ustralian director and co-writer P.J. Hogan has mounted a new, live-action movie version of J.M. Barrie's classic fantasy story Peter Pan, basing it closely on Barrie's original play and books. Unlike the more familiar and sanitized Disney animated film, this Pan feels more grown-up, with budding sensuality, realistic violence and an actual boy—American newcomer Jeremy Sumpter—in the title role. Another newcomer, English schoolgirl Rachel Hurd-Wood, plays Wendy, the spunky girl who joins Peter on his adventures in Neverland.
Hogan's movie also makes use of Barrie's original casting of the same actor in the roles of both Mr. Darling and Captain Hook, in this case, English actor Jason Isaacs of Harry Potter fame. Veteran British actress Lynne Redgrave also appears, in the newly created role of Aunt Millicent.
Hogan and the cast members took a moment to talk with Science Fiction Weekly about Peter Pan, which opens Christmas Day.
Rachel, Jeremy and Jason, you're all playing roles that are famous and nearly a century old. Can you talk about your knowledge and awareness of Peter Pan? What you thought before and what it was like playing Wendy, Peter and Captain Hook?
Isaacs: In England ... Peter Pan is always played by a middle-aged woman whose singing career is behind her. And my first experience ever in the theater was seeing this middle-aged woman play Peter Pan and wondering why Wendy found her so attractive. And then many years later, I read the book. And then when [P.J.] offered me the film, all I remembered of that was the cartoon. So my knowledge was very sketchy. And when I first read this script, I couldn't believe what a magnificent story it was. And then of course it made sense that it had been successful for 100 years, because the thing that I saw on stage when I was 11 really shouldn't have lasted half an hour.
Sumpter: When I was little, I watched the Disney version all the time. ... That was like my favorite movie other than Batman. .. I just loved the story. It's about a kid who never grows up, and he has all these things he can do. He can sword fight. He can fly. I mean, he can do anything, and it's what every kid wants.
Hurd-Wood: I really, really loved ... the Disney version when I was younger. And I was always really jealous of Wendy, because she got to fly and do all these amazing things. And I had a bed cover with the Peter Pan Disney version on it. And I just loved that. I really enjoyed the story. So when I first auditioned for this film ... I thought I'd better read the book, because I hadn't actually read it before. And so I read it and I really enjoyed it, although I found it quite hard. There were loads of long words and stuff that I didn't understand. But yeah, and then when I read the script I just couldn't believe it. I thought it was fantastic.
Jeremy, how did you get the role?
Sumpter: They had me fly to London to audition with Jason, and we were supposed to do this routine in a park for sword fighting. And instead, he takes me to an arcade and gives me Chinese food for a couple hours. And so they call up and they said, "Are you guys ready?" And Jason is like, "No, uh, give us 20 minutes." So we rush to the park for 20 minutes, and we're really going at each other and stuff. These cops run over saying, "What you guys doing?" because it looks like this guy beating on this little kid. ... [Later,] we go up, and then [P.J.] likes it. So he flies me to France to audition some Wendys and Tinker Bells. And then at the airport he draws this picture, and says, "What is this?" I go, "It's Peter Pan." He goes, "No, it's Jeremy Sumpter. You got Peter Pan."
Rachel, were you frightened playing Wendy?
Hurd-Wood: Yeah, I was, actually. But I just thought it would be really, really good fun, because I couldn't wait to learn to fly and sword fight. I thought that would be really, really good fun.
Can each of you talk about the challenges of the sword fighting and flying and coordination of all that and how you prepared for that?
Sumpter: We had a lot of difficult routines we had to learn. .. The sword fighting was especially hard for me, because I had to learn how to keep my knees straight. And me and Jason, we had to actually learn how to do routines right before the shot, because we didn't have a lot of time to rehearse these scenes before we shoot. ... They would say, "You've got 15 minutes to learn this routine." ...
Isaacs: This would be after we learned a different routine for three months.
Sumpter: Yeah, and then P.J. would cut stuff out and change the whole routine, totally different, and we had to learn it all over again. It was really difficult. But the swordmaster said that we were really good at learning it, and so it was no problem for them.
Isaacs: One of the hardest things about sword fighting is that it all comes from the feet. It's all kind of footwork, like boxing. ... [But] we were in mid-air for a lot of the time. It's kind of tricky to thrust when you don't have anything to thrust against. So that was one of the hardest things. And what I found particularly difficult is that I was looking forward to teaching him a lesson, because I had done a lot of sword fighting before, and I did it at drama school, and I was ready to be the on-set expert. And at the last second P.J. said to me, "You do understand you have to fight with your left hand, don't you?" And that completely screwed me.
