On October 21, 1966, an avalanche of coal waste slid down a mountain into the below town of Aberfan in Wales. The disaster took the lives of 116 children and 28 adults, nearly wiping out an entire generation of Welsh children. Eight days later, Queen Elizabeth II finally visited the small town to honor their dead and provide much-needed comfort. She would reveal in 2002 that the delay in her response emerged as the largest regret, at that time, of her reign.
So, when Netflix’s The Crown‘s timeline advanced into the late 1960s, writer Peter Morgan and director Benjamin Caron had to include the tragedy within the series’s exploration of her life and the burden of her inherited role. The episode, “Aberfan,” ranks as one of, if not the, greatest hours in The Crown‘s third season. It’s a meticulously recreated exploration of the tragedy and the political reactions to it, including the reluctance of the Queen to visit the site and a hypothesis as to why. The episode alone is responsible for six of the series’s thirteen 2020 Primetime Emmy nominations.
Included in that nomination haul is director Benjamin Caron for his brilliant and sensitive exploration of the disaster itself and of the Queen’s role in the aftermath. The hour is deeply sad but not sensationalized. Caron guides his cast with an expert hand, eliciting brilliant performances from Olivia Colman as the Queen, Jason Watkins as Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and dozens of child actors portraying the doomed children. When Caron discusses the episode here, he refers to it as “the film,” and he’s absolutely right. Even at an hour, “Aberfan” emerges as perhaps the most cinematic offering to date from Morgan’s The Crown.
His Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series gives Caron the recognition for this masterful episode he so richly deserves. It’s also a bit of an “Emmy I.O.U.” as he directed my other favorite episode of the series: Season 2’s “Beryl.”
Awards Daily: First of all, congratulations on your Emmy nomination!
Benjamin Caron: You’re very kind. Thank you very much.
AD: I rewatched “Aberfan” last night in preparation for our conversation, and it’s as great as I remember it being. It was my favorite episode of the third season which is weird to say considering the horrible subject matter, but it’s just a tremendous piece of cinematic filmmaking.
BC: Wow. Thank you.
AD: So what was it about this episode that spoke to you and grabbed your attention as a filmmaker?
BC: Well, “Aberfan” is particularly personal to me. My father’s side of the family is from South Wales, and so I understand a little bit, not completely, but I understand a little bit of the reality of life in a town like Aberfan where every window looks out onto the works, every street points up to the tip. So, this world was sort of quite familiar to me. Some of my family friends were miners, and so I knew about Aberfan from a very young age. Not many people, I would say, my age did know about it, but if you were from Wales, you certainly knew about it. So, when talking to Peter [Morgan] about season three and he mentioned that this was a subject matter that he was going to tackle, I just put my hands in the air and said I have to do this.
And then when I read the script, it was just very clear it was one of Peter’s extraordinary creations that there was both a fitting tribute to the tragedy and cutting dissection of the political environment around that time. I wanted to be that person who could put it on the screen. I say that “Aberfan” is certainly my proudest piece of work. I’m incredibly proud to be a part of and to have made that with such an amazing group of people.
AD: Given your slightly personal connection to the material and given the traumatic events that happened, what steps did you take to make sure that the proper respect was paid to the families impacted?
BC: “Aberfan” portrays one of the worst disasters in British history where over 116 children died. My aim from the beginning was absolutely to tell this story with truth and dignity. Plus, everything within The Crown has to remain truthful and authentic to these events and characters as much as possible. The Crown always wants to tell these these stories sensitively for a global audience and to start understand more clearly the sort of the measurable impact this disaster had on the community, the monarchy, and a nation as a whole. I felt a deep sense of responsibility to ensure we were respectful in our depiction of that disaster. So much so that I and the producers met with community groups within Aberfan to talk about our approach, and we held community meetings with the local residents to answer any questions and then went back after the film was made to show them and to answer any questions they had. So, we took that responsibility, as you can imagine, very seriously,
AD: Of course. One of the things that struck me as I rewatched the episode was the difficulty there must have been to center the child actors around these tragic events. How did you work with them to get to that moment of sheer terror without terrorizing them?
