Written by Peter Morgan, the first thing about The Queen is to recognise what a huge news story Diana was - Lucia Zucchetti does a lovely non-chronological montage of her early on - and how much her death impacted the country, evoked through good use of contemporary news footage. Peter Morgan's screenplay is good - there's no mistake that Elizabeth and Philip didn't like her and don't seem to rate Charles that highly either; that Alistair Campbell seems to be a prick and there's a good scene where Blair loses his temper with him; and another good scene where Blair and his wife argue about the role of the Crown; and the best scene - the Queen seeing the lovely stag and trying to shoo it away.
Mirren won the Oscar and BAFTA. She's well supported by Michael Sheen, Roger Allam, Alex Jennings, Sylvia Syms, John Cromwell, Helen McCrory.
Photographed by Affonso Beato with a terrific score from Alexandre Desplat.
Helen herself introduces Gosford Park with interesting stories. The 'upstairs' scenes were all filmed first, thus some of the 'downstairs' staff hardly saw the rest of the cast. Helen and Kelly Macdonald didn't understand a scene, Helen told 'Bob' they couldn't see the point of it and he agreed and just dropped it. But later, when Helen said they needed an extra scene - the one between her and her sister Eileen Atkins -Altman said, 'You two go off and write it' which they did. Helen reckons it's only because of that scene that she was Oscar nominated.
She also said that with two cameras constantly moving you had no idea if you were even on camera let alone in close up (which takes the pressure off). That most of the cast were theatre based and so understood ensemble working. And that everyone was radio miked so they had the option of editing 6 - 10 channels of sound as well as picture.
It's such an incredible cast that it's hard to isolate stand-out performances but I'll do it anyway and say they are given by Mirren, Clive Owen, Macdonald (who's really the protagonist) and Michael Gambon.
Andrew Dunn photographed it and Tim Sqyres edited.
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