'The Crown' Showrunner Peter Morgan breaks down how he carefully portrayed Princess Diana on screen, keeping the authenticity of historical accuracy while making a drama series, addressing Queen Elizabeth's death, and why his next project will have guns in this exclusive interview.
Variety Showrunners Sitdown presented by FX.
Variety Showrunners Sitdown presented by FX.
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00:00What's something you still want to do as a creator?
00:03For now, I'd like to do something where people aren't polite, aren't upper-class British,
00:09and they have guns.
00:11I want some guns.
00:23Peter Morgan, thank you so much for doing this interview.
00:26Going into the sixth and final season of The Crown, how long had you known where you
00:40wanted the final chapter to start and how you wanted it to end?
00:45I think we'd always known it would be exactly what it was.
00:49In fact, the only shock is that there were no deviations.
00:52I remember pitching it to Netflix in January of 2014, at the time it might just still have
00:58been three seasons, but very quickly thereafter it became six.
01:01And it ended exactly where I imagined it would end.
01:04Of course, there were a thousand deviations on the way.
01:08If you'd have told me beforehand what making six seasons of television of this kind would
01:14feel like, I might have changed the pitch in 2014.
01:20And I don't think you'll see many of these shows.
01:22A, I'm very grateful for having been allowed to do it, and B, I'm sort of astonished that
01:28I survived it.
01:29Yeah, yeah.
01:30You've spoken about dreading telling the story of Diana's death.
01:34What about it were you dreading the most?
01:36Frankly, everything.
01:38I had a morbid fear of not being able to find an actress that was good enough to play her.
01:44So I think that my biggest worry was finding someone who just left you unpersuaded that
01:51she was Diana.
01:53I have to say that I was willing to rewrite the show and not have Diana in it.
01:58And there were certain advantages to that, that she was this outside element and we were
02:02with the family that was dealing with the outside element.
02:06I was prepared to do that if we hadn't found the right actor.
02:08And first with Emma Corrin and then with Elizabeth Debicki, I think we found the only two who
02:13could do it.
02:14And so then dealing with her death was obviously a matter of great sensitivity, but it's also
02:19a matter of historical record.
02:21It's a major historical event.
02:24And as a dramatist, I believe it's your responsibility to tackle that stuff.
02:28But of course you do so knowing that there are a lot of people who have a lot of feelings
02:34around it and are personally affected by it.
02:37And so you have to be careful and sensitive and responsible in the way that you do it.
02:45The movie The Queen came out in 2006.
02:48What are the things you learned over the course of making The Crown that allowed you to tell
02:54the story of the aftermath of her death in such a different way?
02:59Well, I didn't want to repeat myself.
03:01The Queen was very much a story about the relationship between an elderly lady and a
03:07young modernizing prime minister who'd come in, who could clearly see how the country
03:12needed to change.
03:13You almost saw it through Blair's eyes as he thought, God, how am I going to shake these
03:16people up?
03:17And how painful is it as an elderly lady to realize that you might suddenly be misjudging
03:23the mood of the country?
03:24With The Crown, I didn't want to repeat myself.
03:26I didn't want to do it through Blair's eyes.
03:28I didn't want to have those same conversations.
03:30A lot of that attitude I gave to Prince Charles.
03:34And also, now that we were dramatizing Diana, I always wanted to see how she affected them
03:40in the aftermath of her death.
03:41So that's why I wrote those scenes, which I thought really long and hard about, where
03:45Elizabeth Debicki was a figment of their imagination, part of their internal conversation.
03:50Right.
03:51They're trying to show you who they are, what they feel, what they need.
04:00And I know that must be terrifying, but it needn't be.
04:07How did you come up with that idea?
04:09And what did you want them to say to the people they were appearing to?
04:14First of all, I thought really long and hard about it.
04:17The only two moments in the show, really, where we break with naturalism.
04:22And you know, in the immediate aftermath of losing someone, I don't think it's uncommon
04:26for people to have imaginary conversations, to imagine seeing them.
04:29You know, one or two people in the United Kingdom referred to it as a ghost.
04:32It's not a ghost.
04:33You know, there's no rattling chains.
04:35It's such a silly term, that.
