Downton Abbey: why the transition from television to film has been so massively successful

Six years ago Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville said getting the cast together once again for a film would be “like herding cats”.
Downton Abbey: A New EraDownton Abbey: A New Era
Downton Abbey: A New Era

But the cats were duly herded… and the big-screen version of the massively-successful TV series hit the cinemas in 2019.

Now comes the second film, Downton Abbey: A New Era, opening in cinemas this Friday.

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Downton Abbey – in which Hugh played Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham – first hit the television screens on September 26 2010. The final episode of the sixth and last series aired on November 8 2015.

It has now made the transition to film with great success, not once, but twice.

As Hugh, who lives near Midhurst, said: “The fact is that we all wanted to do it. The film had been talked about ever since we finished the series, and there had been incarnations of scripts and stories that had not quite landed or people had been tied up elsewhere.

“But when it came to it, (executive producers) Julian Fellowes and Gareth Neame patiently got everyone together and gradually reeled everyone into their net and put them all back at Highclere (where the series was filmed).”

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Recalling film number one, Hugh said: “It was great. When we got to the read-through, we were all thinking ‘Can it really have been three years ago or whatever?’ because really it just felt like yesterday. Everyone had gone off and done different things but here we all were, back in the same room with a script that really engaged.”

So what is the difference between television and film?

“The direct comparison is quite quantifiable. The main difference really is the sense of the story arc. Julian had to create a finite story within the structure of a 100-minute film, but also it was the sense of scale. With a film, you are working towards a 70-foot screen. There is a much greater sense of opening up. We have got a great big parade scene which is going to look epic on the big screen. We could have done it for television, but it would have had to have been much, much smaller scale. With the film, we had something like 90 horses.”

But one continuity which cast and crew enjoyed from the TV series was that the weather for the film, just as it had been for the television version, proved generally kind.

And it simply felt right.

Hugh recalls the launch of the final TV series in America, in Washington DC in a university theatre.

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“Usually you would be watching with your family or a group of friends, but we were watching this episode in the theatre with 200 people there, laughing when it was funny or pin-drop silence when it wasn’t. And I remember thinking ‘This could really work as a film.’ That shared experience which connects us all as audience members and that engagement with a piece of entertainment, we had that, and I hope that never leaves us.”

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