Hurd-Wood: I didn't have to do as much as Jeremy and Jason, but, I'm not as strong as they are, so I found it really difficult carrying big, big, big swords. And when I was fighting one of the pirates, well, all the pirates I fought were really, really tall, and they were really, really strong, and I was scared that they would dash my brains out. So I had to be careful.
Isaacs: Can we talk about flying for a second as well? Because I still can't walk properly. ... Jeremy and I and Rachel ... spent a very, very large part of our year in mid-air, getting a giant wedgie from these harnesses. And it was very tough. I mean, it was tough for me. It was tough for the kids. They had to have breaks all the time. A lot of people were either passing out or close to passing out, because it cuts all the blood off from your legs. And at one point very near the end of the shoot, we had the guys who did all the ... wire work in The Matrix, and we had been up there for hours, and we got off, and they said, "Good job, good job." And I said, "Yeah, yeah. It's not like you didn't see plenty of this on The Matrix." And they went, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, those guys must have been up there for months." And they went, "No, no. They used to have a break every half hour." And no one had told us!
Jason, this movie observes the tradition of having the same actor playing Mr. Darling and Captain Hook. What's your interpretation as to why that tradition is?
Isaacs: I didn't get paid any more. Well, P.J. doesn't like it when I'm too literal, because the magic of the book is you never know whether Neverland is a real place or it's in Wendy's mind. Barrie is quite clear that ... if you could stay awake when you're asleep, you would find your mother tidying up your mind much like she tidies up drawers. She takes all the pretty thoughts and puts them at the top and takes all the evil dark ones and hides them at the bottom so you can't find them in the morning. And the Neverlands are a place inside children's minds, which have not just pirates and adventures, but first days at school and nasty-tasting medicine and math sums, and it's kind of this strange, surreal land.
So my interpretation is that Wendy is placed in this horrible position where she's told she has to grow up, and growing up in those days meant marriage and kids and knitting. There was no kind of hanging around with an iPod on, dancing in the mall. So she goes to this place maybe in her imagination, maybe not, and in order to help her work this out, there's someone there who's never going to grow up, who represents staying childish for the rest of her life, and someone who represents the very worst and the very best things about being grown up. So there's this repulsive creature that she's strangely attracted to who looks a little bit like her dad, oddly enough, because who do little girls think about when they think about being married? They think about being married to their dad. And that's as far as I can go, Freudian-wise, without alienating the entire audience.
Rachel, you were basically in school when you won the role of Wendy. Now, suddenly you're a star of a big studio movie. Can you talk about the adjustment of that for you? What was it like to suddenly be on this huge set and in this movie?
Hurd-Wood: At home, when I go to school, I have a completely normal life. I go to just a normal secondary school. I mean, my friends were really, really supportive of me. And a few people have been suddenly wanting to be my best friend, and they've kind of ignored me before that. ... When I came back from being in Australia [where the film shot], and there were some people I got teased by, but mainly ... everyone has really supported me. But suddenly being in Australia and .. working on a film set ... was just incredible. It was just such a weird thing. And it wasn't like I imagined. I imagined ... there would be a lot more time to relax. But if I wasn't on set, I would be in tutoring. And if I wasn't in tutoring, I would be in stunts. It was just mad all the time. So it was completely different being in school than being on a set.
Do you really not want to be an actress after this?
Hurd-Wood: Well, I'd love to do a couple more films. That would be really, really good fun. But I'm definitely set on being a marine biologist.
P.J. Hogan, Peter Davies, who was the model for Barrie's Peter Pan, died tragically. Late in life, he was so haunted by the Peter Pan story that he called the play a terrible masterpiece. What do you think he meant by it?
Hogan: I think he meant something very personal. Because it was common knowledge that J.M. Barrie did base the inspiration for Peter Pan with [Arthur] Llewelyn Davies' boys. I think that haunted him all his life. But ... I think that's what he was saying, that it's a terrible masterpiece, because it's made my life terrible. In fact, when he died, the headlines were, "Peter Pan commits suicide." So even when he died, his name was inextricably linked with Peter Pan. But .. I think it is a masterpiece. Its an amazing piece of writing, especially the play. And there is a lot to it. It's an adventure, a tragedy, a romance. And I think that it has something for everybody, and it's moving in ways that you don't expect it to be. ... Barrie always said about the play, "All children grow up. That is their tragedy. Except Peter Pan. That's his."
