It was “E.T. the Extra-Terrestial” that turned David
Lowery into a lifelong fan of “Peter Pan,” specifically the scene in which a
mother reads the section about Tinkerbell’s possible death to her daughter
while the friendly alien hides in the closet. “You just watch E.T. listening to
that story, and it’s so emotionally resonant that it hooked me to ‘Peter Pan,’
no pun intended, more than any film version of it did early on,” Lowery said.
اضافة اعلان
For his second live-action retelling of a classic Disney
film — following “Pete’s Dragon” (2016) — Lowery imagined his own variation on
Neverland in “Peter Pan & Wendy,” with young actors Alexander Molony and
Ever Anderson in the title roles and Jude Law as the villainous Captain Hook.
Initially, however, Lowery underestimated the task.
“When I first took the job, I thought, ‘It’s Peter Pan, how
hard could it be?’ It turned out to be the hardest but most exhilarating
creative endeavor I’ve done to date,” he said. The difficulty, he thinks,
stemmed from his desire to introduce a new shade to a fairy tale while honoring
the story’s legacy.
The original J.M. Barrie novel about Peter Pan and Wendy as
well as the numerous film adaptations — Steven Spielberg’s “Hook,” P.J. Hogan’s
“Peter Pan,” Joe Wright’s “Pan” and, of course, Disney’s 1953 animated
rendering, among them — all swirled in Lowery’s mind as he reconsidered the boy
who never grows up.
Speaking during a recent video interview from Cologne,
Germany, Lowery, 42, laid out some of the less obvious influences for his
re-imagining of “Peter Pan & Wendy,” now streaming on Disney+.
Peter
Pan’s Flight at DisneylandTo remain faithful to Disney’s take on “Peter Pan,” Lowery
closely observed Peter Pan’s Flight, one of the original rides at Disneyland
based on the 1953 film. The attraction, he said, “represents the movie
distilled into a physical experience.” Although stunningly crafted, some the
animated film’s defining iconography, most notably the image of Captain Hook
straddling the jaws of the crocodile, has a greater impact on younger audiences
when they see it immortalized in three dimensions in Peter Pan’s Flight.
It’s a musical, it’s a drama, it’s a romance, it’s a horror film.
That the old-fashioned theatrical illusions the ride
employs, like the use of forced perspective for London’s skyline, could still
elicit wonder even in an age of digital effects, impressed him. Lowery rode
Peter Pan’s Flight while preparing to shoot “Peter Pan & Wendy,” and
hearing the excited reactions of children and adults alike reminded him of how
beloved the animated version is. “Seeing this film condensed into a theme park
ride, I realized the weight that these stories, as told by Disney, have in
popular culture,” he said.
‘Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom’Lowery first watched the Steven Spielberg action adventure
at the tender age of 7, and it immediately ignited his creative aspirations.
“It’s a real kitchen-sink experience,” he said. “It’s a musical, it’s a drama,
it’s a romance, it’s a horror film.” For the emotional approach to “Peter Pan
& Wendy,” Lowery drew on the eclectic tone of “Temple of Doom” as well as
its juvenile sense of humor.
When creating the pirate hideout Skull Rock, Lowery tried to
evoke the underground mines, in a cavernous space illuminated by lava, where
the film’s Temple of Doom was located. “There’s also one shot in particular of
Tiger Lily, the Lost Boys and Wendy looking down as John and Michael are about
to be executed that is a direct homage to Indy, Willie Scott and Short Round
looking down into the temple as the poor gentleman is about to be sacrificed to
Kali,” Lowery explained.
Andrei
TarkovskyLowery sought to reconceptualize how Peter Pan and
Tinkerbell are introduced to the Darling children. As he wrote the sequence in
which Tinkerbell sprinkles Wendy with pixie dust, ostensibly to float her all
the way to Neverland before she wakes up, the image of the sleeping woman
levitating in the Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s surrealist “Mirror” (1975)
came to mind. He added a screen grab of that moment to his look-book and then
replicated it with Wendy.
‘Master
and Commander: The Far Side of the World’To differentiate his movie from traditional pirate films,
including Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, Lowery looked to Peter
Weir’s 2003 high-seas saga, which informed how he thought about Captain Hook
and his crew. Instead of mere scoundrels, Lowery saw Captain Hook’s men as
pirates playacting as soldiers and Hook himself as a decaying version of
Captain Jack Aubrey (played by Russell Crowe in “Master and Commander”).
As someone who is still in the process of growing up, it’s really helpful for me, on a therapeutic level, to see a character look at the future with a sense of wonder and anticipation
“I thought, ‘What if Captain Hook at some point commandeered
a Napoleonic vessel and executed all the other soldiers on board and he and his
pirates took over this ship and he now thought of himself as an admiral on the
HMS Bounty?” Lowery said. To help the actors, the director brought in
consultants to teach them how to realistically operate a ship. One bit of
unexpected synchronicity: John DeSantis, who plays Bill Jukes in Lowery’s
fantasy, also appeared in Weir’s Oscar-winning film.
‘Death in
Venice’Since Captain Hook is horrified at the notion that he has
grown up, Lowery introduced the idea that he dyes his hair. “He wants to
maintain his youth as an affront to Peter,” Lowery explained. The inspiration
came from Luchino Visconti’s “Death in Venice”: In the Italian director’s
historical drama, an aging composer played by Dirk Bogarde colors his hair and
wears makeup to appear younger. “At the end, when he’s on the beach, the hair
dye just starts running down his face, exposing the deceit at the heart of
Bogarde’s character,” Lowery said.
Bill the
Butcher and ‘Candyman’For Captain Hook’s image, Lowery drew from multiple sources.
When he first pitched the project to the studio, he edited a hook for a hand
onto a photo of a mustachioed Daniel Day-Lewis in 19th-century attire as Bill
the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York.” “That became the Captain
Hook I saw in my mind while I was writing the script,” he recalled.
With the hook itself, Lowery wanted to stay away from the
precise, shiny devices used in other adaptations, like Spielberg’s “Hook.” The
one Jude Law would wield in “Peter Pan & Wendy” had to look like a less
refined, “pugilistic instrument of violence.” Lowery gave the prop department
an image of actor Tony Todd in Bernard Rose’s 1992 horror film “Candyman,”
about a ghostly killer with a hook for a missing hand. “We want it to be
rusty,” Lowery added, “and to feel like it was a piece of metal that he pulled
from the boat and had a blacksmith hammer into a barely usable form.”
‘Raising
Arizona’There’s a vivid montage near the end of Lowery’s movie that
shows Wendy’s adult life. She overcomes nostalgia and embraces the potential
that lies ahead. “I wanted to capture the idea that growing up could be a
beautiful thing,” he said. The montage is an allusion to a sequence, known as
“Dream of the Future,” in the offbeat Coen brother’s comedy “Raising Arizona,”
in particular the shot where the kidnapper H. I. McDunnough (played by Nicolas
Cage) imagines himself and his wife in old age with their large family gathered
around a table. “As someone who is still in the process of growing up, it’s
really helpful for me, on a therapeutic level, to see a character look at the
future with a sense of wonder and anticipation,” Lowery said.
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