Peter Pan: Conquering fear with imagination

An adventurous approach brings the classic story of Peter Pan to life.

Hugh Jackman in a scene from the movie Pan.

English director Joe Wright says he always tries to work outside his comfort zone.

At first, that may appear somewhat disingenuous from a man who made his name beyond British shores with two period features, Pride & Prejudice and the adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement.

But then he went to Los Angeles to corral Robert Downey Jr and Jamie Foxx in the contemporary biography The Soloist before the thoroughly adult adventure thriller Hanna, then back to a loyal version of Anna Karenina.

Pan is another leap beyond his comfort zone altogether. The latest iteration of JM Barrie’s loved tale is a bold, occasionally chaotic rendering in which Peter (young Australian Levi Miller) is stolen from a World War II London orph­anage and thrown into a very different Neverland overseen by Hugh Jackman’s mad Blackbeard.

“I try not to repeat myself and try to do that which scares me,” Wright says. “I think fear is a great motivator and I look for projects that I don’t know how to do and yet have a sense of, and have an emotional connection to, regardless of genre.”

Wright has already upset the apple cart with his visually crammed and often crazy film because it is a movie for kids, not the formal adult drama cinephiles might have expected of him.

Wright says: “I’ve always made quite adult films of a modest scale.” His recent fatherhood (he has two young sons) has shifted his attention a little.

“I’ve watched the relationship between my son and his mother blossom into this intense, passionate love and it kind of blows me away, as does my own son’s imagination,” he says.

This Pan screenplay by unknown 20-something Jason Fuchs had been doing the rounds of Hollywood agents.

It wasn’t picked up, but Jackman saw it and thought “it was ­really smart”.

“He used the original book ­really well and it was a nice interesting new take rather than doing Peter Pan verbatim.”

Wright agreed. The screenplay about a boy who goes looking for his mother and in the process discovers himself “had this amazing energy”, and it resonated with him.

“I felt like I had a secret, really, about how to tell this story,” Wright says. “I felt I could tell it like no one else would, which is important.”

Then he re-read the original Barrie book and discovered the story was “far stranger and wilder and at points more fierce than I had remembered”.

“So I tried to bring some of that atmosphere to what is a very different plot,” he says.

Jackman says Wright brings something very different to Pan. “He has a ridiculously incredible visual sense and creativity and a slightly twisted mind, combined with his sense of joy and wonder,” Jackman says.

The Australian jumped in as soon as Wright showed him his version of Blackbeard, which wasn’t the historical version of the pirate he’d imagined. “He showed me a picture of me with a Marie Antoinette wig and a Louis XIV costume literally superimposed on top of my head with all this rappers’ bling, and I said: ‘I’m in!’ ”

The transformation is like Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Carib­bean although this pirates-in-space adventure takes far kookier turns. Jackman’s Blackbeard enters reciting lyrics from Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and later the Ramones’ Blitzkreig Bop is recited.

“For (Joe), Neverland represented a child’s imagination where anything goes,” Jackman says, adding that the Nirvana idea emerged about 10 days into rehearsal.

“And he’s not afraid to try,” he says. “He sold me on the possibility, the idea that in a kid’s imagination, adults have to be frightening, yes, but they’re also ridiculous.”

Wright did not believe Barrie’s story was sacred.

“Peter Pan exists beyond Barrie’s original work,” Wright says. “It’s so part of the collective public consciousness, certainly in Britain, this idea of a boy who could fly, who never grew up and has this wicked imagination.”

But the film — described in the credits as “based on characters introduced by JM Barrie” — is well beyond the original material already, Wright says.

“For me, I was trying to create a love letter to the original book without feeling one had to be slavishly faithful to it,” he says.

That is apparent in his only minor references to Tinkerbell or the crocodile, or casting Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily (indeed, the film has a strong cast, including Kathy Burke as the tyrannical orphanage mother, Amanda Seyfried, Garrett Hedlund and it-girl Cara Delevingne as “Mermaid”).

But this is a big Hollywood movie, and not every risk could be pursued. Wright cast indigenous actor Jack Charles as the tribal elder after seeing a poster for his stage show, Jack Charles versus The Queen, at the Barbican Theatre in London.

“I thought: ‘Wow, that’s an extraordinary face,’ ” Wright says, realising when later meeting him that Charles had the gravitas to play the chief of the native tribe.

“At one point he was going to do the entire role in first nation dialogue but that was a bit too much for the studio,” Wright says with a laugh.

There goes the fear again. Pan is a huge undertaking. “Massively, massively,” Wright says. “It is terrifying but in a way the whole process of directing a movie for me is about conquering fear.”

“The first films I ever saw were Bambi and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and both movies scared the crap out of me,” he says.

Pan is in cinemas from tomorrow.