Downton’s tricky French

COVID was a nightmare for cinemas, cinemagoers and producer Gareth Neame – when he filmed the Granthams on the Riviera

Downton’s tricky French lessons

When was the last time you went out to see a film?

I know we all watch them at home and a combo of Netflix and big domestic screens and speakers means we all have our own sort of cinema, in a way.

Box-office income has thankfully gradually started to increase, but might 2022 be the year to really tempt you back? And more specifically might Downton Abbey: A New Era be the film to do it? I think it really is rather good – so I do hope so.

Total box-office revenues in the UK and Ireland in 2021 rose 85 per cent to £597 million from the nadir of 2020’s £323 million. However, these numbers remain far below pre-pandemic levels, when the annual box office exceeded £1.3 billion in each of the five years up to 2019.

This has already started to affect the new films that get put into production. Frankly, the viability of your nearest cinema continues to be challenged as never before in your lifetime. It really is down to you to help, I’m afraid.

In 2016, having concluded six seasons (as we all now call them!) of Britain’s biggest TV drama hit – and more importantly our biggest TV export – the logical next move seemed to be the big screen. The brilliant cast understandably wanted a break from the routine to explore other projects, but their affection for Downton meant an occasional cinematic return was in the offing.

And, in those golden pre-ghastliness days of 2019, the first film was released to great aplomb, becoming No 1 in North American and UK box offices.

The transition from a hit TV show to the big screen is a stony path. My

Downton Abbaye – the French sequel

partners at Focus Features were quite understandably cautious about risking the sums of money involved. Would a global fan base leave their comfy sofas for the movies? Fortunately, the audience turned out in droves. Very quickly, the conversation turned to what was next for the Crawleys and Downton.

As always, this was a discussion between Downton’s writer, Julian Fellowes, and me. As we generally follow the natural chronology of the main characters, the year was to be 1928-29. We first alighted on a story based on the making of the movie Blackmail (1929).

This started production as a silent film, switching to sound when director Alfred Hitchcock realised, following the release of The Jazz Singer (1927), that his film would be behind the curve.

My grandfather Ronald Neame, later the producer of Brief Encounter (1945), Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), and director of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), worked on that very film as a young assistant cameraman. His mother, the global beauty Ivy Close (1890-1968), was an actress whose career began to fade with the advent of talkies.

She was from the great town of Stockton-on-Tees – so I do wonder whether her own accent struggled to make it across the Atlantic, a predicament experienced by the character Myrna Dalgleish in our film.

Downton’s home is Highclere Castle, now rightly a beloved and famous historic house, which means we have to negotiate our time there with the many other events our hosts Lord and Lady Carnarvon undertake.

One practical solution has been to create stories where the Crawleys have stayed with family friends in Scotland and Northumberland and enjoyed the London season – all places toffs of that time might have legitimately visited.

But we have never taken these characters abroad. The time had come for us to see the Crawleys go to the Riviera, to echo what the great and the good would have done in the 1920s.

At that time, what had been a winter escape was becoming increasingly popular for well-heeled American and British holiday makers. And, from a commercial point of view, France was the third biggest market after the US and the UK for the first film – so it felt fitting to set some of our story there.

With the premise of our next film

Granthams at sea: Hugh Bonneville (left), Elizabeth McGovern and Jonathan Coy

settled, Fellowes and I were in New York City, preparing our new HBO series The Gilded Age. A matter of days before production started, the pandemic ground us to a halt. Repatriated to the UK (I noticed there was no hot water in the washbasins at the BA lounge at JFK, which seemed peculiar given the hot water we were in), we shared the cabin home with Sting – no longer an Englishman in New York.

With production on the series suspended for what we thought might be a matter of weeks, but ended up being almost six months, the one silver lining was that we had time to get started on the new Downton script.

With the turmoil and uncertainty of 2020, how smart I thought we had been to release the first film long before we had heard the word COVID. And even smarter that I didn’t plan to start the next movie until early 2021, long after the pandemic would have subsided – or so I assumed.

As the world lurched into the second year of the pandemic, we had a finished script and the cast all on board. Yet the big second wave now put the entire production in jeopardy.

The film industry had swiftly adapted to the new normal, with intricate COVID protocols involving mask-wearing and constant testing, with cast and crew in their own bubble. But if any of us actually caught it in production, we risked being shut down, at an enormous cost. The biggest problem was that vision I had had about foreign filming. As countries shut their borders, what should have been a fairly simple operation in normal times – to film for a few weeks in France – became fraught with difficulties.

There was a real risk we might start a film that couldn’t be completed. We had some very forthright conversations about whether we ought to risk going ahead.

Normally, film directors view prospective locations and intricately plan what is to be filmed, but our French locations near Toulon had to be selected virtually, as such scouting was prohibited.

We even had a back-up plan – so unpalatable that its code name was Plan Z (zee, not zed; it sounds better that way) – that involved shooting the whole French story here in Britain. Yes, really: Tender Is the Night in Bognor.

With all the British scenes successfully completed, we planned to send the cast and crew on chartered planes to the south of France, to remain within the bubble and minimise the risk of anyone’s catching the dreaded lurgy.

After months of worrying whether we would ever get there, I was glued to my flight app at home that morning, watching our two planes take off. My fingers were crossed as I tracked them both, flying over the northern coastline of France. I followed them as they landed – one in Toulon and one in Nice.

An hour or so later, a call confirmed that we had cleared the controls. Our French story would get made in France after all. There are worse places to have to quarantine for a few days, I suppose. And the finished product is a very beautiful-looking film.

As and when you go to see it, I hope you are relieved to be in the real place. While Ken Branagh’s Death on the Nile was brilliantly recreated in a studio, we might have had to make do with the Italian gardens at Hever Castle, a mansion in Lothian and West Wittering beach. Beautiful as these places are, they would not have delivered our story the way Downton fans would have desired!

With the lengths we went to to bring you back to Downton Abbey, if you haven’t yet ventured back to the cinema, I do hope that this title is the one that gets you there.

You’ll be helping British cinema to return to form – and I suspect have some laughter and tears along the way.

Penelope Wilton and Maggie Smith; Gareth Neame at Highclere Castle

Downton Abbey: A New Era is out on 29th April