04:37These are the imagined conversations of grieving people.
04:40I find the scenes very moving, very touching.
04:43I think some of the best performances that Elizabeth Debicki gave us were in those scenes.
04:49She had incredible composure and incredible compassion.
04:52The Crown is famously very well-researched.
04:56How did your research change as you moved away from history books and more into things
05:03that are recent tabloid events, like Diana's death?
05:07Well, because it's just because it's recent doesn't mean it's not history, right?
05:11And there is, of course, a moment where you ask yourself, is what I'm doing?
05:15That's one of the reasons I like to keep so much time, as much as possible.
05:19A minimum of 10 years is a personal rule.
05:22And in The Crown, I managed to make it over 20 years.
05:25I believe that when you're a generation away from the events of something, you have an
05:29opportunity to look at it with greater distance, and it is historical.
05:33I also believe that something that happened, you know, like the events in America on January
05:386th, I think that's a historical event.
05:41And anybody tackling contemporary American history would want to tackle something like
05:45that and have a look at it from all sides.
05:47Diana's death was every bit as momentous.
05:50But are there reliable accounts on what happened between Diana and Dodi Fayed the night of
05:56her death?
05:57What were you relying on for that?
05:59Well, we've got, I mean, a number of witnesses.
06:02We've got sort of firsthand accounts from people.
06:06But then ultimately, there was a period of time where Diana and Dodi were on their own
06:11in that Ritz hotel room.
06:12We know everything that happened from the minute they left that hotel suite and went
06:16down to the car.
06:17We know yard by yard, second by second, what happened.
06:21But what we don't know is what they were saying to each other in that hotel room.
06:25And that's where I come in, and I have to use my imagination.
06:29But I don't just sit there and I don't just start writing immediately thinking, well,
06:33I wonder what they had.
06:34I mean, you think really long and hard, where is this particular character at this moment
06:40in their life?
06:41So many people, both close to Diana and close to Dodi, have spoken about the frames of mind
06:47of the two individuals at the time.
06:50And you piece together what you imagine to be the case.
06:53And if you get it wrong, an audience will tell you.
06:56An audience, even without doing the research, will intuit if something is right or not.
07:02Critics are so smart, and you can't pull a fast one.
07:07If it's implausible, an audience will know it instantly.
07:10They'll just reject it.
07:12And so my harshest critic is not actually a historian, because historians are always
07:16pushing their own agenda.
07:18They're often people with a certain point of view.
07:21I find an audience's response much more telling, much more appropriate, because it comes from
07:26a huge cross-section of people with different political views, different ages.
07:33They reject if they're being lied to.
07:35And so we have to do a lot of work and a lot of thinking.
07:38And I call it joining the dots, where you know that this happened.
07:42You know that this happened.
07:43You sort of are reliably told that this person felt this, and this person felt this.
07:47But there still leaves this gap.
07:50And that's the gap that a dramatist has to step into and do their best.
07:54It just so happens to be that I'm drawn to that gap-filling.
07:58For many writers, it would be too restrictive.
08:02They want the wide-open planes of their imagination to be able to go in any direction they want
08:09with pure fiction.
08:11And for other people, they would want to do real second-by-second recreations of verbatim,
08:16you know, where we know what was said.
08:18And they would want to recreate that.
08:19And I'm somewhere in the middle.
08:21For me, the fun is in the imagination.
08:24But imagination, which is so well backed up with either anecdotal records, personal interviews
08:30you can do, historical books, that you can actually then imagine accurately.
08:36That scene that night in the Ritz Hotel, I'm particularly proud of that scene, because
08:41I really believe that is as close as one can get to what Diana and Dodi were saying to
08:46each other that night.
08:48I can't make your father love you more by becoming your wife.
08:51Well, actually, I think you can.
08:53Well, I'm not going to do it.
08:55The fact that she didn't want to, the fact that she didn't want to hurt his feelings,
08:58the fact that she had no intention of marrying him, the fact that he was acting under the
09:03pressure of his father, there was a terrible tragedy at work there, and very moving.
09:09My conscience is pretty clear about where we got to with that.
09:12How did you figure out how to map the rest of the season going into what would be the end?
09:18There was still seven or eight years left to cover.
