Five Fun Facts About Wendy
The classic story of Peter Pan has been wildly reimagined by Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin into a ragtag epic about the deadly peril of growing up. Shifting the traditional narrative from Peter’s point of view to Wendy’s, someone who experienced Neverland but had to leave it behind, Zeitlin investigates the true nature of aging and the erosion of the spirit that happens only when joy, wonder and hope are lost.
We’re celebrating the film’s upcoming March release by delivering a few fun facts, which we’ve pulled from its meaty press kit!
CAUTION: There are spoilers below; read on at your own risk!
Zeitlin had a lot of difficulty finding the right kid to play Peter Pan, due in part to children’s imaginations becoming dominated by technology.
After an exhaustive search of the island of Montserrat, a mountainous Caribbean island in the West Indies, looking for the right Peter, Zeitlin and his team were on the verge of giving up and returning to the States to re-think the role. “It was honestly incredibly difficult to find children that still had a passion for playing outside. We consistently found that kids’ imaginations where dominated by technology and whatever they were experiencing on their phones,” Zeitlin said. “Then one night we were talking over our plight with Anderson T. Andrew (a local filmmaker and production manager on the film), and he said, ‘You’re gonna find him.’ The next day he brought Zeitlin and crew to the Nyahbinghi Rastafari compound situated in the forest off a dirt road in the neighboring island of Antigua. “As we drove into the camp, we look out at a group of children charging barefoot through the forest, flying through the upper branches of the trees, it was unlike anything we’d seen.”
“The last kid we auditioned was younger than anyone we’d considered for the role” says Zeitlin. “He has this sparkle of mischief in his eyes that was as dangerous as it was joyful. As he was giving us a tour of his best hiding spots around the compound, I got that crazy feeling that I’d just met Peter Pan. Still, given his age I thought there was no way he could actually play the part. We decided to try an acting game with all the kids. Out of nowhere Yash dropped into character and improvised a scene with a poise and intensity it takes people years to learn. My heart just started pounding out of my chest. It was several months before we made the decision but right there, I knew, it’s him. We’re making a movie.”
The most daunting feat of the 66-day Wendy shoot was navigating volatile, inaccessible settings for the children’s adventure through Neverland.
“We needed locations and landscapes that were untouched, with no evidence of human habitation,” Zeitlin said. “We didn’t want to ‘build’ Neverland. It had to exist. Our characters’ playgrounds are trees, oceans, rocks, and ruins. They sleep wherever they end up each night. One game turns into the next and they never stop long enough to actually ‘build’ something permanent.”
On identifying the right place to form the basis of Neverland, Zeitlin says, “It had to start with a volcano.” This central story point led him to Montserrat, the most recently active volcanic island in the West Indies. “As mind-shattering as buried cities and the mountain itself are, I was as struck by the diversity of other landscapes there—lush rainforests, towering cliffs, surreal rock formations in the ocean.”
Zeitlin was also looking for a place that would become a true collaborator on the project. “I always want the culture of my film set to feel like more of a community art project than a regimented film production. There was a genuine enthusiasm on the island about the idea of a movie happening. It had never been done before and I quickly found an incredibly talented community of people who were excited to join our team in dreaming up ways to execute something unprecedented.”
The script was revised to incorporate each new discovery as the team explored mountainous landscapes surrounding the island’s 5000-person population. “Because nothing we were looking at could be synthetic, we had to change the script to adapt to what was there. In many ways it felt like Montserrat was writing our story and as we chased after it with a pen and paper.”
Many of the film’s locations were challenging to access even by expert hikers, never mind with a full-scale film crew. Staircases were built into cliff faces, roads were created through the volcanic wasteland, equipment (and lunch) arrived by zipline into deep valleys, and a fifty-foot steel ship was sunk and then raised off the coast of Antigua where the film’s water locations were shot.
“Every element you see on-screen is a real location,” producer Paul Mezey said. “When you see a pirate ship on the open ocean, we literally had a heavy piece of steel on the open ocean. Kids are jumping off of it and swimming through the actual hull of the ship. If you see a volcano, it’s because we literally shot at the base of an active volcano. There’s an awesomeness to those moments.”
Producer Dan Janvey added: “The movie feels like a true adventure. We worked really hard to create safe shooting conditions, unusual and wild habitats. And that’s quite unusual in movies, especially in children’s movies; to feel extreme adventure. Normally the notion of adventure can be kind of glib or cute.”
