Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1260764
Peter Morgan's scripts seldom prescribe sets but always suggest what excites this designer most: scale, movement, framing, a world beyond and how they connect. I made a plan of the connections just for myself, not wanting to clip any director's wings, but in order slightly to lean on each of them to (for want of a better word) obey. When word of the plan's existence got out on season four, one of the directors asked to see it and together we discovered that no one in forty episodes had broken the unspoken rules. The private apartments presented both a problem —they are, of course, not part of the tour—and an opportunity to use what I can best describe as informed imagination. Based on as much as we know about Buckingham Palace and from knowledge of other buildings of around the same period, a second new term entered The Crown vocabulary "enfilade"a suite of rooms in a line connected by a succession of doorways. Put a bedroom at each end with dressing rooms between and you have an architectural metaphor for a certain kind of marriage, one that signifies wealth, absence vs. presence and, dramatically important, occasional solitude vs. the significance of coming together. For storytelling, it presented new opportunities for framing, movement, distance. Thus, another go-to image presented itself—the door closing on Diane Keaton at the end of The Godfather. (It doesn't take E F A B C D