![]() ![]() He, because of his affection for Balaban me, because I knew that if the film did go forward, with a different writer, I would never recover. There followed a slightly surreal period when neither I nor, as it turned out, Altman had the faintest belief that the film would really come off, but we both felt that we had to behave as if it might. “It’s a who-cares-whodunit.” Naturally, I said yes. I am never quite sure how helpful Altman’s comment was when we were discussing the nature of the film: “This isn’t a whodunit,” he said. ![]() The actual nature of the story had yet to be defined, and as for the title, I knew what I was looking for, a hard, unsentimental sound, but I did not settle on Gosford Park until an old friend, Francesca Gosford, rang to tell me she was leaving England. I have always wondered if it was the spirit of my dead mother who urged their refusals. It turned out later that every major writer in England – Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hampton and the rest – had already been approached to write the film and, without exception, had turned it down. This was the film that would start the ball rolling and lead, eventually, to a dozen years of writing Downton Abbey. In those days, if the public was aware of me at all, it was as an actor. My screenwriting credits consisted of three series for BBC children’s drama. It seemed very unlikely that I would otherwise have figured on Altman’s preferred list of writers, especially as I had not, at that stage, ever written a film that had been made. ![]() The director of M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player and countless other classics, Altman was known as a freewheeling rebel, a stand-alone refusenik who could face down the studios and go his own way.Īpparently, Balaban – for whom I had once written a script of Anthony Trollope’s novel The Eustace Diamonds, which has never been made to this day – had told Altman I would be just right to fashion a story based in an English country house, loosely modelled on an Agatha Christie murder mystery. I was in the kitchen of our house in Moore Street, Chelsea, when the telephone rang and an American actor-producer called Bob Balaban asked me if I would be interested in writing a film script for Robert Altman. My life essentially changed one day in early January 2000. ![]()
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