Versailles’ Simon Mirren & David Wolstencroft Talk Period Drama

PREMIUM: Versailles‘ executive producers and writers Simon Mirren and David Wolstencroft talk to TV Drama about how they crafted a bold, lavish series that examines the early years of the Sun King’s reign, the opulent palace he built, and the women in his life.

TV DRAMA: How did you first get involved in the project?
MIRREN: The first time I heard about it was when Anne Thomopoulos [one of the executive producers of Versailles] called me and said there was a project called Versailles in Paris that she was involved with. It had been in some sort of development for about five years, and she wanted to find someone who could breathe new life into it. She sent me some material, which I read but didn’t respond to very well. I didn’t know anything about that period in French history, and period drama is not something I ever really looked at doing or had any idea about. But I started to do some research about Louis XIV—I asked my mother, who is a teacher, and my aunt Helen [actress Helen Mirren], who has done a lot of period drama, What’s the deal with Louis XIV? My mom said that if I even engaged in this project it would be a big challenge for me because I basically failed out of school when I was 16, so I had very little education! I started to read about Louis XIV and saw the relationship between him and his brother, Philippe. I thought it was the most remarkable relationship of its time, in my interpretation of the period, because we can only interpret the facts that are left behind and those facts are always written by the winners anyway. I’m always a little dubious about historical facts. But what was really evident to me was just how extraordinary that relationship was. It gave birth to modern media in its time with regard to music, poetry, dance, fashion, art and even science; Louis was much more prolific than I ever realized. I wondered where he got the idea to build the palace [of Versailles]. When I started reading about how he built the palace, I realized from my years working on Criminal Minds and with the BAU, the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI in Quantico, that there was a very strong psychopathy to Louis similar to what a CEO would have. He was not a psychopath—more of a CEO, someone who needs to control everything. I wondered why Louis built the palace around his father’s hunting lodge. Why didn’t he just tear it down? Why did he keep [the hunting lodge], what is famously known as “the envelope”? To me, that was a psychological trait [that indicates] a kind of psychopathy. I wondered if he built around the envelope to respect his father or to say, Look at what I’ve done, Daddy. Or, did he build Versailles as a kind of, “fuck you, Father?” [Maybe he wanted to say,] I’m not just a number, I’m Louis XIV. I’m going to make France more than it ever was before I got here, and it’s going to be completely different after I leave. By building Versailles, he built a precinct, and precinct drama is something I’ve always worked in. Here’s an extraordinary precinct [in which Louis] gave birth to modern media, with the help of his brother, who was gallivanting around Paris, gathering up all his very artistic friends, Molière and various others. Louis was attracted to them because he couldn’t go play in Paris, he didn’t even like Paris. His brother was bringing all these extraordinary people to Versailles, and they would become Louis’s friends. He would make them official court people for the art world. And the stories that evolve from that precinct are endless.

Then I had a dream about the Hall of Mirrors, so I wrote what became the opening to Versailles, which is the girl running through the Hall of Mirrors. I got to about page 20 and I thought, well, that’s it!

TV DRAMA: How did David get involved?
MIRREN: David called me up, and I said, I’ve been offered a period drama. It’s Versailles. I got to page 20 and, terrifyingly, they want me to do it. After page 20 I’m a bit lost, so I’m going to have to bury myself in books. And he said, You won’t have to, because I got a star first [honors degree] at Cambridge studying Louis XIV. David had worked with all the experts and had a photographic memory for all this history.
WOLSTENCROFT: I had always been interested in this world, but certainly when I was leaving college, period drama was the place for film, it was the place for Merchant Ivory; it wasn’t for TV, it was too expensive. [But now in television] we could really inhabit that world and it would be amazing if we could do a 17th Century House of Cards. Power and sex and culture, it’s the origin story of so much in our world today. We started talking about it and we met on this triangle, this deeply dysfunctional family dynamic of a king and his brother—I can’t say gay because the label didn’t exist then—who was married but preferred men. The king was having an affair with his brother’s wife and she was one of his great loves. There was this crazy love triangle at the center of a period drama. We flew out to Paris and spoke to Canal+ and they just fell off their chairs and said, Yes this is exactly what we have been missing. That’s how it happened, we both fell in love with it and we set to work. [We shot] a 2-hour pilot, because Canal+ shows episodes in twos, and I’m happy to say, suddenly we were greenlit and in Paris.

TV DRAMA: Did you and David have a shared vision for the show?
MIRREN: We wanted to make a drama that felt modern. We knew for sure the French press would go after us. The English press would go after us. How dare we do a show [about Versailles] in English and so on. I just felt like it was worth it, because why not? At least we had the guts to give it a go and try to tell a story about history in a modern way. We wanted to make sure that young people would come to it and then would explore the real history for themselves. It was a necessity that we made it feel modern, which is what a lot of people take offense to.
WOLSTENCROFT: Versailles was a grand experiment in a sense. No one had ever done anything like this before, [shooting] in English in France with such a budget and such a scope. But of course when you have a budget, the numerical budget doesn’t necessarily reflect spending power. In France certain things are much more expensive because of social taxes, production tradition, expectation and business culture. This is where Ann was really very helpful in triangulating, being a great creative producer in her own right and fluent in French. [She was able] to negotiate that hybrid of “this is the way we do things” and “this is the way we do things.” OK, well, we have to find some common ground. No one has climbed this mountain before so we have to climb it together. There was a lot of that going on too, so in all that mix to have a tried-and-tested partnership between Simon and me was invaluable because we had instant shorthand with instant trust.