BC: That’s a really good question. The first thing we had to get right was the landscape and in terms of where this school was. Aberfan was utterly dominated by the mine and the smells and the sand and enthralled to the workings of this of pit. So, in terms of working with the children, actually, I hired a child acting coach who had been working with fellow executive producer and the previous director, Stephen Daldry, to spend the whole day working with those children in that classroom to help them set a very normal school day. We had a psychologist on set to explain to the children what we were making and why we were making it and what they were being asked to do. But for the most part, we were trying to create a very normal environment, a very familiar environment, set in a classroom and to make sure that felt as authentic as possible because that was what was so heartbreaking. Had those children been 20 minutes later, they would not have been in that classroom. It was their last day before they broke up for for holidays. It was tragic on so many levels.
My job was, yes, to make that as authentic as possible, and I don’t know whether you noticed, but another unusual choice was a decision I made quite early on in prep was to try and refrain from showing the children’s faces. I don’t know whether that was an instinctive thing, but I sort of like to think it was maybe done out of respect to the families of Aberfan and a feeling that I definitely didn’t want to sensationalize the story. I was also interested in letting the viewer internalize their own projections of these children. I think it’s a resulting episode that feels sort of uncompromising and powerful and unsensationalistic in its approach, but I don’t know. You’d have to tell me whether it works.
AD: I think it absolutely does work. It doesn’t feel overly sensationalized. It doesn’t have that sort of, what I would argue, is more of an American approach to tragic material, where you’d have people running around screaming with dramatic music gushing. “Aberfan” is not over the top. It’s shocking and terrifying in its simplicity. I think that’s where the power comes.
BC: Thank you for saying that. It’s very kind. I mean, in terms of the impact itself, all of that was done with VFX. So those children never actually had to, you know, be part of that themselves, and there are games you can play to get some of the close-up reactions. But it was hard. As a filmmaker, I would say it was emotional every single day, not just to myself but obviously most of the crew found every day making that film incredibly emotional.
AD: So, conversely, talk to me about working with Olivia [Colman] on keeping all of those emotions in and keeping that restrained Queen Elizabeth II reaction.
BC: Well, I’m so proud of all of the cast in “Aberfan.” Of course, across the season as well, but particularly in “Aberfan.” I think the performances are exemplary, and Olivia’s Queen disassembled before our eyes. Olivia naturally – it’s just part of who she is – had a very strong emotional response to the script. Starting with the first read through, she was in tears the whole way through, and so we had to find imaginative ways to mitigate her real upset in order to show the Queen’s inherent restraints. I’ve talked about this before. There were many, many methods we use. These are sort of things that you don’t really want people to know because ultimately the finished film is what really matters. I came up with the idea of putting an ear device in and playing the shipping forecast so that she could just try and stay measured through the scene. That just shows how raw Olivia is and one of the many challenges that we had to put this film together.
AD: I’d like to talk about two specific sequences with regards to using sound. One is Prime Minister Wilson’s first press conference with the searching crew in Aberfan. The audience was hidden, and when he approaches, there’s no sound except for the flashbulbs. What were you trying to convey through that shielded audience and those gunshot-sounding flashbulbs?
BC: Well, sound was a big part of the character of this film. Very early on, I made a decision to sort of keep a lean and economic approach to the editing and also the sound that was used throughout. We divided the film by timestamps emphasizing the days that had lapsed between the disater and the Queen’s visit to Aberfan. We refrained from using music as a means to prompt feeling and instead utilized sound effects – mechanical, environmental – to create mood and tone.
