Dressing Gosford Park
For the actors portraying the above stairs characters, much of the shooting schedule was spent in a country house just north of London, where most of the above stairs sequences were filmed. (In addition, a few of the above stairs bedroom scenes were filmed at Syon House in Middlesex.) Production designer Stephen Altman went to work changing furniture and carpets to match the period, but felt that the basic structure and architecture of the house served his purposes very well: "In houses like this, there are antiques from two or three hundred years before, so we just added in layers of modernity. We wanted to make it comfortable and liveable, since many of the stately homes we'd seen were like museums and didn't seem like homes."
The below stairs set was created at the U.K.'s famed Shepperton Studios.
Stephen Altman explains, "We set our sights on building our own below stairs set because we were unable to find anything intact and convenient for filming. The set was based on a composite of pretty much everything that we'd seen, whether from research or actual places that we visited. In compiling it, I tried to get the scale and geography right with our above stairs location house. We duplicated a couple of staircases that connected above and below stairs, but otherwise it's the best bits of many places."
Extensive research went into making the below stairs set the essence of a working household. Stephen Altman and his team fashioned an ironing-andsewing room where the maids and valets prepare their employers' clothes for the glamorous events ahead; a still room where jams are made, cordials are distilled, and breakfast trays are set up; the butler's pantry where silver is first polished and then locked away; the brushing room, service lift, kitchen, servants' hall, scullery, and some of the senior servants' own accommodations.
Being true to scale, the set would be a confined space. This was a challenge that Stephen Altman was able to solve: "Most of the real below stairs places were like labyrinths, which would have been very difficult to shoot. Hence, we added some crossing corridors and windows that are not entirely fictitious: they did have a lot of windows in the corridors to let sunlight into the dark halls. I did adjust them slightly for shooting purposes at each one of the cross sections, there are doors and windows on each corner so we could shoot through and get a sense of feeling around it. Otherwise, we'd just have had tunnel vision all the time. You have to try and find ways of expanding the cameras' images as much as possible."
The costume department was no less rigorous in its attention to specifics.
Costume designer Jenny Beavan notes, "We talked in detail about every element of the costumes, down to what underwear the maids would be wearing. Robert Altman loves this detail: he wanted everything to be incredibly real without looking stagey or phony. To that end, I did a great deal of research and looked at original clothes from the 1930s that we then remade. Whilst there was a lot of inspiration for the upstairs characters, there was less available for the servants. They were not greatly photographed at that time, but we did have some wonderfully written records, by Nancy Astor's maid, Rosina Harrison and by Lady Troubridge."
Speaking in his capacity as Gosford Park producer, Bob Balaban proudly states, "I love the way this movie looks. 1932 is a period we don't see all that often in movies. It's a great look, those great hairstyles and beautiful, voluptuous gowns."
