The Last Czars, Netflix

The Last Czars is history at its most epic; an unstoppable train crash that brings together some of the most infamous names in modern history: Czar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, Rasputin and, ultimately, Lenin.

It’s also the story of the richest family in the world. The Romanovs had palaces by the dozen, a wealth of jewellery, Fabergé eggs and yachts. That was our first challenge – how would we capture the opulence and madness? The answer was unusual and exciting.

The Last Czars was ordered as a drama documentary, but Nutopia made the bold decision to hire a full drama team, including writers, and make it almost entirely scripted.

Now we just needed some locations fit for kings. In hiring Baltic Film Services as our location partner, we struck gold. Operating out of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, Baltic helped bring Russian-set epics War And Peace, Chernobyl and Catherine The Great to our screens.

When I saw the first location we’d be filming at, Rundale Palace in Latvia, my jaw dropped. “What’s this going to cost us?” I asked line producer Steffan Boje.

“Hereward,” he drawled. “You can’t stint on palaces.” Rundale Palace has an understated 138 rooms and could give Versailles a run for its money.

It was designed by renowned architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who also gave life to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, and like its Russian sibling, Rundale drips with gilt, chandeliers, ballrooms and corridors that stretch for miles. In short, it was ideal.

But as ever in television, there was a catch: Rundale is also a popular tourist attraction, and we couldn’t shut it down. And so, on day one of principal photography, we found ourselves locking down bedrooms, corridors and stairways an hour at a time, holding back a curious horde of Japanese tourists.`

They got tantalising glimpses of the birth of Anastasia, Alexandra of Hesse in full bridal wardrobe and, perhaps most extraordinary of all, Rasputin being buried in the landscaped gardens. Our next locations took us over the border to Lithuania. Verkiai Palace became the Moscow residence of Count Yusupov, the man who murdered Rasputin.

At Traku Voke, a wild stately mansion, the art department meticulously recreated Alexandra’s infamous Mauve Boudoir, including her unintentionally ironic painting of Marie Antoinette.

Rumsiskes, an open-air museum with more than 150 genuine 19th-century wooden huts, fully dressed with period furniture and utensils, became the perfect setting for Rasputin’s Siberian village.

In the heart of old Vilnius, we filmed the carriage explosion that kills Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, while the Orthodox Cathedral of The Dormition of The Theotokos provided stunning backdrops for Czar Nicholas’ coronation, although we almost ran afoul of a problem all new Czars must have faced: the crown was too small.

We had one specially made in America and it was by far the most expensive prop, but that didn’t stop me grabbing a pair of pliers to desperately bend the rim wider so it would fit our Czar Nicholas (Robert Jack).

Recreating history

There was only one location we built from scratch: the cellar of the Ipatiev house, where the Romanov family were executed by Bolshevik soldiers.

As a team, we’d watched every filmic iteration of the infamous massacre, and almost all were shot when it was still okay to place a group of children and adults in a windowless vault and fire off a barrage of blank rounds.

The danger of close-proximity wounding as well as potential damage to eardrums necessitated a studio build that could be pre-rigged with sequenced bullet strikes and gave us safer working distances. The end result was chilling and, more importantly, safe.

The final day of filming was a recreation of the infamous Yar restaurant incident where the one-man party that was Rasputin goes a step too far. We called wrap as Ben Cartwright, who plays the influential mystic, knocked over tables and exposed himself, with 70s pop classic Rasputin by Boney M playing in the background. It seemed wildly appropriate.