That example you just said is one of those. That scene you’re describing, there was no electricity at the time, so that’s a very, very dark, somber scene. I think there’s only one battery powered light in there, and as you say, we see Wilson walking through the crowd of helpers exhausted. He gets these shocks [from the flashbulbs] — almost like his nervous system — as he comes across and then has to face the press. What do you say in that situation? So that was one example. I held back music. I think there’s only one real cue in the entire film, and that’s when composer Martin Phipps’s extraordinary horn melodies are finally utilized. That’s the moment the Queen finally visits the disaster site at Aberfan. I think that effect is just unbelievably remarkable. I really like the effect of the sound effects of sort of cutting through time. I found that to be really very powerful.
AD: The second scene is very similar to the press conference scene. It is the scene where Elizabeth comes out of the house where she’s met with family members of those who had relatives and children who had died. She’s stepping from the house. She’s wiping the quote unquote tear from her eye. She also has those flash bulbs. She is also surrounded by people whose faces also remain obscurred. Is that juxtaposition intentional? Were you trying to contrast those two reactions to those two political figures?
BC: You could read into that. For me, that moment was more of her being accepted by the people of Aberfan. She had finally arrived. She had gone inside. She had met some of the survivors and parents who had lost children inside, and then as she comes out, she’s sort of engulfed and accepted by the local community. That, for me, was meant to be a moment of acceptance and relief. It may not have been shown in her being too emotive, but by her just being there was something that gave that community the thing that they were looking for.
AD: Well, maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it does make for an interesting juxtaposition when you think about the fact that Wilson was there early on, trying to help. She took days to visit the site and provide comfort. So, you’ve set up this similar sequence where the people respond well to her, but those same people are very angry at and reject Wilson. That’s a really compelling way to establish reactions to the two different leaders.
BC: It was one of her biggest regrets, delaying. I think it was a line by Martin Charteris in his diary that said that one of the biggest regrets was delaying the visit. It’s such a fascinating question. Why did that happen? What they needed was a physical presence to validate that morning, to a certain extent. Yes, I think that it’s two people in positions of power, and how they responded to this event. I think that’s what Peter is so brilliant at getting underneath.
AD: Absolutely. It’s a mistake that she makes again, 30 years later, with the death of Princess Diana and the delayed response to that tragedy.
BC: Yeah, there are similarities, for sure.
AD: I’d like to talk about the closing sequence. It’s this long tracking shot approaching the Queen’s back and then coming around to see her face. Finally she has a single tear. Are we meant to think that this is her actually experiencing emotion from the day or from the events? Or is this her working out whether or not she could still cry?
BC: That’s very good question. And I think one that everyone has a very different feeling about.
AD: What’s your feeling?
BC: Well, my feeling doesn’t want to undermine other people’s ideas. I think that ending is and should be open to interpretation. I will say that, on the day when we filmed that, we weren’t sure how we felt through the film. There were versions where Olivia didn’t cry, or there were more tears. We as filmmakers didn’t really know where the ending was going to land. So by making the film, that’s the sort of final choice that we went with. You know, there was even a version early on when we didn’t come around to the front of her. We just stayed on the back and left it even more open for interpretation. So, yeah, I think I’ll leave that for the viewer.
AD: It’s a perfect way to end the episode. It’s very challenging, and I really loved it. I love the entire episode.
BC: Did you see the moment after that, the image after the credits? There’s a shot in the credits at the end where we’re in the schoolyard, and we see the children playing below us. You see these long, long shadows. It’s quite a haunting scene. I shot it actually to go at the beginning of the scene, and then we decided that overhead shots didn’t really fit into the visual literacy of the film itself. It was too showy. But watching that back, I remember talking to the editor about how actually haunting that was because you could see his children playing, and the shadows were almost as little versions of where they would have been had they grown up. I found that to be my tribute to some of the children who lost their lives. I encourage you to have a look at it. It’s a very powerful cinematic moment, which I’m very proud of.
AD: I will go back because I don’t remember it from the screener I had. I will go back and watch it.
BC: Thank you, and it’s been really pleasant talking to you, sir. Thank you very much. It’s been a while since I’ve been in “Aberfan” world. We’re just about finishing season four, so it’s nice to go back and revisit. Thank you.
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