Title: The Family of Pan
Author: Mark Salisbury
Publication: Empire
Issue: October 2004
IT’S A WARM AUGUST EVENING IN 2002 TOWARD THE END of the Finding Neverland shoot, and Johnny Depp, as playwright J.M. Barrie and Dustin Hoffman, who plays his loyal theatrical producer Charles Frohman, are resplendent in their first-night finery of white tie and tails. They’ve spent the past few hours at the ornate, 19th-century Richmond Theatre in southwest London filming two scenes: one that takes place early in the movie, in which Frohman consoles Barrie after a disastrous opening night, and the other, late in the story, in which Barrie tries to reassure Frohman that tonight’s performance—the world premiere of Peter Pan—will be a sell-out. As director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) readies another take, Depp fires up hand-rolled cigarette and swaps jokes with Hoffman (who, having starred in Hook, is no stranger to the world of Neverland). Two of the best actors of their respective generations, they make a fine double act, united by a mutual respect. “The two of them have this great balance, how they play off one another,” says Forster. “They have the same quality, this quality of being a child.”
That’s a compliment Peter Pan himself would be the first to appreciate. Written a century ago, Barrie’s play about the boy who won’t grow up remains a seminal work of children’s literature, its characters—Peter, Wendy, Tinkerbell, Captain Hook—and defining themes as fresh and pertinent today as they were back then. “We all don’t want to grow up,” says Forster. “Once we lose the child within us, we lose all our creativity.”
FINDING NEVERLAND, ADAPTED FROM ALLAN KNEE’S PLAY THE Man Who Was Peter Pan and scheduled for release November 12, takes a novel approach to Barrie’s most famous creation: how he came to be. “It’s about transformation of imagination,” says Forster. “How people get inspired, how they form ideas, and how they turn them into something.”
Loosely based on real events, the film follows Barrie, a Scottish play -wright living in London and emotionally detached from his wife (played by Radha Mitchell), as he finds the inspiration for Pan in his friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family: widow Sylvia (Kate Winslet) and her four fatherless young sons, George, Michael, Jack, and, in particular, Peter (Freddie Highmore). Together they help him unlock his imagination and the door to Neverland, and Forster takes us into that creative process by integrating the emotional reality of Barrie’s life with the fantasyland of his dream state. Thus, Barrie dancing with his dog in a city park becomes Barrie as a circus ringmaster, two-stepping with a bear under the big top. During his games with the children, he adopts the guise of an Indian or a pre-Jack Sparrow pirate, and we see the entire world he’s created in his head. “It was a ball,” says Depp of shooting the fantasy sequences. “It’s moments like that where it’s really a strange job for a grown man.” The story, he adds, “had a purity; the emotion wasn’t fake, it wasn’t saccharine.”
The German-born and Swiss-raised Forster, who’s tall with a soft voice and a kind, gentle manner, has swiftly become known as an actors’ director. (“Subtlety is Marc’s middle name,” says Winslet, who played Wendy onstage when she was 15.) He’d fallen in love with Finding Neverland before making Monster’s Ball, but back then, with only the DV feature Everything Put Together to his credit, he couldn’t even get a meeting. After Monster’s Ball and Halle Berry’s Oscar win, Forster found that Neverland still needed a director. Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein was concerned that Forster would make the story too dark—the director’s previous two films had dealt with death and grief—but Forster told him, “I have another side in me as well. I understand death because my brother and father passed away. But it should be a balance between light heartedness and comedy and a certain darkness.”
The casting of Depp, an actor especially suited to tapping into the spontaneity of youth, was inspired. “The closer he got to the kids, the more they trusted each other, [and] the more he opened up with his playfulness,” says Forster. “There’s still a part of me that’s stuck in teenage years, I guess,” says Depp. “But having kids takes you right back to certain emotions you felt growing up. It opens up a whole new arena where you start to see things like your kids do, almost for the first time in a way.”
In fact, Forster says the bond between Depp, a father of two, and the four young actors was as close in real life as it is onscreen. “He played with them, invited them into his trailer. The last day of shooting was almost tragic for the kids because they loved him so much, especially Freddie—he was so heartbroken and crying. They became a family.”
Winslet, who brought her then two-year-old daughter, Mia, to the set most days, was amazed by Depp’s flawless Scottish accent and lack of a dialect coach on set (Forster hired a Scottish first assistant director to keep an ear out for him). But she was most impressed by his mischievous side: He brought a fart machine to a dinner scene, letting it off (with Forster’s sanction) during takes to lighten the atmosphere. It was, she notes, “one of the most triumphant things I’ve ever seen an actor do. The first take was priceless. The boys didn’t want to speak, to say, ‘Someone just farted.’ Then it happened again, and they were bursting. That was the thing that made the scene work. That was totally down to Johnny.” Says Depp, “A lot of it was me going, ‘What can I do to make the kids laugh?’ You start doing stuff like that and it gives license to the kids to start doing stuff, and then it gets a little chaotic. You get assistant directors and producers going, “Okay, we’re on limited time here,’ and you’ve got kids running around screaming and laughing. I wasn’t particularly helpful in terms of reining in the chaos.”
It was just as important to Forster that Depp and Winslet take their young costars seriously as performers. So he scheduled a pivotal scene—in which Highmore’s Peter, distraught at the thought that his mother is ill, tears up a play he’s written—for the third day of filming. “I have never, and Johnny said the same thing, stood next to an actor—the child part doesn’t even come into it—during a scene and had the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” says Winslet. “Johnny and I were like, ‘The kid’s fucking great, what are we going to do?’ It did make us notch everything up a gear. He has a scary gift, that child.” Winslet later recommended Highmore to producer Richard Zanuck, a friend, for the title role in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory opposite Depp’s Willy Wonka. “Freddie’s really composed, and it’s not a false composure, it’s a Zen-like purity,” says Depp. “He’s like a little, British, skinny Buddha. I’m working with him now [on Charlie], and he’s teaching me chess. He’s really, really sharp and very funny.”
Completed in June 2003, Finding Neverland was slated for theaters last fall but sat on Miramax’s shelf for a year; there were problems with certain lines from the play Peter Pan, parts of which are performed in the film. “Originally,” says Foster, “we had a script where the lines were all approved.” But he chose to use different ones, and clearing them was easier said than done, as the rights were owned by the makers of Revolution’s live-action Peter Pan, which was being released by Universal and Sony at the end of 2003. Eventually the parties compromised, agreeing that the lines could stay if Finding Neverland was released at least 90 days after the Revolution film. At Weinstein’s request, Forster cut a version with all the lines removed, but “Harvey understood that a huge part of the movie would be missing,” says the director. “He said there’s not much we can do except postpone.”
One thing Weinstein did insist on was an Elton John song over the end credits. “He gave me everything I wanted, so if he wants the song, I’m not going to make a big stink about it,” says Forster. “It’s not about liking or disliking [the song]. It doesn’t feel right.” Adds Depp, “I think that Elton John and Bernie Taupin have written some sublime pieces of music with equally sublime lyrics over the years, but this isn’t one of those.”
BACK ON THE SET, A GAGGLK OF AROUND 25 CHILDREN, AGED 3 TO 13, have arrived outside the theater. They’re playing orphans invited by Barrie to see his latest production. They walk up the steps past Depp and Hoffman, eager expressions on their young faces. Their excitement could simply be due to the fact that they’re acting in a film. Or—if you believe—it could be the magic of a boy named Peter Pan.