The score, by Dan Romer & Benh Zeitlin, is based in lullaby and sea shanties, and incorporates some unusual instruments.
Zeitlin adds, “We also looked to songs that our parents sang to us, particularly my mom sang me to sleep every night when I was a kid and there were these melodies that were very simple. They're Irish and they feel very timeless. When you hear it, you feel like you've heard it before. They are drawn from a very traditional melodic structure and chords but had to both surprise you and also feel like it was something that has always existed.”
Romer says he listened to lullabies around the world but was also really drawn to sea shanties: “We were drawing emotionally from sea shanties. They feel a little less American…the main melody is sort of in that sea shanty vein, melodically and harmonically. The rest of the music was meant to stand along with that, that would be our centerpiece and everything else would feel in the same vein. We wanted it to feel like any part of any theme could pop up in any of the others, they are all related in some shape or form.”
Zeitlin and Romer wrote a lot of material that wasn’t perfect musically, to express the chaos of Neverland. “There's an element to the score that's trying to express not necessarily what's literally happening, but the way that Wendy experiences what's happening. She has this imagination that's very cinematic. So, we wanted to make the score kind of clunky and organic to also feel really grand in a childish way. A way that feels like how a kid might imagine their own theme music playing, when they're imagining something.”
To help create that unique sound, Romer suggested using an unusual instrument: “We used wine glasses throughout the whole score. That’s one of our central instruments. I met this guy Johnny at a concert we both played at and showed Benh a video of him playing and he was really excited to do it. We flew this wine glass player down to the studio and recorded the score. You can hit the wine glasses to make them sound like bells, or you can stroke them with your finger to make them sound like a sustained organ.“
The design for “The Mother” was made up of mostly practical effects, which were seamlessly blended with the aid of VFX.
Benh and Eliza Zeilin worked together on “The Mother” with a team of miniature-makers led by Jason Hamer (Ghostbusters), and VFX specialists led by Jasper Kidd to create a miniature of the creature to shoot in a tank, and a full-scale version for interactions with the actors.
Says Eliza, “The Mother character was initially conceived as the first creature on earth, the origin of life, a benevolent beast made of sweetness and light hidden deep in the heart of the sea. I was adamant about creating a full-scale puppet, because my process is always guided by the conviction that there is no substitute for the real thing. I wanted the kids to be able to genuinely interact with her. I wanted the audience to be able to believe in the Mother, and I hoped to create something so wondrous and beautiful, you would almost believe that you, too, could somehow remain young forever.”
After working for some time on a metal framework, The Zeitlins realized the beauty and majesty of the creature had to do with every part of her moving all the time. She needed to be organic and fluid, so they began working on a softer face that had to be underwater in order to take its shape, almost like a blob fish.
The lighting and “The Mother’s” blood were shot in real life underwater. They used a pyrotechnics group called Coatwolf in Ventura, California to burn a substance called thermite underwater. Zeitlin shot the burning iron as it descends through the water in super slow-motion and then used those glowing rocks to show “The Mother’s” blood, and the glowing laughs she collects from all the children.
The final result is a combination of the miniature made by Jason Hamer, and the full-scale face made by Eliza Zeitlin’s team on the film. Break / Enter and Jasper Kidd brought those elements together, created the environments around her in the water, and reworked a lot of the underwater lighting concepts they designed for the miniature and face.
Costume Designer Stacy Jansen tried to stay as far away from previous Peter Pan wardrobes and favored comfortability above all else.
“In creating the kids’ wardrobe, we didn’t take inspiration from any previous Peter Pan stories,” Jansen said. “In fact, we tried to stay as far away from them as possible. There are a couple references later in the film: for example, one of the Lost Boys wears a bear costume, which alludes to the cartoon version of Peter Pan. But overall, for the Neverland costumes, we paid more attention to what the kids were most comfortable in and what they acted the best in.
We were working in difficult conditions and very high temperatures. Many days were wet and muddy. The kids wore loose layers of clothing; stuff that could slip on and off and things that they felt comfortable running around in. Creating new costumes with few resources, doing laundry in a cave in the middle of the day because we needed a fresh costume, changing the children out of clothing multiple times a day to maintain continuity or if they got wet—there was a big learning curve for the kids and we all learned together. For me, some of our greatest challenges were also our greatest joys.”
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!