Cool. Guys, congratulations on the film.
Thank you. I really, really enjoyed it.
I wondered for you guys as as writers, filmmakers, etc.,
what the challenges way of bringing the theater into the cinema?
What was kind of the unique challenges and
and such to to bring it to the big screen.
How long have you got?
5 minutes.
And there's a lot of different challenges at different points.
And, you know, right at the very beginning,
we're looking at a stage show that Dennis and Tim Minchin and I worked on,
which is very cartoony.
And it's got
and is also very theatrical in the sense, like you talk to the audience,
it's immersive.
The performers go in and out and so in a sense, it's
a deliberate attempt that show to do everything that theater can do.
You know, that theater does best.
And so none of that applies on film.
So interacting with the audience, obviously, you know, you've got to go,
but also this idea of how cutting cartoony it should be.
You've got to fill in the world in a funny way, unless you're doing an animation
or something really sort of heightened.
You've got to fill in the rest of the world.
So we made a decision quite early on that what we were going to go for is
magic realism rather than anything over, you know, super heightened.
And so it was a world in which would have a pile of reality in it,
but also have one foot off the ground.
So when people started singing and dancing, it wouldn't be a huge leap.
And in certain areas of the storytelling would be exaggerated
with color or, you know, design, in other words.
So calibrating how to pitch the story
and to keep enough reality to make it feel exceptional when magic happens,
and to make sure that it's not to impossible, that people sing and dance,
stuff like that.
So that was a big early decision and
and I suppose
in all of that and all of the decisions that came afterwards,
we found that having
quite a few years open up between just doing the stage show
and tackling the film was really helpful because the things we took for granted
about the stage show, things we were absolutely obsessed about or,
you know, in love with or immersed
in, they kind of went further and further away from us each year.
And so we become more and more possible to see the story, same story,
similar almost the same story told in a completely different form.
What you said.
Yeah, I think I think that's all I think that's all true.
I mean, there's a whole bunch
of very practical things like, you know, suddenly needs a very definite,
definitive time period, which doesn't need us on stage.
And there's a whole bunch of stuff on stage.
You don't need to look down.
You suddenly got to lock it down on film.
I mean, also, it was just the challenge of doing your act because we'd done it
like we did the stage play, you know?
I mean, so is, is actually difficult doing your own thing, you know?
And again, like Matthew said, that time really helped
because it gave us distance to look at it and go, well,
you know,
to not be sort of sacred about stuff and not hope, you know, because it's quite
different from the from the
is different and the same in this, you know.
So we were we were free to sort of like
rip it up and reinvent them, but that's kind of hard.
Yeah.
Also, you know, I thought it was
it was those hard things, tricky things to figure out over time.
But the main experience of adapting it was enjoyable
because this idea that you can just let your imagination go
and say, let's go for a balloon, let's be in airplanes.
What we've got on board, there's a storm.
You know, you can introduce all of these.
The weather is a great thing to play with.
You can't really use on stage and all these elements.
So I found it very exciting being able to like free associate
and just imagine a story in a new three dimensional world.
Yeah.
Did it help in terms of casting them
because obviously said it was it was the same but different.
Having a kind of fresh cast for you guys kind of made a guess,
gave a fresh impetus.
Anyway, I guess that helped as well.
Yeah, definitely.
You know, on stage
we have four Matildas at any one time and now six months later we have another four.
And to find this one Matilda and for it all be about this one performance.
You know, that was a that was a big responsibility
an interesting thing to do but be able to get the camera close to the performances.
Uh, not only Alisha Weir's Matilda, but all the characters, you know, be able to get right in there
close does a different thing emotionally to the story completely.
And that's a whole layer of vocabulary that wasn't available before.
Before, and for the first time having a woman playing Trunchbull
because with Emma Thompson, something that we haven't done on stage,
mainly because we need to physically
do those kind of stunts with spinning the kid around
and we need to have somebody very, very tall and
an imposing and
on film.
Of course, you can do a lot with a camera and do a lot of trickery.
And and we were able to make the character appear bigger than she was.
So an opportunity to have a woman play that part.
And Emma, you know, really eats it up.
She just grabbed hold of that that role.
And that was an exciting thing to do.
So yeah,
lots of new little things to explore in the performances.
Yeah, I guess you as writers as well for you as a writer, should I say
the kind of intricacies of the character is slightly different given it's
when you have Emma
and you have Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough and Lashana Lynch
that little there's little bits in there that you can maybe play around
with a little bit. Yeah, a little bit.
I mean, I think you sort of like a lot of the time
they've come on board a lot of the writing is already not the writing
hasn't been done, but it has been, you know, you've drafted it quite a bit.
But once they do, once you start, once you know, it's, say, Stephen Graham,
you can't help but sort of change your, you know, little things change within it
because you just sort of see all these opportunities.
Just suddenly these people that you just think of, you really admire
and you think are brilliant performers and you just think,
oh yeah, that'll really work because they start getting read.
You know, some of them are doing the Trunchbull suddenly, you know, it's
slightly different from the way it's sort of seen as before.
There's a real kind of always been kind of a hopeful optimism,
kind of entrenched
in Matilda and some of Roald Dahl's work.
It feels like the right time to do something like this.
Given the state of the world at the minute, do you feel like it's
the timing feels right, particularly if you're going to have a cinema release
in the UK as well?
This feels like the right thing at the right time for people to get lost in. Um.
Well, it's nice to be working on something.
It's so uplifting and joyful for sure, but also at the same time
it doesn't feel trivial
because it feels like it's got some substantial messages in it as well.
So that's a lovely combination that I really feel when I am.
The last film under it was called Pride and when I first met the Stephen Beresford , the writer of Pride, our very first meeting, I said to him,
You know, the older I get, the less I see the point of tragedy.
And and we saw bonded over that.
And, you know, there's some wonderful tragedy
and there is a purpose for tragedy.
But I think it is very hard to beat
uplifting comedy when you've when it's
got a substantial message, when it's not just trivial.
So I'm really pleased.
I think it is a good a good time for a story.
And I think I think if there is anything in it, it's not sort of, uh,
it's not,
you know, it's not sort of
trying to bash a particular drum in fighting a particular crime, you know?
I mean, it's very uncynical, you know?
I mean, I can I think that's
you seeking us down to Matthew because he's he's a very uncynical person.
But it's not like it's not like we've thought
while this is what's going on in the world,
if we slip that in, you know, then then we can, you know, bang a few extra bucks.
You know, it's its own story.
It's just its own story.
And if it speaks to bigger things, it speaks to bigger things
because it's talking about people and, you know, all it's fundamentally
about those sort of power relationships between people, you know?
Fantastic.
Well, guys, I wish you the best with the film for you.
Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Very nice talking to you.
Good to see you as well as.