Just when Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes thinks he’s told all the tales he planned to tell about the Crawley clan and their devoted servants, he realizes there’s plenty of storytelling real estate to explore—as long as the audience is, as ever, hungry for more.
The acclaimed writer-producer’s sprawling, soapy saga of the early 20th-century British aristocrats and the domestics who adore them has received fitting endings not once but twice: first for the finale of Downton Abbey’s acclaimed six-season run on television in 2015, and then for the 2019 film sequel. The latter proved Downton’s enduring appeal as well as its box office potency, prompting Fellowes to return for another big screen turn with the Crawleys (after an extended pandemic-induced hiatus) for Downton Abbey: A New Era.
Fellowes, who rose to prominence chronicling upstairs-downstairs dynamics with his screenplay for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, also currently oversees the HBO Max series The Gilded Age, an American-minded period take. For A New Era, he supplied half of the household with a movie-making invasion, while the other half journeys to the South of France to unravel the mystery behind a sun-soaked villa left to family matriarch Lady Violet (Dame Maggie Smith). And as Fellowes reveals to The A.V. Club, many more stories branched out from there—whether he expected them to or not.
The A.V. Club: You have put a little bow on the story of Downton Abbey a couple of times now. Did you come into this one feeling like there’s unfinished business to address or was it truly just a blank page this time?
Julian Fellowes: Well, it’s sort of a blank page, always. When you start a new series or you’ve been employed to write a book or a musical, it’s just this empty screen. But when I did start to think about it—because, as you probably know, you have that sort of preliminary period when you are just thinking about it without really doing anything—I realized that I wanted to have some very 20th century element coming into Downton and disrupting it, because I didn’t really feel we’d done that. We had one story where they opened the house to the public for charity once, and that was one program. But I just wanted something more than that, and more vivid.
And then [executive producer] Gareth Neame told me about the story of his grandfather, who had been a runner on a film for [Alfred] Hitchcock called Blackmail in 1928. They’d had to stop play and make the transition and go back and have an actress speaking, so the leading lady had to mime all of this stuff. And as he was describing it, I thought, “That’s it.” Because in that way I can bring film—which is a really 20th century phenomenon, there’s no 19th century precursor—into Downton at its most disruptive, which was that period of transition. And because the previous film had been set in 1927, 1928 seemed our natural year.
And then Gareth also was very keen to get them out of England, or at least some of them, and so I came up with a reason for doing that. And then these two storylines sort of plaited together to become our spine, and every other story was dependent on one or the other, really.
AVC: It was such a delicious idea to bring in the movie shoot. What was fun or revealing about researching that period of filmmaking and figuring out how to make that work in the Downton framework? There’s also a meta quality: the cast has said they understand the anxieties of actors when a new technology comes around.
JF: Yes, it must have been extraordinary because a whole film set would change entirely before they talked all the way through, of course, because there was no sound. So they would say, “Move into him, move into him, kiss him now.” “Oh, now he’s surprised you. Look back.” And suddenly everything was silent. I went to visit a friend who was making a film in Rome about Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, who he had executed. Anyway, I was just there as a friend, I was on the set and they said, “Action.” And everyone started talking, chatting away, “What are you doing for lunch? Blah, blah.” I thought, What the hell’s going on? And they said, “Oh, we don’t bother about sound. We re-record all the sound.” And I thought, My God, this is like being on a silent movie set. And it was absolutely extraordinary, and that always lingered with me.
And after that experience, I always had a sort of slight desire, because I am interested in the history of film anyway—I mean, not just because I work in it—and so I’ve been reading books about films and everything, really all my life, and that is a particularly interesting phase. Of course, the legend of it in a way, which is rooted in truth but is not the whole truth, is that people with terrible voices lost their careers. And of course they did, but it wasn’t only that. It was also that adding sound to the mix meant that a reality had come into film that was quite different from the reality of a silent picture.
A silent picture was essentially, as [Dominic West’s character, the actor] Dexter said, mime and music, and it was almost androgynous and kind of graceful and balletic. And you often see that in the early sound films of stars who survived—Norma Shearer, or someone like that. Originally, their movements, it’s almost balletic. And then they gradually beefen up as they go on. And the public could have a reality in talkies they couldn’t have in silent. And they wanted a different kind of star. They wanted James Cagney pushing a grapefruit into the face of Mae Marsh. And not [Rudolph] Valentino, fainting over someone in a sheik’s outfit. It was a different demand, really. And some of the actors could meet the new demand and others could not.