09:22I always knew where I wanted to get to.
09:24I always knew it was going to be Charles marrying Camilla and what that would provoke in his
09:29mother and the kind of questions she would ask about whether she should or shouldn't abdicate.
09:34That's basically like starting a whole season again and thinking to yourself, what are the
09:37key events that happened?
09:38And these are the questions you would ask yourself every time.
09:41What are the events we can't live without?
09:43What are the events in each personal character's life?
09:46And so, for example, we knew that Princess Margaret was going to die.
09:49We knew the Queen Mother was going to die.
09:51Suddenly you had this, my God, it was really inconvenient.
09:55For a dramatist, you're like, well, you can't have all those deaths in one, you know, they
09:58come all, couldn't they space them out?
10:01You're given suddenly far too much story far too quickly.
10:04And how do you manage that?
10:06Because I always, in my head, always think of The Crown as a train moving through history.
10:10Our train particularly moves at the same pace all the way through, which is a decade
10:15a season.
10:16So when things suddenly happen in Bunchan, you think, well, we might need three episodes
10:20to deal with one year.
10:22The train gets, its rhythm is messed up.
10:26So the bulk of my time was not spent writing the episodes.
10:29The bulk of my time, I'd say 60 percent of my time as a showrunner was spent figuring
10:34out the season, mapping out the 10 episodes.
10:38Once I started writing episodes, I would stick to it.
10:40But mapping out the outlines took me many months and is always a process where I pitch
10:47it to the researchers, the researchers grant me permission or give me the red card.
10:53The architecture of it was always the most critical.
10:57Thereafter every decision is small.
10:59Once you've mapped out the architecture of the season, after that everything else is
11:02like, sure, until you get into the cutting room where things are minute.
11:08So you keep going down and down and down in terms of the size of your decisions.
11:13Did Queen Elizabeth's death change how you wrote the final season and the ending?
11:19I think it changed everything.
11:21It changed how we felt making the show.
11:24We felt it much more acutely in the United Kingdom.
11:27I don't know.
11:28It felt like a band without the lead singer, do you know what I mean?
11:31It felt like, oh, but we're making a show about her and about her life.
11:35And then I had to suddenly deal with her death at a time where there was no prospect of her
11:39dying.
11:40So how do you then write an episode that deals with her death, even though at that point
11:45she still had 18 years to live?
11:47And so that's when we stumbled upon the fact that she was actively planning her funeral
11:50from 20 years out.
11:53And so that was a light bulb.
11:55I was like, well, we can make the final episode about her death, even though she's not going
11:59to die for 18 years, you know?
12:01William and Harry become bigger characters in the second half of the final season.
12:08And in the finale, the Harry uniformed debacle, we see that happen.
12:14Were you forecasting what we now know are some themes in their relationships in terms
12:20of Harry's resentment toward William?
12:23He calls him a company man at one point.
12:26How did you write that story?
12:27I wrote it, you know, like I write anything else, where I'm reading what other people
12:32have said about it and I'm figuring it out.
12:35The great thing about a show like The Crown, whether it's the political characters or the
12:38royal characters, I'm presenting it, I'm trying not to lead people too much by the nose, and
12:44people are reaching their own conclusions, and very often totally different conclusions
12:49about the same episode, the same character.
12:52I wasn't writing about today when I wrote about then.
12:56But the thing about families and history is you can write about then, and it suddenly
13:02have all sorts of relevance, and all it needs is for some events today to change, and suddenly
13:07what I've written about looks like it was prefigured.
13:10That's right.
13:11And it wasn't intentionally prefigured.
13:13You have to trust that if you write a long-running, multigenerational family saga, which is, let's
13:19face it, the most interesting thing you can write, by a mile, those stories will have
13:23echoes and connections with people, they bring their own family into it.
13:27It's like looking at an abstract painting, you know, you come and bring all sorts of
13:31meaning to that painting, your own story.
13:34And people do that with the royal family, you see it plays out every single day.
13:38The British public, but also based on the appetite for what newspapers write, it seems
13:43the whole world use this family as a sort of ersatz family onto which they project their
13:49own meanings.
13:50That's a long way round of saying, I just wrote it the way I wrote it.
