SINKING FEELING: Passengers prepare for disaster.
When he wasn't putting together Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes was busy on a mini-series about the Titanic.
On AprilL 15 it is 100 years to the day since the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank into the Atlantic Ocean, taking 1517 passengers with her. It would become the world's most famous maritime disaster, inspiring countless books, documentaries, films and television shows. A century on and we are still captivated. It should come as no surprise then, that a new television drama has been created to commemorate the anniversary.
When Oscar-winning writer Julian Fellowes was approached about writing the script for Titanic, he needed little persuading, he told Culture at the recent, well, launch event at the London Film Museum.
"I've always been fascinated and haunted by it. There are certain disasters that seem to latch on our psyche. I suppose it's just the level of tragedy and the sort of completeness of it. When I was young, people used to say that when living memory had died, when the survivors were dead, interest in the Titanic would fade, and that hasn't proven to be the case. It is something about man against nature, when man is proud enough to think he has defeated nature and then invariably nature defeats him."
Fans of Fellowes' award- winning drama Downton Abbey will know that the four-part mini- series begins with news arriving of the Titanic sinking. The self-confessed "Titanorak" (yes, seriously) says it was a remarkable coincidence, as he had only just finished writing the first few scenes of that series when he met with Titanic producer Nigel Stafford-Clark, and had to assure him that Downton Abbey would be a sufficiently different show.
Fellowes jokes he had to resist putting a little Downton Abbey into Titanic. "There was a slight temptation for someone to say, 'Do you know Patrick Crawley?' in the background, but since I knew various links would be made without any help from me, I resisted it."
Starring Linus Roache, Geraldine Somerville, Toby Jones and Celia Imrie, the mini-series tells the story not just of a single ship, but of an entire society, interweaving stories of all its passengers from first class to steerage.
"This was an opportunity," says three-time Bafta winner Stafford- Clark, "to present a portrait of Britain in 1912 at a particular moment before it vanished forever. We were the most powerful nation on earth and we had been for about 50 years at that point, and we saw no reason that shouldn't continue forever. We were sailing towards the First World War as obliviously as the Titanic was sailing towards the iceberg."
And what better setting to provide a snapshot of Britain's entire class system than a ship? Says Fellowes: "They talk about the perfect storm; this is the perfect disaster, because it has everything in a very compact form. This one ship holds every element of this proud and self- confident society that was headed for a smash-up, and the fact that you take that world and shrink it into a bottle makes it very potent."
Inevitably, from the outset, comparisons were made to that other film (which has just been re- released in 3D), but Stafford-Clark insists that this is a different story. "Titanic is like a cowboy movie - just because one is made doesn't mean you can't make another one, you just have to find new ways of doing it . . . [James] Cameron was basically making a love story, this would almost be polar opposite to that."
Right from the start, he says, they set out to tell the story of the whole ship by featuring a range of characters - some real, some fictional - and their stories. "It is a study of the human condition."
Each episode sees the tragedy told from different characters' perspectives and ends with the boat beginning to sink. It's not until the final episode that we learn who survives.
Stafford-Clark and Fellowes agreed that they would not decide who was going to live until Fellowes had begun writing the end of the third episode.
"We duly got together when we got to that point," says Stafford- Clark, "only to find that we didn't want anyone to die. I would say, 'Well, he really has to go.' And Julian would say, 'I don't think so. What about her?' It took quite a long time for us to work it out."
In the course of researching the Titanic sinking, Stafford-Clark says he learned surprising details that he hadn't known before. For example, the highest mortality rate was not among the men in steerage, despite the fact they were lower class and their accommodation was in the bowels of the ship, but it was the second-class male passengers, who "were so desperate to abide by what they saw as the principles of their betters - the upper classes - that they were the ones who most rigorously adhered to the order that only women and children should get into the life boats. Whereas the upper classes, who had a sense of entitlement bred into them, were prepared to let the women and children go first, but once the boats started going down half-empty, they got in too."
The $21 million series, which has been sold in 86 countries, was filmed in Budapest, Hungary, for practical and financial reasons, not the least being that it had a studio big enough to fit the Titanic set, as well as Europe's largest purpose-built indoor water tank that the production team would go on to build. The tank took three months to construct, two days to fill and 10 days to get it to a workable temperature for the actors, who would spend many hours in it. Since filming took place in summer, many of the cast members found their greatest challenge was pretending to be cold while sweating in 30-degree heat, swaddled in fur, corsets and woollen coats.
Ask Fellowes if he is concerned about Titanic fatigue, he scoffs. "This is the year of Titanic. It would be wrong to have nothing new in the [anniversary] year.
"It is somehow right that there should be one more new drama telling the story and as far as I know, this is it.
"I'm glad and pleased and actually rather proud to have been part of it."
On the box:
The first of the four-part Titanic screens on Friday, April 13, 8.30pm on TV One. National Geographic Channel will screen three Titanic 100 documentaries. The Final Word with James Cameron on Monday, April 9, at 7.30pm gathers Titanic experts including engineers, naval architects, artists and historians, to figure out how an "unsinkable" ship sank.
On Sunday, April 15, at 7.30pm the channel has Save the Titanic with Bob Ballard, in which Ballard - the man who discovered her wreckage - is on a new quest to protect the wreck from glory seekers and treasure hunters. And on Wednesday, April 11, at 7.30pm, Case Closed will examine how two expert lookouts missed a giant iceberg lying straight ahead on a clear night under a blanket of unusually bright stars, and why a nearby steamer failed to come Titanic's aid.
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