How ‘The Crown’ Season 5 Put Claire Foy in Historical Footage
The Crown Season 5 got to see Claire Foy again in the season premiere. The young Queen Elizabeth appears at the christening of the Royal Yacht Britannia, an actual historic event. The Crown put Foy into newsreel footage of the christening and director Jessica Hobbs explains how they did it.
Hobbs was a guest on The Crown: The Official Podcast that premiered Nov. 9. She explained why they scrapped plans to restage the christening and figured out how to put Foy in the original footage.
Recreating the christening was too expensive even for ‘The Crown’
Hobbs revealed that creator Peter Morgan originally wrote the beginning of The Crown Season 5 intending to just restage the christening. For budget and Foy’s availability, that proved unfeasible.
“Initially that was written with Claire not as newsreel,” Hobbs said on The Crown podcast. “Peter always knew he wanted it. He took it out, put it back in again. It was going to be one of the most expensive sequences we’d ever filmed on The Crown. It was also very challenging. Claire was in Canada. We were trying to find a date that would work. It kept moving out and out and out. I started to feel anxious about are we ever going to get this? Do we need to think about another beginning?”
‘The Crown’ Season 5 figured out bow to put Claire Foy into history instead
Hobbs worked with editor Paulo Pandolpho to figure out if there was a way to put Foy into history rather than rebuild history around her. First, they make a cut of the Crown Season 5 premiere episode with the historical footage included .
“I said, ‘Can we just try cutting it in as a placeholder and just see whether we feel it’s worth continuing down this road?’” Hobbs said. “And it was electrifying. Then I said, ‘Do you think we can do kind of a Zelig idea with Claire in that newsreel footage? Before we got Peter in there, I thought I’ve got to know we can do this. We brought the visual effects department in, the sound guys in, the whole post team. They just immediately went, ‘We can completely do this. We can drop her in.’”
The movie Zelig Hobbs reference was one in which Woody Allen edited himself into historical footage. Technology is much more sophisticated by the time of The Crown Season 5.
“The art department were like, ‘I can build this section of where she was,’” Hobbs said. “So we started to create this storyboarded idea of exactly how we could slot her into the existing footage. So we’d have the 30,000 strong crowd. We cast the faces to match the faces that we knew existed.”
They also got permission from the owners of the footage
Hobbs also made sure the owners of the newsreel would sign off on The Crown Season 5 experiment.
“We’ve got to find out if Pathe and Movietone are going to give us [permission],” Hobbs said. “We’re going to start to muck around with their footage. Are they going to be open to that? And they came back and they were brilliant. They said, ‘You can do whatever you like.’ I was like, ‘Okay, because we’re now going to drop a different queen into the original one.’”