13:54I wasn't thinking, ha-ha, I'll make a point about today.
13:57Charles is very happy to marry the love of his life in the finale.
14:02He also simultaneously feels thwarted that his mother isn't stepping down.
14:07Where did you want to leave him at the end of the series?
14:11Exactly as you've just described it.
14:13I thought that was, as I listened to you ask the question, I thought, I like the sound
14:17of that.
14:18I like the sound of two things being possible at once, and both of them being strongly held
14:22positions.
14:23Of course, on the one hand, she was never going to stand down, those are the rules.
14:27But on the other hand, as a mother, how can she not want to?
14:31Because the act of staying on involves her becoming a bad mother, right?
14:36A good queen, but a bad mother.
14:38Because she's denying her eldest son the fulfillment of his lifelong preparation.
14:44And knowing that if she stays on the throne for the same amount of time that her mother
14:48stays alive, you're going to end up with Charles being exactly as he is today, a vulnerable
14:53man not in the best of health and no longer in the prime of his life.
14:57What a shame for him, on the one hand, that he hasn't been able to have his own reign.
15:01He's a deeply interesting man and a very committed, responsible king.
15:06But he's now unfortunately struggling with other things and other challenges that come
15:10with age.
15:12Elizabeth has an internal debate about whether to step down, as illustrated by Claire Foy
15:19and Olivia Colman playing advocates for one side and the other.
15:24Was it always the plan to have the two of them come back for the finale?
15:29There's always the chance that the actors would be unavailable or the actors wouldn't
15:32want to come back.
15:33So I think before I floated the idea to anyone, I seem to remember making contact with Claire
15:40and saying, if I were to write one scene, just one scene, would you?
15:44And she said, yeah.
15:45And I knew that Claire, if I'd have said, I'm going to write a whole episode, she'd
15:49have said no.
15:50I knew I had one shot and it would be one scene.
15:52And I think it was the same with Olivia.
15:54Because I think when actors move on, they want to move on.
15:57I understand that.
16:01I think it was their respect for Imelda Staunton rather than their gratitude to the show that
16:05brought them back.
16:06And I was thrilled.
16:07I suddenly thought, good.
16:08And it was the same with both of them.
16:13You mentioned it was in November 2014 that The Crown was originally announced and that
16:19it would unfold over 60 episodes.
16:25One of the, if not the most ambitious television project ever to be planned.
16:32What do you remember about going in?
16:36I had no sense of what I'd taken on.
16:39Because I think if you do know, you wouldn't do it.
16:41I think you just stumble in like an innocent fool.
16:45And you thought, oh, well, that sounds like fun.
16:47And you assemble a nice group of people and you think, oh, this is nice.
16:50And speaking now just as a freelancer, there's something unsettling if you're a writer or
16:55a director or an actor always looking for the next job or meeting different people or
16:59wondering if it works out here, works out there.
17:02And a lot of us as artists are unsettled, complicated people from complicated backgrounds
17:08with complicated lives.
17:09And so the idea of finding stability and a family, there's an extraordinarily high percentage
17:15of people that made The Crown that stayed from episode one to episode 10 of season six.
17:22It was such a functional, gorgeous group of human beings.
17:26It sort of removes the noise and the nonsense of freelance life.
17:31You know, where you're worried about this, worried about that.
17:33This new person in that job, that new person, do I know them?
17:37Will I develop a relationship with them?
17:39We were spared all of that, all that existential crackle.
17:45And we're able to just do our jobs.
17:47And I just get a sense of how grateful everybody was.
17:50Because the freelance life, the self-employed life, there can be a cold, whistling wind
17:56of discomfort.
17:58And I think we were all enormously privileged at a very special time for television to have
18:03had that opportunity.
18:04And so when it got very tough, and it always gets tough, a show like this is impossibly
18:09tough to do without, I'm just talking about how to make it good rather than personal relationships.
18:15I kept pinching myself and reminding myself of what I felt might be a unique moment.
18:21And indeed, the climate has changed now.
18:23I don't know that the same show would get made again.
18:26You know, we were left alone to do it.
18:28I mean, I can't stress this enough.
18:32We were given support and no notes.
18:35This is the show we wanted to make, and it is the way it is because that was how we wanted
18:40to make it.
