Julian Fellowes on Downton Abbey

Got a message from one of the members here saying thank you, Julian, for the fun that I've had with Downton Abbey. And they'd like to know where you get your ideas from and how long does each episode take to write? It's very difficult to say how long an episode takes to write, because you write a first draft. I'd send, first of all, my process is this. I write it, I then show it to my wife. She picks up the mistakes. She also says, I don't really believe this. This bit’s very boring, you know, whatever. So I do her notes. I then may show it to my son, if he's around. Then it goes to the two other producers of the show that sort of trio at the core of the show is Gareth Neame, Liz Trubridge and me. And they give me their notes and their first lot of notes are quite big. The elephant story doesn't work, you know, whatever. And then I'll rewrite it according to that. Then they will send me a second lot of smaller notes, you know, why does she say Thursday? Shouldn't it be Tuesday? And then when I've done those, but only then does it go to ITV and, and so on. So really by the time Gareth, Liz and I have finished, it's pretty close to what will be shot. But during that process, I'll be writing other episodes. I mean, I sent off one, I might not get it back for two weeks. So by this time I'm writing two, you know, and so on. So it goes over a period of probably about six or eight weeks, but they're all plaited together. So they're all happening simultaneously. So it's quite hard to say, um, as for where I get my ideas, I don't know. I mean, I, you know, you've just think of things. Sometimes you remember things. Sometimes people say something and you think, Oh, that's good. Sometimes you take a real story and you just alter it slightly, change the sex of the protagonists or whatever. So it's quite hard to recognize, but it is in fact, uh, such and such a story sometimes, you know, you just think things up in the bath and you think, well, I know I'll give them this to do. And, and then you plait them all together. I mean, the thing about Downton is that it's lots of plates spinning on the sticks at once. And you've got big stories that go right through the series and stories that right across the episode or across two episodes. But you also have little stories, you know, is Daisy going to buy a new hat or something, and that's probably only three scene. And then you have stories that you just keep in the air, but you don't do the story story until episode four. So you've primed it, but you don't deliver it. And all of that has to be woven together and you have to, at the end, make sure that all the characters turn up a reasonable amount. I mean, they don't expect to have plum stories in every episode, they want a decent story in about every three or four episodes, but then you've got to keep them in play to make those stories land. So what you do is you involve them in someone else's story that you, them part of this group, that's trying to work out how such and such so that they've got a reason to be in the room and contributing. And in that way you keep everyone in the air at once. But you know, things like search are very useful because I will go to the top of an episode when I've written the first draft and I'll put Mrs. Patmore search. And then I look at the page numbers and it says three, seven, eleven, twenty one. And you think, got to get her in somewhere around 17, you know? And then you look at those scenes and you see one that you can drop Mrs Pat in so that you keep them all on screen, a reasonable amount. That's quite tricky in a way. It's amazing. God bless the search function. And is there a character in Downton Abbey that you particularly enjoy writing for? Well, you know, they're all my babies really. I never, I mean, you know, people always expect me to say Violet Grantham because Maggie delivers all the lines you give her so well, you know, she, she is a wonderful actress to write for because you never have to say why it's funny, you know, what, what the line is supposed to do. I don't mean they're all pretty good, quite honestly. I mean, I can't think of a duff member of the Downton cast. I think they're all top notch. And so they're all fun to, to write for really, I mean, I think what does happen is an actor takes the part and it suddenly becomes rich. They, they sort of reveal the potential of a character sometimes in a way you haven't quite seen. So, um, Kevin Doyle, for instance, with, with Molesley you know, or Lesley Nicol with Mrs Patmore or, and thinner and, uh, with the dreaded O'Bryan or Rob James Collier with Thomas, as they started to play them, you start to write for the way their play. So in a sense in you, you create the character together, the actor and the writer, um, creates the character. I've never written a series before. So that's a new expense. Normally I've written shows and film or a mini-series or something so that they get the script and then they cast the script, they play the script, but a series is an ongoing thing. So you’re, you're working with them. And I find that quite an interesting part of the process actually,