It’s not by chance that the show is about brothers because Simon and I do have each other’s back a little bit more than perhaps [is usual]. This is an industry not particularly known for loyalty but we’re very loyal to each other in that way.

TV DRAMA: How did you take facts and build on them with your storytelling?
MIRREN: Louis XIV woke up to 100 people every day. Then he would go outside, and he would have 1,000 or even up to 8,000 people following him. We can’t present that real history, so we had to choose a few particular characters [to] represent 100 characters. We didn’t have the time, and we certainly didn’t have the money, to dress the 100 people that Louis wakes up to! We also had to interweave characters that were fictitious, so we had some way of explaining other things. We also had to take a piece of history and condense it down to a couple of years. A lot of the facts [we showed] are real; they just happened over a much more extended period of time. So there are choices you have to make in any drama, but we wanted to take the facts and present them in a way that was modern.

I was brought up predominantly by my mother, who is a teacher, and her sister, Helen, so I’ve been very influenced by two powerful women. And the power of those women in my life made me look at Louis’s life and how he was empowered by his mother. He was brought up by a very modern mother for the times, who nurtured Louis into the man he became. It’s my interpretation that it’s the women who made him successful in his life. So what would it mean to be a woman in the court of Louis XIV, a woman who had the smarts and the skills to be powerful but couldn’t be? I guess these women would have focused all their smarts and brilliance into the men they were with to try to engineer themselves up the ranks of the court of Louis XIV, and some of them had Louis’s ear. Maybe some of those women affected some of the massive decisions Louis made. I have always been fascinated by the women [in history] because they had no voice. When we put in Claudine, who is completely fictitious—I knew we were going to have a problem with that—I just wanted to play with that a little bit and try to explore what it was to be a woman in the court.

TV DRAMA: With all your years of experience working in American writers’ rooms, how was this process different?
MIRREN: The word “showrunner” should only be used in America. Writers in the U.S. fought very hard to claim that title through the WGA [Writers Guild of America]. A showrunner has to sign a massive document at the beginning of a show and promise to deliver a complete show to the network for X amount of dollars, and the showrunner will oversee absolutely everything that goes on on that show. That kind of power doesn’t exist in Europe right now; there are levels of it, but it’s not the same experience. There is no real writers’ room, per se, in the way there are writers’ rooms in America, at least not in my experience. It’s not the same because the mechanics of how America has built the system of television is very, very different from how it’s been built in Europe. In Europe it was so steeped in theater, but in America it was free of all that in a way. I’m not saying that [in the U.S.] we’re any better at [making shows] than in Europe—it’s just a different way of doing it. We didn’t have a writers’ room [for Versailles] in the way we have a writers’ room in America. We kind of had a room, but it didn’t operate the way it would operate here.

TV DRAMA: How did you share the writing process?
WOLSTENCROFT: We had ten episodes. We had mapped out in our heads with a couple of the other writers on the show in France what the architecture was. Then Simon and I basically wrote the first four or five episodes and then the last episode. We then dove in and did some [rewriting] to even out the tone. We generally work best together in a room because we are both quite bouncy in terms of story, we like to kick things back and forth together. At some point, the script has to be written in which case one of us starts and passes it on to the other and we over write and get in each other’s face about it! We are also very competitive so the things that Simon does better than I do, I try to do better then he does. And the things I do better than Simon, he tried to outmaneuver me in a healthy way. We try to keep each other honest in that way and always seek to improve and do something different. I can’t really say why Simon and I work so well together, but we both know how the other is feeling or thinking without having to write it down, so it’s a very instinctive collaboration.

TV DRAMA: As a writer, do you take suggestions from actors if they want to make changes to the dialogue? How did you work with the cast?
MIRREN: I watched an actress grow through the years, and I learned from the graciousness of the way she would interpret lines. For me, if you can say something without any words, do it. If you can say it in Mandarin and I understand it, go for it. There are certain lines Louis says [in the script] that he literally said in real life, [and we have to keep those, but] as long as the intent and the emotion and the story make sense, I’m fine with them.

With regard to the cast, one of the great things was that we didn’t have the money to go after big names, so we went after the best people for those roles. It was very important that we cast somebody who was Louis’s age at the time, because he was only around 26 or 27 when he was the most powerful man in the world. It’s very hard to find actors who can inhabit that. We found it in George Blagden, Alexander Vlahos, Noémie Schmidt and Elisa Lasowski. It was a daunting task for them to be in these lead roles, but they were wonderful, and they’re all like family now.

TV DRAMA: What are the story arcs of season one and two?
WOLSTENCROFT: In season one, Louis XIV makes this big decision on the death of his mother to take control of his life and to become the absolute monarch of France. He doesn’t want to go to Paris because Paris is a place of threat and conspiracy for him. He wants to start building his destiny in Versailles. He makes Versailles the center of his world [and in] ten episodes he basically takes power. So you have a power play by a young king who has to worry about his image and his brother. He wants to send his brother to war but then his brother becomes a world hero. He has to deal with these problems that he has to turn into gold. That’s the big standout for any successful leader. If you bring them a really bad problem, they can turn it into an opportunity for themselves.

In season two, the story is about the problems that happen once you get to the corner office. Louis’s plan in season one is to bring the nobles to Versailles so he can control them. Season two is about this is what happens when you bring the nobles from France to live in your house! Be careful what you wish for is effectively what season two is about!