18:41I mean, when did you get that?
18:42Yeah.
18:43I mean, you know, I kept thinking on behalf of all the other people who haven't been given
18:46this opportunity, I've got to not screw it up.
18:48I've got to not drop the ball.
18:51With the new actors coming in when they'd switch out, what did you find were the best
18:56ways to talk to them about the continuity of the character and what you wanted them
19:04to bring to the character that was new?
19:06Well, I mean, just because they were playing the same characters didn't mean you approached
19:11them the same way.
19:13Because every actor, so for example, the way in which you would deal with Claire Foy was
19:16very different from the way you deal with Olivia Colman, was very different from the
19:19way you deal with Imelda Staunton.
19:21That said, there's something about the character of the Queen that filtered into all of them
19:26and they all became extraordinarily stoic and resilient.
19:31You know, something filters through from the character into who you are and with a whole
19:35new cast come whole new people, whole new human beings.
19:39They have different methods and approaches.
19:41So the way Gillian Anderson works could not be more different from the way that Olivia
19:45Colman works.
19:46And so Gillian likes a lot of preparation, a lot of support, a lot of research, a lot
19:52of engagement, a lot of stimulation.
19:55I get the sense that Olivia reads the scene in the taxi on the way there and forgets it
20:01in the taxi on the way home.
20:03And if you say to her, do you remember the scene we filmed yesterday?
20:06She'll go, remind me.
20:10And you go, Olivia, it was yesterday.
20:11And she goes, I know, but.
20:14Wow.
20:15So you're like, wow, exactly.
20:19So you have to have a production that can cope with both and cope with anything.
20:25Because actors have different processes and you want to support all those different processes
20:31no matter what those processes are to get the best work.
20:34Film Courage Are there any royal stories that you wish
20:38you could have portrayed like Andrew and Fergie or the attempt to kidnap Princess Anne?
20:43The attempt to kidnap Princess Anne sounds riveting and you think, my God, what a fantastic
20:48story.
20:49I can't wait to see that.
20:50Why didn't they put it in the crown?
20:52I want my money back.
20:54We looked into it and it's actually not that interesting.
20:56Sort of nothing happens.
20:57It was a sort of eh.
20:59I didn't want to try and cook it into something that it wasn't.
21:02Andrew and Fergie, I'm afraid I need to feel something.
21:08They were just characters I didn't want to write.
21:10And also I felt that given that they were never going to wear the crown, the skewer
21:16in the shish kebab, as it were, of the show is the relationship between Buckingham Palace
21:21and Downing Street.
21:23And when you deviate from that too much, you deviate from the two houses, you deviate
21:27from the Queen, the Prime Minister and that intimate audience that they have together
21:31about what's going on in the world and in the country.
21:35The show quickly becomes something that it shouldn't become.
21:39And so we did try deviations and always learnt the lesson if you stay clear of the line of
21:46succession you're lost.
21:49And so as long as it involved the Prime Minister and as long as it involved the Queen, you
21:53were always on what I would call core crown.
21:55Film Courage As a writer, have you always been interested
21:59in writing historical figures?
22:02No.
22:03That came to me when I was about 40.
22:05So I've only been doing it about 20 years.
22:07I mention it to my own children always.
22:09Somebody said it to me which is that the best creative years of your life are 40 to 60.
22:15That doesn't mean it applies to everybody.
22:18But it certainly applied to me and I was told it before I got to 40.
22:23Stephen Frears told me that and he said your best years are 40 to 60.
22:28I'm now 61.
22:29It's all over.
22:30Film Courage You seem like you're doing great.
22:33Well, you're very kind but I'm 61.
22:35It's finished.
22:36It's over.
22:37Film Courage Is your next project adapting your play PATRIOTS?
22:41No, my next project is an adaptation of BOYS FROM BRAZIL.
22:46Film Courage Oh wow.
22:47Wow, that movie scared me so much.
22:50That's a really good reaction.
22:51I like that reaction.
22:52Film Courage Yeah.
22:53The blue eyes.
22:54Don't give away the plot.
22:55Film Courage Sorry.
22:56There's a generation of people who don't know what happens.
