Read Online A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey: Seasonal Celebrations, Traditions, and Recipes by Jessica Fellowes - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jessica Fellowes
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parked on the lawn. Close to the front door is a table with tea and coffee – nothing, apart from bottled water, may be eaten or drunk inside. Spare lights, cables and camera tracks – these are used for above-stairs scenes to create a smoother sensation; for below stairs, they use hand-held cameras, giving a greater sense of movement and activity – alert one to the fact that you’re on set, but you cannot help but be struck by the interior of the house itself. From the grand hall, with the various coats of arms of past wives of the Carnarvon earls around the gallery, to the hundreds of leather-bound books in the library and the pretty pink sofas in the drawing room, it looks exactly as you would expect, although the ‘Please do not sit on here’ printed cards placed on chairs remind you that these are real heirlooms, not imitations made by the art department. The house is in fact increasingly used by the Carnarvon family for their own enjoyment (they also have a cottage on the estate in which they live when the main house is hired out) and always when hosting a house party or shooting party for friends.
I watch the monitor as the director for episodes four and five, Minkie Spiro, shoots a scene with Michelle Dockery and Hugh Bonneville. There is absolute hush when the cameras are rolling – the slightest footfall on a creaky floorboard or muttered whisper will echo. Removing sound from the film is one of the production’s more painstaking tasks: ‘It’s amazing how much of the twenty-first century we hear and edit out – at the time, you don’t even know you can hear the distant sounds of the A34,’ explains Liz Trubridge.
The scene wraps and the actors for the next scene begin rehearsing. Elizabeth McGovern (Cora), rather disconcertingly dressed in a pink fluffy dressing-gown, hairnet and Ugg boots, holds her script and blocks her movements, an industry phrase for working out exactly where she will stand and move to within the scene. A splendidly dressed, tall and booming Richard E. Grant introduces himself to me – ‘Hi, I’m Richard’ – and he looks so absolutely as if he has stepped out of 1924 that I am quite flummoxed and manage only, I am sure, a rather stupid reply.
But Highclere is only part of the story. Bampton in Oxfordshire is the location for any village scenes, right down to the churchyard where Lady Sybil and Matthew Crawley are buried. Donal says that they try to film there in blocks, so that it is less disruptive to the inhabitants, but the seasons are a factor in the schedule: ‘There’s a danger that we leave Highclere in winter and arrive at Bampton in spring, as the changes can be so quick, with hawthorn bushes in flower and trees blossoming almost from one day to the next.’
Bampton is also the village where the exterior of Isobel Crawley’s house is filmed (the interior is a house in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, and reflects the tastes of her progressive, intelligentsia outlook). The real-life owner takes great pride in her garden, now frequently admired by fans of the show from America to China, peering over the wall.
Violet’s house is Byfleet Manor in Surrey. The design is more deliberately Edwardian inside, symbolic of her resistance to change. Lady Rosamund’s house is in London’s Belgrave Square – on the outside; the inside is the very pretty interior of West Wycombe, home to Sir Edward Dashwood and his family today.
For the inside of the Crawley family’s London palace, seen for the first time in series four, Donal chose Basildon Park, a National Trust property close to Pangbourne: ‘We had to find a house that was lavish, but not as lavish as Highclere. Basildon Park is a reasonable size, but not too enormous. We dressed it with some personal items, but it was its own Georgian interior that was right for the part.’
The grounds of Basildon Park were also used for the filming of the Hyde Park picnic scene in the final episode of series four. They had a
I watch the monitor as the director for episodes four and five, Minkie Spiro, shoots a scene with Michelle Dockery and Hugh Bonneville. There is absolute hush when the cameras are rolling – the slightest footfall on a creaky floorboard or muttered whisper will echo. Removing sound from the film is one of the production’s more painstaking tasks: ‘It’s amazing how much of the twenty-first century we hear and edit out – at the time, you don’t even know you can hear the distant sounds of the A34,’ explains Liz Trubridge.
The scene wraps and the actors for the next scene begin rehearsing. Elizabeth McGovern (Cora), rather disconcertingly dressed in a pink fluffy dressing-gown, hairnet and Ugg boots, holds her script and blocks her movements, an industry phrase for working out exactly where she will stand and move to within the scene. A splendidly dressed, tall and booming Richard E. Grant introduces himself to me – ‘Hi, I’m Richard’ – and he looks so absolutely as if he has stepped out of 1924 that I am quite flummoxed and manage only, I am sure, a rather stupid reply.
But Highclere is only part of the story. Bampton in Oxfordshire is the location for any village scenes, right down to the churchyard where Lady Sybil and Matthew Crawley are buried. Donal says that they try to film there in blocks, so that it is less disruptive to the inhabitants, but the seasons are a factor in the schedule: ‘There’s a danger that we leave Highclere in winter and arrive at Bampton in spring, as the changes can be so quick, with hawthorn bushes in flower and trees blossoming almost from one day to the next.’
Bampton is also the village where the exterior of Isobel Crawley’s house is filmed (the interior is a house in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, and reflects the tastes of her progressive, intelligentsia outlook). The real-life owner takes great pride in her garden, now frequently admired by fans of the show from America to China, peering over the wall.
Violet’s house is Byfleet Manor in Surrey. The design is more deliberately Edwardian inside, symbolic of her resistance to change. Lady Rosamund’s house is in London’s Belgrave Square – on the outside; the inside is the very pretty interior of West Wycombe, home to Sir Edward Dashwood and his family today.
For the inside of the Crawley family’s London palace, seen for the first time in series four, Donal chose Basildon Park, a National Trust property close to Pangbourne: ‘We had to find a house that was lavish, but not as lavish as Highclere. Basildon Park is a reasonable size, but not too enormous. We dressed it with some personal items, but it was its own Georgian interior that was right for the part.’
The grounds of Basildon Park were also used for the filming of the Hyde Park picnic scene in the final episode of series four. They had a
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