‘The Crown’ Production Designer Martin Childs On Recreating a Tragic Moment in Russian History for ‘Ipatiev House’

One of the great pleasures of Netflix’s The Crown occurs when the traditional narrative (Elizabeth/Phillip or Charles/Diana drama) is interrupted by an unexpected sidestep into European history. I’m thinking about Season One’s fog episode or Season Two’s JFK and Jackie visit. Season Three’s tragic exploration of the Aberfan mining disaster will always remain an unforgettable and uncharacteristically emotional highlight of the series.

The same experience continues into Season Five with “Ipatiev House,” another unexpected look at the British monarchy and its impact on the broader socio-political climate. In this episode, were presented with an unanticipated connection between King George V and Queen Mary and the execution of the Romanov family by Bolsheviks in 1917. In the modern era, Queen Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton) engages with Russian president Boris Yeltsin (Anatoliy Kotenyov) as she becomes the first and only reigning British monarch to make a state visit to Russia.

“Ipatiev House” is a fascinating episode that prominently invites viewers into multiple Russian and British eras. To recreate those worlds authentically, production designer Martin Childs recreated Ipatiev House and the aftermath of the shocking assassinations in a faithful and respectful manner. He also needed to de-age Buckingham Palace to reflect the King George V flashback sequences that orient viewers within the story.

It remains a marvel that Childs was able to accomplish this stunning work without overly relying on CGI facades and without traveling to Russia itself.

Awards Daily: The Crown obviously deals in history, but this episode, “Ipatiev House,” recreates a particularly brutal and shocking moment of world history in the assassination of the Romanov family. Was there apprehension when you approached this episode in terms of getting the look and feel exactly right given the tragedy depicted within?

Martin Childs: As with the tragedy of Aberfan in Season Three of The Crown, we gave respectful consideration to the portrayal of the brutal assassination of the Romanov family. The big difference was that we had just a few moments to dramatise the family’s fate. Research only shows us a forensic record of the aftermath while it was necessary for us to show the family’s journey from their bedrooms, through corridors, down the staircases, through unrecorded sections of the basement all the way to the part familiar from photographs. We therefore took the architectural detail from the research – columns, vaulted ceiling (to give a sense of a space that holds up the entire building), distinctive windows high in the arches – and expanded what was recorded to create a journey that leads to its fateful conclusion. Given the content of the scene we made the decision to build the basement using a combination of a continuation of the chosen location with a replica of the architecture of the real Ipatiev House. Careful thought was given to telling the story to both an audience who knows the family’s fate and an audience who, like the family themselves, are unaware of what’s about to happen until it does.

Awards Daily: “Ipatiev House” pushes the story back initially to 1917. How did you take the main story line version of Buckingham Palace back to the early 1900s? Were there that many changes to the set across the eras?

Martin Childs: With each odd-numbered season we have introduced new actors playing the Royal family and have shown them in familiar sets and locations. Thus our breakfast room in the Buckingham Palace private apartments has been used by Claire, Olivia and Imelda. It felt right for the queen of a hundred years ago to be seen in the same room, showing that the Royal Family as an institution remains constant while the world around it moves a little faster. This, together with our Buckingham Palace exterior set and our main staircase location, provided a familiar journey to which we could add a century-ago twist or two: the Edwardian fashion for house-plants, a somewhat gloomier colour palate, a blackened Buckingham Palace exterior that would echo a more Victorian/Edwardian painting style. We also created a bomb-cratered London street and a century-ago Downing Street, familiar but sufficiently unfamiliar to know we’re at the other end of the twentieth century.

Awards Daily: Where did you find the locale for the exteriors/interiors of Ipatiev House?

Martin Childs: I had distant memories of a house in North Yorkshire where I had filmed before, at the same time as Peter Gray, our location scout, showed me the exact same house, Duncombe Park. It was a shared eureka moment. There’s something about its coal-darkened exterior and its profile against the sky that gave it a look never before seen in The Crown, and both chimed well with the photographs of Ipatiev House. The owner welcomed us and allowed us to build more elements for the approach of the truck, giving us opportunities to get even closer to the real building.

Awards Daily: The room in which the episode depicts the massacre of the Romanov family looks remarkably different from that depicted in photos. Can you talk about why that set was chosen and why those differences?

Martin Childs: Architecture, lighting, action, atmosphere, and mood were created to give an emotional sense of truth rather than a replication of the forensic aftermath stills, these having clearly been lit to provide a record of the tragedy, seldom straying from the wall where the assassination took place. Our aim was to create a reconstruction of the moment rather than its aftermath, using information plus informed imagination. The whole of the basement (together with the last leg of the staircase) was built in its entirety at Elstree Studios. The scene contained the kind of action that would have been impossible to achieve on location without irreparable damage. From a purely practical viewpoint, with a ground-up build we were able to accommodate a film crew, all of the action, an appropriate atmosphere and achieve several takes with prefabricated wall replacement.

Awards Daily: When Queen Elizabeth travels to Russia, was location shooting involved? How did you replicate Russia of that era?

Martin Childs: We never travelled further than Yorkshire, re-dressing Bradford to create the back streets of Moscow and creating the wide boulevards on an airfield west of London with the help of CGI. For the Kremlin interiors we went to a house called Wentworth Woodhouse and used two vast empty rooms as a blank canvas for Elizabeth and Philip’s bedroom and for the banquet scene that precedes it. It was essential to show another kind of wealth, the kind boasted about in the earlier scene where Russia comes to Buckingham Palace, to see that the boast wasn’t idle. For the banquet scene all we had on location were the walls and the floor so we used the geometry of the floor tiles to form the layout of the tables. For the bedroom scene it was key for Elizabeth and Philip to be like fish out of water, somewhere they could have the kind of conversation that’s less likely to take place on home turf. Even these two are overwhelmed by decor such as this.

It is creatively satisfying to look back and know that for this entire episode we never left England.

All sketches provided by Martin Childs via Netflix.