Hollywood Breakthrough: Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park)

The Wrap has a feature called "Hollywood Breakthrough," where people who work in the entertainment industry describe how they got their big break. At present, there are five featured screenwriters, perfect for a five-part series, one per day this week.

Let's kick off the series with Julia Fellowes, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for the movie Gosford Park (2001). Here is an excerpt:

I started writing film scripts, and one of them was for Bob Balaban, the actor-producer --an adaptation of a novel by Trollope called “The Eustace Diamonds.” It didn’t get made; in fact, they’re trying to get it going now, but it was that script that made Bob think of me when he was trying to set up “Gosford Park” with Robert Altman.

They wanted to do a country-house murder mystery, and they couldn’t find a writer, thank God, and Balaban rang me and asked, “Would I like to write a film for Robert Altman.” I went out and I gave myself kind of an Altman festival. Over three days I watched six or seven of his films and I realized it would probably be a multi-character, multi-arc thing.

So then I was asked to have a conversation and to outline characters and things, which I did, and interestingly quite a lot of those characters got into the movie. And then I was asked to write a first draft, and all the way through that period, although I was very pleased to be asked and I worked very hard, I never thought it would really happen. It just seemed too unlikely that I was going on with my life and suddenly I was asked to write a film script for an internationally known director, you know?

Fellowes sums up the experience this way:

The lesson of this, of course, is when you do have a possible door opening, you’ve got to act as if it’s going to happen, because if it does happen and you miss out, you have to kill yourself.

To read more, go here.