Paddington stars have a message for us all as beloved bear goes home

Antonio Banderas still remembers how powerful movies were to him as a child. “I remember movies that impacted me as a little kid. I even remember the warmth of my father’s hand over mine, taking me to see 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo, Peter Pan. Movies like that modelled my personality and the way I understood life. So movies for kids are very important. We shouldn’t forget that. It’s not like a genre. It’s a seed we plant in our children.”

Banderas plays a complicated villain – a wrong ’un who is ready to reform – in Paddington in Peru, the third instalment in a film franchise that, like Paddington Bear himself, has become a British national treasure. Captain Hunter Cabot is the devious skipper of a beautifully appointed boat in which Paddington (inimitably voiced by Ben Whishaw) and his adopted English family the Browns travel upriver in Peru, searching for Paddington’s missing aunt, Lucy.

Antonio Banderas plays the devious Captain Hunter Cabot (and his gold-digging ancestors) in Paddington in Peru. Credit: Studiocanal

Cabot comes from a long line of men and women obsessed with finding the Inca gold supposedly stashed in Eldorado. Banderas plays them all, in a constant internal conversation with his ancestors. “I think Hunter is a sick man,” Banderas says. “He is an addict, not to alcohol but to his own legend.”

The multi-part performance is a callback to the multiple family members played by Alec Guinness in the 1949 classic Kind Hearts and Coronets. Paddington in Peru is full of such cinephile Spotto moments. The kids won’t get it, but Paddington is just as enticing for adult audiences.

He is also an icon of the English idea of decency. “I suppose Paddington is a manifestation of everything we wish we were and could be,” says producer Rosie Alison. “He’s like the lost part of everybody’s innocence. It’s interesting: when we work on set, everyone has a very strong sense of Paddington, what he would do, what he would say. People understand his sincerity, his kindness, his ability to always think the best of people. But he’s not sentimental or preachy, because he’s a comic klutz.”

Accompanying Paddington on his journey home, Hugh Bonneville returns as the irascible paterfamilias while Emily Mortimer replaces Sally Hawkins as ditzy Mrs Brown. Like Banderas, Olivia Colman is a newcomer to the world of Paddington. She plays a singing nun who is in charge of the Home for Retired Bears, where Aunt Lucy could be found enjoying cups of tea on their gently fanned colonial cane furniture until she suddenly disappeared.

There are no prizes for guessing this cinematic reference: Colman, a national treasure in her own right, whirls around on a meadow with the majestic Andes rising behind her, guitar in hand. When director Dougal Wilson offered her the chance to channel Julie Andrews, she was in.

Olivia Colman channels Julie Andrews in Paddington in Peru.Credit: Studiocanal

“I wasn’t so good at singing and doing the feet,” Colman says now. “Thankfully, the habit is quite long.” Her trilling voice, moreover, is unnervingly close to Maria at her schmaltziest.

Dougal Wilson takes over as director from Paul King, who came to Paddington from the world of alternative comedy, bringing many of its alumni and an anarchic sense of humour with him.

“I was a fan, but I was minding my own business doing videos and commercials when I got a call from Rosie asking if I might be interested,” Wilson says. This is the first feature he has directed.

“The first film [2014’s Paddington] is brilliant and the second [Paddington 2, from 2017] is a masterpiece, in my opinion,” he says. “I thought it was something where you would just have to try not to drop the ball.” He also had to maintain King’s style. “But I’m slightly used to that in commercials – and I quite like the challenge of doing things to a brief.”

As a fan of the first two Paddington films, director Dougal Wilson figured his job was “to try not to drop the ball”.Credit: Studiocanal

Directing a Paddington film was certainly starting at the deep end for the first-time feature director. Inside Framestore, the visual effects studio where the film came together, VFX supervisor Alexis Wajsbrot estimates that it took roughly 600 people, spread across London, Toronto and Mumbai, to put the bear in the picture. In the intensive last stage of production, live action shots filmed in West London came together with backgrounds and local colour filmed in South America and the digitally produced Paddington.

The shooting schedules for Wajsbrot and Pablo Grillo, the animation director, are full of calculations and minutely calibrated graphs, every shot planned down to the millimetre, to accommodate an invisible bear later in the process. The backgrounds had to match the live action: the sun had to come from the same angle, the wind had to blow the real leaves and digital bear fur in the same direction.

It’s the right thing to do, to talk about these topics.

Olivia Colman

“If we were on a Marvel film, we would do the background digitally, which would be more flexible but less real,” says Grillo. “What works so well with Paddington is that the sets are very grounded. The bear is the magical element; otherwise, it’s live action.”

Wilson shoots little mock-ups of each scene he calls “crapomatics”, using his runners and assistants to stand in for the actors, as a guide for the animation and camera; the production’s physical comedy co-ordinator, Javier Marzan, invents and then rolls through Paddington’s moves so they can be timed to the second. During rehearsals, the actors work with actor Lauren Barrand, who is the same height as Paddington.

“She’s brilliant because she gives you everything,” says Colman. “She gives you the empathy and the sad eyes and she knows the lines, everything you know you would get from Paddington, so it helps us enormously.” Once their reactions are down pat, Barrand is replaced with a ball on a stick. “What we need is a clean plate with nothing in it,” says Grillo. An army of compositors puts it all together in the end.

The three films are as English as toast and marmalade, Paddington’s favourite food. The story is that he was taught English by an explorer and then packed off to London by his Anglophile aunt. It is the product of another time, Colman points out; Michael Bond wrote the stories 60 years ago.

“I think there’s something quite sweet about the idea of a traveller in the jungle teaching English to bears,” she says. “And that then you take on the attributes of your teacher, the umbrellas and the reading glasses and the newspapers.”

Paddington in Peru sends the much-loved bear home on a mission to find his missing aunt.Credit: Studiocanal

But if there is a whiff of Kipling about the Anglicised bear, much more important in our modern context is the fact that the furry little fellow arrives in England as an immigrant without papers. “And that we embraced him and we loved him and that has worked really well for us,” says Colman. “So the logical next step is to show he still loves where he came from, that Peru is the country that made him, but his chosen family and the life that is right for him is in his new country.”

Paddington can revisit Peru in this film only because, to his great relief, he finally has his British passport. Like most immigrants, he now straddles two cultures, a bear forever divided. It’s a tough subject to tackle in a children’s film, however snuggly the presentation. “And it’s the right thing to do, to talk about these topics,” says Colman, sounding a bit like Paddington herself. Banderas agrees. “Paddington is about something bigger than a bear,” he says. “Paddington is about an idea.” Which is definitely not just for children.

Paddington in Peru is in cinemas from January 1.