AVC: With a cast as expansive as yours in a roughly two-hour movie, is it tricky to make sure that everybody gets their due on the screen? Some characters obviously get more expanded plot lines than others, but are you so in tune with these characters at this point that you just kind of know where everybody’s going to fit into the stories?
JF: I think it’s a bit of both actually, to be honest. I think it is important in a film that everyone has something to do that has a point and a purpose, and it’s not enough for them just to be cutting the cabbage up while Mrs. Patmore is having a plot standing next to them. You know, they need a plot, and sometimes you look into past things that have gone on in Downton and you replenish that and refresh it. And other times you invent something completely new...I think I feel strongly that all the actors must have something to do and they must watch the film in the end feeling satisfied with their own contribution. I think that makes for a happy show, really.
AVC: Nobody knows better than you the joy that people take from Downton Abbey. There’s a lot of joy on the screen in this, but you managed to also bring in so many elements of the series in this compacted story: there’s a mystery; there’s scandal; there’s plenty of romance; there’s a bittersweet quality. What kinds of things do you want the audience to feel in one Downton story?
JF: All I ever want is for the audience to be un-disappointed and to go away feeling really pleased they bothered to drive to the cinema and buy a ticket. And that’s my goal. Part of that, I think, is amusing them and making them laugh. Part of it is making them cry and making them emotionally involved in what’s happening on the screen, so they get caught up in it. It has to be quite dense when you’ve got so many characters to deal with, as you correctly point out. But that is my goal: that they will see this film, have a great dinner, and go home and say, “Oh, I’m really pleased we did that.” And that’s what I’m looking for, really. I know it’s not very fashionable to say that these days, but that’s how I feel.
AVC: Every once in a while, a writer and an actor have a collaboration that is extraordinary, a perfect match of words and performance. It’s safe to say that’s true about you and Maggie Smith. What’s been great about the collaboration the two of you have shared throughout the course of working on Downton?
JF: I always feel, not that I discovered Maggie Smith, but that my understanding of my appreciation of Maggie Smith is very rooted in me because it comes from when I was about 15 and my mother had taken me off to see Laurence Olivier in Othello, which was the great success at that time. Rather unfashionable now, but anyway, she took me to see it and I knew nothing about the theater. I didn’t know anything about anything, really. And the whole evening was stolen for me by Desdemona and she was absolutely extraordinary. And I remember in the end I thought, Who is this woman? And it was Maggie Smith.
So there seems to be something sort of ordained in our collaboration, that what she’s got, and I understood it in Gosford [Park], which was the first time we worked together, she has this extraordinary ability to contain the elements of comedy and tragedy within her persona, on the screen or on the stage, simultaneously. So that she can make you roar with laughter one second and then a minute later make you cry. And that is wonderfully rewarding for a writer and particularly a writer who wants to make you laugh and cry. Some writers only want you to do one or the other, but I want you to do both. And so in a sense, Maggie was the perfect actress for me. It’s a gift I’m not sure all that many people have in elementally, maybe, but she is a past master of that.
And I find her very moving in stuff I’ve written. I mean, that’s what’s so mad, is that there I am crying. And I think to myself, “You wrote this speech. What did you think she was going to say?” But she just puts that added dimension in. And of course, obviously now, Downton’s been going for 13 years, I think, and there was Gosford before that...I think we’ve got each other’s measure really pretty well now. I never have to explain why a line is funny or anything.
Another thing that she’s got is an absolute understanding that a large part of comedy is to do with: rhythm, vocal rhythm. And that if you add one syllable to a comedic line, it’s not funny anymore. If you change one adjective, if you take out one word, it’s not funny anymore. And so few actors have that complete understanding, so that with Maggie, your lines—and most of all your funny lines—are very safe. She never changes them. And if she disagrees with them, which is very rare, it all comes up much earlier, before the work is done.
I remember almost the first time we ever spoke, because the beginning of Gosford, we did all Maggie’s scenes, because they got her bedroom ready first, of the set—before they could get the rest of the house ready, we had to shoot in Maggie’s bedroom, so that she was in every scene. And on about the second or third day, she had this line with the marmalade, that when she took the lid off a pot of marmalade and looked into it, she had the line, “Bought marmalade, I call that very feeble.” And she came over and she said, “Well, what is that?” And I said to her, “Well, it came from a great aunt of mine, really, who thought that if you stayed in a country house and any of the jams or jellies or anything were bought from a shop that meant someone—the housekeeper, the cook, the maid, someone—didn’t know their job.” And she said, “I’ve got it”... I love that because she has a sort of precision—I suppose you could call it an outline—she has a kind of outline in her work that makes it so vivid. So real, but so vivid. And that is very rewarding, really.