Film was inspired by The Crown to up its game
IT HAS royal drama, lavish costumes and rich period detail – no wonder the makers of the Downton Abbey film took lessons from The Crown.
Michael Engler, the film’s director, said Netflix had set the bar so high with The Crown that its influence could not be ignored.
While the Downton Abbey television series was made on a relatively modest budget for ITV, with only a handful of extras, film-makers have pushed the boat out for the big screen version.
Engler described himself as a fan of The Crown and said he had learnt from it. “It wasn’t that we said, ‘Oh, we need to do what The Crown is doing,’ but … more and more, the level of production and truth and detail and scale just keep getting extended and raised.”
The plot revolves around a royal visit by George V and Queen Mary. For the most extravagant scenes, producers used 100 horses, 80 soldiers and six gun carriages from the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery, the first time they have appeared in a drama.
“That was a level of military organisation that I’d never really experienced before. The series, ambitious as it was, was never that ambitious,” Engler said.
Liz Trubridge, one of the producers, said that transporting the unit from Woolwich, south-east London, to Lacock in Wiltshire – where the outside scenes were filmed – was “daunting to say the least”.
The film used the same location to double as the interiors of Buckingham Palace – Wrotham Park in Hertfordshire – that is seen in The Crown.
Keen observers may also note an unspoken reference to Theresa May. Kevin Doyle, who plays Molesley, the butler-turned-footman, has a comic scene in which he performs a disastrous mix of bow and curtsy before the royals.
Doyle said: “I modelled the bow/ curtsy on Theresa May, believe it or not. There’s this famous photograph of her curtsying to some royal and it was such a preposterous curtsy I thought, I’m going to have that.”