Nick Wall/Carnival Film & Television Limited 2012 for MASTERPIECE Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham in Season 3 of “Downton Abbey.â€In the first installment of an interview with the “Downton Abbey†creator and writer Julian Fellowes, he discussed how some key departures from the series occurred in Season 3, and how he is starting to think about his own exit from the show.
In this final edited excerpt from that conversation, Mr. Fellowes talks about his approach to writing Season 3, characters who may (or may not) be returning for Season 4, and other “Downtonâ€-relatd projects he may (or may not) be working on.
Lee Everett/The Mount, via Associated Press Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey.â€Is there a tradition in Britain that Christmas specials â€" like the one that aired as the finale here in America â€" are supposed to be more uplifting, given the spirit of the holidays, than a typical episode of the series
Not really, to be honest. Not here. Most of the soap operas always use the Christmas special to kill huge quantities of their characters. So they have trams coming off their rails, or cars slamming into each other or burning buildings. It’s a general clear-out. The f! irst Christmas special we did of “Downton,†it was pretty Christmas-y. It was the proposal, which was very nice. But that isn’t particularly the tradition of these Christmas shows here. In a way, they’re supposed to be more dramatic than a ordinary episode of the series. So in that sense, we were fitting into the ethos.
The theme of the series is always people confronting change whether they like it or not, but was it a conscious decision to make that theme even more explicit in Season 3
Yes, it was. We started the show in 1912, which was just before the Great War. When you get to the ’20s, you get into a very much accelerated rate of change. But it wasn’t completely clear how much the world had changed. There were new inventions of course, but at the same time, a lot of people, both rich and poor, were living in a pretty similar way to the way they’d lived before the war. But that was essentiall a chimera, and underneath the surface, in fact, the economic realities were making it clearer and clearer that actually, the world for most people had changed substantially. It would in the end be the Second World War that was the coup de grace for these Crawley type people. Not all of them - there’s still people with cooks and butlers. But as a way of life, enjoyed by a whole tier of society, that finished it off. And I like that. I like the febrile quality, particularly of the ’20s. Was it the modern world or was it all the same That seems to me, to lend itself to drama.
In the absence of major historical events this season â€" the sinking of the Titanic or World War I â€" you would focus on how more subtle developments affect the characters
I think we’ve always had a kind of house style, of concentrating on their reaction to big things that are happening elsewhere. Some series, you have the door opening and Lloyd George and! Adolf Hi! tler and Ribbentrop all walk through it. We haven’t done that. We’re not saying that the Crawleys are ordinary - they live a life that was pretty unusual even then. But nevertheless, they’re quite deliberately not people who are in the thick of things. Tearing a pheasant with the prime minister on one side and the Queen of Romania on the other. We’ve chosen not to do that. Which I think is actually one of the strengths of the show.
Shirley MacLaine appeared on “Downton†this season as the mother of Cora (played by Elizabeth McGovern). Where did the idea come from to cast her on the show
We wanted very much to show that Cora came from a different tradition to Robert. There were a lot of these very rich girls who came over and married into the English upper classes and they saved masses of houses, at least for a bit Cora hasn’t come from some elegant Long Island, Daughters of the Revolution thing. Her father made a lot of money, and now she’s here. It gives her a robustness and it explains why increasingly, as the century goes on, she doesn’t feel she has to constantly align herself with aristocratic prejudices and principles. Because that’s not who she is. And we needed a mother who would make that instantly clear. We also needed someone who would be evenly weighted to Maggie Smith, so when they were on screen together, it wasn’t like a featherweight against a heavyweight. They were matched. In that, Shirley completely fulfilled both requirements. When she’s on screen with Maggie, you don’t know which one you want to look at.
Will you have her back for Season 4
Oh, I hope we can. She’s very busy, and she has a lot of film offers! . I would! love to have her back in Series 4. I think Shirley agreeing to be in the show was a real mark of how successful it was. We loved having her, she was great.
It’s been reported that you’re writing a “Downton Abbey†prequel that would chronicle the courtship of Robert and Cora. Is this something you’re really working on
I gave a lecture last year, and someone stuck up their hand and said, “Would you ever†- horrible word - “novelize the series†And I said, “The only novel I think you could write that wouldn’t interfere with the series, would be the prequel - the back story of Robert and Cora falling in love and her coming over as an American heiress.†Because we know he married her for her money but then he fell in love with her afterwards. But we don’t know how that happened. Well, by the time I got home, my agent had rung from L.A., saying, “Why idn’t you tell me there was a prequel†By the time I woke up the next morning, the prequel was in production and was being cast. As it happens, I think that book would be quite fun. But I haven’t got any plans to write it at the moment.
“Downton†took some critical lumps in Season 2 for plot developments that viewers felt happened too quickly or seemed beyond the scope of the series. Did this influence your approach to writing Season 3
The British press had praised this to the skies throughout the first series. And when they do that, you know they’re going to hammer you in the second. We knew that before the camera had turned on. I remember someone said, “Oh, but the second series is so much faster than the first series.†It wasn’t faster at all. It was exactly the same. I think one was two and a quarter years, the other was two and a half years, or something. There was one thing where they got very excited about Ma! tthew’s! wound, and when he regained the use of his legs. That was a straight medical condition, which they could have looked up on the Internet. A lot of the diagnoses were made in tents on the edge of battlefields, by overworked doctors who hadn’t slept for a week. They were sent back to England with a probable diagnosis, which of course in many cases proved to be true. But in quite a few, proved to be false. And the business of a severed spine being confused with a bruised spine, there were many instances of that. But the papers didn’t want that. America doesn’t, as a whole, seem to have a problem with success. But Britain does. And you just have to not let it get you down too much while it’s going on. It’s like a war of attrition. If you’re still standing, then they stop beating you.