One of the subtexts of this whole story is someone at the edge of womanhood meeting a kind of sexuality emerging in the young lady. This film has a very charged sexual component to it. Can you talk about that element? Some members of the audience were kind of creeped out by it.
Hogan: First of all, I don't think there's anything creepy about first love. I just thought that was one of the beautiful things about it. Peter Pan's never been played by a real boy before, and Barrie always fudged the age a little bit. ... In the book and the play, he sort of just suggested how old Peter was. It was between the lines. I went back into Barrie's life, and the inspiration for Peter Pan to me was obviously the brother that Barrie had who died at the age of 12, and I thought 12 seemed to be the age for Peter. So I looked for a 12-year-old boy to play the part. And when you cast an actual boy in the part of Peter Pan and cast a 12-year-old girl in the part of Wendy, something that I think never happens on stage, because the part traditionally on stage is played by a middle-aged woman, happens. And that's you've got a boy and girl opposite each other, they're 12 years old, and they, in the case of Rachel and Jeremy, they had chemistry that had nothing to do with us. Sometimes I just felt like I was just recording what was happening between the two of them, and it's pretty interesting. And I think, for me, it was very exciting, and it was the reason to do the film again.
There's also a sexual energy between Wendy and Hook.
Hogan: It's not so much strange in that Wendy is on the verge of womanhood. ... She doesn't want to grow up. And yet there are a lot of great things about growing up. And one of them is that you do discover the mysteries of life. There are answers. She's intrigued by Captain Hook. ... And Captain Hook knows this about Wendy. He knows that Wendy wants a life of adventure and is interested in something more than the life that Aunt Millicent promises. And he plays off that. ... I think it gives a kind of strength to their relationship. ... For me it was always subtext. It was never anything overt, certainly not in the script.
You wanted to deviate from the animated version that everyone knows so well. What did you want to do going in that was different and would make this distinctive?
Hogan: I wanted to do the original Peter Pan ... the play by J.M. Barrie. And I was familiar with the Disney version, but not too familiar. So I deliberately didn't look at it. ... My source was the play, the book and Barrie's life. And I wanted to find what was relevant about Peter Pan for today's audience and for me. ... The Disney version I think is wonderful, but it isn't the play. It's very, it's very different. It comes across more as Leave It to Beaver in Neverland. So I wanted to go back to the play, because the play is thematically rich and psychologically profound.
This version is also very dark. Even the mermaids seem pretty creepy.
Hogan: In the play they're creepy. They try to kill Wendy in the play. She's on the rock and the mermaids try to pull Wendy in and drown her. Peter warns her, these are creepy, creepy things, don't trust them. ... We're so used to the little Ariel vision of mermaids. We forget where they actually came from. They're sirens. I went back to the original myth of mermaids. Mermaids are sirens. They lie on rocks. They sing songs, and they lure sailors to their death. ...
Barrie stated that in the book. And so I thought, well, these mermaids are going to give you the idea there's a dark side to Neverland. Because you can't really have an adventure without a dark side. And Peter can't be good without Hook being evil. To me it was part of the fabric of the piece. And I really wanted to be true to the original turn of the story. It's not all sweetness and light, the original book and the play. ... I think [it will] surprise people, because they're so used to the Disney version, which really did remove all the darkness.
Lynn Redgrave, do you have any thoughts?
Redgrave: I was brought up on some pretty dark [fairy tales]. Of course, the Brothers Grimm. But also some ... fairy stories that we used to have in our house that belonged to our granny. The Grey Fairy Book, The Blue Fairy Book, The Violet Fairy Book, which are full of all those dark, dark sides. ... And it's extraordinary as a child that you can ... hear these horrifying things, of ... a wolf who eats somebody and you cut open the stomach and out comes all these living people. ... We tell these stories regularly, and I think that [they fill] some need in mankind, ... because there is a dark side to all of us. ... The fairy stories allow us to go there without really going there. So [in] Peter Pan ... there are some very dark moments, there always were in the story, and certainly there are in the telling of it. But the fact that the good overcomes [evil] is a reassuring message. And we all seem to need to know that, and we still go on needing to know that. ... I think fairy stories actually are an enormous help, and it doesn't all have to be cute little Teletubbies. I think children like to see the dark side and see that they can be safe, because their worst imaginings are pretty dark. That's just human.
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Also in this issue:
The cast of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
