I love all Daphne du Maurier's stuff. And just enjoying period dramas, really... wanting to do something drastically different from 'Nighty Night', the chance to write very different language.
I used to want to be in 'Downton' because I had never been in a period drama, but then I did 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher' and had to wear one of those frocks and... I didn't feel very comfortable.
One way of grounding the magic is by putting in lots of stuff about street lamps, carriages, and how difficult it is to get good servants.
It's always thrilling to encounter the sweep of time in a work of fiction in a way that feels authentic and real.
For almost every novel I've written, I've read the daily newspaper of the time almost as if it were my current subscription. For 'Two Moons,' which was set in 1877, I think I read just about every day of the 'Washington Evening Star' for that year. For 'Henry and Clara,' I read the 'Albany Evening Journal' of the time.
Besides, it doesn't make any sense to have these characters living in the year 3000 when all their points of reference are from the pop culture of the 80's and the 90's.
The idea of doing a period movie, some people say, "Isn't it odd that you're doing a period movie? That's a change of pace for you." And, I'm like, "Not really." When you're doing a science fiction movie, it's almost exactly the same.
I have a British voice and a rather formal one at that, having been brought up in post-WWII Britain. My voice is perfectly suited to the sort of book I write, I think. It would not fit a contemporary, besides which I do not know enough about the contemporary world to write convincingly or comfortably about it!
We wanted the book [Paper Girls] to feel to evoke the '80s, but not necessarily feel that it was drawn then.
People always ask me, 'Why so many historical dramas?' Because those are the best roles I get to play, and I get to play heroes in those roles.
I hate period films - and there are plenty of them - where they say, "Let's not do contemporary language because the audience won't understand it;" "let's not make the girls wear corsets, because it's not sexy" and all that sort of thing. Gradually it disintegrates into a no man's land: you don't really believe it's a period scene and it doesn't feel like it's now because it's not now. You don't feel it's quite real and you don't believe in it.
When I was working on a Victorian-era novel, to get in the mood, I read several historical novels set in approximately the same period and place, and really enjoyed the detective novels of John Dickson Carr.
When I heard that 'Dracula' was being made into a series by NBC and Carnival, I couldn't resist. I knew they would do something interesting with it. A period drama with a supernatural twist seemed like a whole lot of fun.
So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone, and he doesn't discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail.
You could believe that Sinbad could fight a skeleton because that's from a period in the past, a magical period. But if you had James Bond fighting a skeleton, it'd be almost comical.
With 'Downton Abbey,' you're always stuck in one stately home.
Athol Fugard became famous as a playwright, so although 'Tsotsi' the book was written in the '60s, it was only published in the '80s. It was then optioned pretty much every year by producers. I think the problem was that holding onto its period setting made it very hard to get finance.
I don't know if it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm not going to be writing about Paris in the 1800s. I feel like it would come off as just ludicrously uninformed, even if I did a lot of research.
'The Great Fire' is more what I'm used to - being in costume and make-up for a long time, trying to be 'period appropriate.'
It's always fun to immerse yourself in a different time period.
I've seen so many period pieces in my life, I really enjoy them so much, a lot of my favorite movies are period pieces.
It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing.
You don't really have to dress a ton of actors. You don't really have to spend a bunch of money lining up extras to look the time period.
I've never really worked out this thought, and I don't know if I'm really conscious of it, but I can see there's an attraction about writing about a period that's over and isn't going to change colour while you look at it.
Because I had grown up with Jane Austen novels and period dramas, I was very familiar with that period and that world.