22:57Film Courage You've said you have a prequel idea to THE
23:00CROWN which would go backwards in time.
23:03Has that…
23:04Well, it would start further back and then move forwards in time.
23:07Yes, sorry.
23:08It wouldn't be Benjamin Button, THE CROWN.
23:09It would be linear.
23:10It would be linear but it would be in the past.
23:12Has there been any forward movement on that?
23:15Nothing yet because, you know, I'm enjoying my time outside the palace gates and I'm
23:21excited to do these other stories but if I don't become too decrepit at some point
23:25I might like to do that because the story is sensational.
23:29You have a specific idea?
23:30I do.
23:31Spill it.
23:32No.
23:33Okay.
23:34There's always so much drama with the royal family.
23:40Spill it.
23:41Spill it.
23:43Even recently with the whole Kate Middleton having cancer and the…
23:47Yeah, I wouldn't go anywhere near that.
23:49Right.
23:50But do you watch it as a spectator-like thank God issue?
23:52I don't.
23:53I just think…
23:54No where is Kate hashtag for you?
23:56I think…
23:57I hope the British press behaves well and I hope we behave well because actually the
24:01press responds in many cases to our greed.
24:05And I just hope we all collectively whether it's us or the press behaves well.
24:11These people need privacy sometimes.
24:13Watching it in the U.S. it just seemed like the British media at a certain point, not
24:18just the tabloids, but the media became more and more outraged about things in The Crown.
24:24Did that make the show harder to make?
24:27There's an unfortunate climate of outrage about everything.
24:30I try and understand it.
24:32I don't see it in American newspapers.
24:34I don't see it in French, in Austrian, in wherever I travel I don't see the same
24:39degree of what I would describe as outrage.
24:43There is an outrage response to everything in the U.K.
24:48And I think it's deeply troubling.
24:50I think it's, you know, reviews for any movie are either one star or five stars.
24:55That doesn't reflect, you know, everything is dialed up.
25:00And I can only imagine it's because journalists are under pressure to keep their jobs.
25:05Their jobs are being measured by clicks.
25:08If you get a certain amount of response to what it is that you write, you will get...
25:13I'm appalled when I read English newspapers, no matter what the subject is, how much outrage
25:21and how much judgment and how much...
25:23So we got caught up in some of that, but everybody gets caught up in that.
25:26No matter what...
25:27If you're doing something that has high visibility about a subject that is as discussed and turned
25:34over as The Royal Family, you know, you're walking into an area where there will be
25:40people expressing opinions and trying to make money from it.
25:44That's what...
25:45There's a lot of royal correspondents, there's a lot of historians, there's a lot of people
25:48who have agendas.
25:50But it's not...
25:51But I want to say it's just...
25:52It's about sport, it's about politics, it's about culture, there's rage, there's a lot
25:57of outrage.
25:58What's something you still want to do as a creator?
26:01Oh, there's a lot I want to do.
26:04Right now, I really want to write some men again.
26:07For me, The Crown, even though there are male characters in it, it feels like a female show.
26:12I've always felt I was writing a feminine show, where the protagonist was female and
26:17everything radiated out of that.
26:19I think I want to write a couple of things now which feel masculine.
26:23I feel like re-engaging with that.
26:26But also, you know, one of the reasons why I hold on to the opportunity of still going
26:31back to The Crown is because of a complex female character at the heart of things,
26:34and I enjoyed that.
26:36But for now, I'd like to do something where people aren't polite, aren't upper-class British,
26:42and they have guns.
26:45I want some guns.
26:46Yesterday, I met a couple of fellow showrunners who were talking about scenes where they were
26:52talking about disposing a body, you know, and how did they deal with it dramaturgically.
27:00I was so envious.
27:02I want that problem.
27:04I want a problem of how to deal with a body.
27:06Will there be bodies in Boys from Brazil?
27:08Yes.
27:09Okay, yes.
27:10A lot.
27:11Yeah, yeah, yeah.
27:12There's a really excessive amount of death.
27:14Oh, yeah.
27:15Oh, no, I'm making sure of that.
27:18Fantastic.
27:19Yeah.
27:20Peter, thank you so much.
27:21This was a real pleasure.
27:22Yeah, for me too.