MR PIP
PRODUCTION NOTES
CONTENTS
Fact Sheet
Short Synopsis
Longer Synopsis
ABOUT THE FILM
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
ABOUT THE CAST
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION COMPANIES
FULL CREDITS LIST
“Great Expectations is the book that almost destroys Matilda.
It’s also the book that saves her.”
– Andrew Adamson
OLYMPUS PICTURES and NEW ZEALAND FILM COMMISSION
NZ ON AIR, TV3 and DAYDREAM PRODUCTIONS
in association with EYEWORKS FILM
present
a STRANGE WEATHER production
a film by ANDREW ADAMSON
HUGH LAURIE XZANNJAH
“MR. PIP”
HEALESVILLE JOEL EKA DARVILLE KERRY FOX
Casting by NIKKI BARRETT
Music and Original Songs by TIM FINN
Score by HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS
Costume Designer NGILA DICKSON
Production Designer GRANT MAJOR
Cinematographer JOHN TOON NZCS, ACS
Editor SIM EVAN-JONES ACE
Co-Producers GEOFF LINVILLE LLOYD JONES
Executive Producers TIM CODDINGTON TIMOTHY WHITE
DAN REVERS JAMES DEAN JULIE CHRISTIE
Based on the novel by LLOYD JONES
Screenplay by ANDREW ADAMSON
Produced by ANDREW ADAMSON ROBIN SCHOLES LESLIE URDANG DEAN VANECH
Directed by ANDREW ADAMSON
Running Time: 130 Minutes
SHORT SYNOPSIS
In 1991, a war over a copper mining in the South Pacific tore the island of Bougainville apart.In 14 year-old Matilda’s tiny village, the reclusive “Popeye” (Hugh Laurie) offers the children escape into Dickens’ GREAT EXPECTATIONS. But on an island at war, fiction can have dangerous consequences.
SYNOPSIS
Adapted by Andrew Adamson from the best-selling novel by Lloyd Jones, Mr Pip is the story of how Mr Watts (Hugh Laurie), a teacher on the war-torn island of Bougainville, helps a young girl survive the violence of her daily life through the power of imagination. Mr Watts reads from his favourite book, “Great Expectations”, and 14-year-old Matilda (Xzannjah), is transported into the Victorian world, finding inspiration, friendship and hope when her real life is filled with harsh uncertainty and danger.
LONGER SYNOPSIS
Mr Pip, written and directed by Andrew Adamson (Chronicles of Narnia, Shrek), stars Golden Globe winner Hugh Laurie (House) as Mr Watts, the last Englishman remaining on the small South Pacific Island of Bougainville during a violent civil war in the 1990s. When the village elders ask Mr Watts to take over teaching the children, he reads to them from the book that most influenced his life, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
Matilda, an imaginative 14-year-old student played by newcomer Xzannjah, is transported into the novel, finding escape in the world and its characters. Matilda’s passion for the story inadvertently brings terror and tragedy to the village when the invading army starts searching for her imaginary Pip. But Great Expectations also sustains her through the brutality of the war, ultimately inspiring her to celebrate the power of her own voice.
ABOUT THE FILM
Mr Pip is a story of an enigmatic Englishman, Mr Watts (Hugh Laurie) and the magical impact his storytelling has on an impressionable, imaginative teenage girl, Matilda (Xzannjah).
When war threatens the tropical island village in which Mr Watts lives, all the other white settlers make a hurried escape, but Mr Watts chooses to stay with his beautiful, mute wife, Grace. He treats her like the “Queen of Sheba”, devotedly wheeling her around in a flamboyant handmade bamboo cart. The children call him “Popeye” and believe he’s mad, the way he gets around in his white linen suit and red clown nose.
When the village chief persuades Mr Watts to take over as schoolteacher, he agrees. He confesses to the children that he’s not a teacher, but he will read them his favourite book, ‘Great Expectations’, “the greatest novel by the greatest English writer of the 19th Century - Charles Dickens”.
Fourteen-year-old Matilda is entranced by the story and the character of Pip (Eka Darville). She begins to see Pip and the stories Dickens tells as if she was there herself. She feels she knows Pip and the others in his world: the blacksmith Joe Gargery, Magwitch the criminal, the wealthy Miss Havisham and her cruel daughter Estella. As she tries to understand Pip’s desire to better himself by marrying Estella, she learns about reinvention and changing one’s life.
Matilda’s mother Dolores (Healesville Joel), a Christian preacher, challenges Mr Watts’ teaching methods. She believes “stories have a job to do. They can’t just lie around like lazybone dogs. They have to teach you something”. Something of moral value. So she and other parents tell the children ‘useful’ stories, including the wisdom of crabs in predicting the weather, the life and times of the heartseed tree, and the best place to find broken dreams.
Gradually, all of the parents (except for Dolores) begin to turn up at school to listen to Mr Watts’ daily reading of ‘Great Expectations’, and for a while the story of Pip becomes village entertainment. But for Dolores, this entertainment is threatening her daughter’s soul and Mr. Watts needs to be stopped.
Meanwhile, the war encroaches upon the village in an escalating series of brutal encounters with government soldiers searching for rebels. When a misunderstanding causes the soldiers to start looking for the fictional Pip things take a turn for the worse; and when the only proof about who Pip really is - the book ‘Great Expectations’ - has gone missing, it places all of the villagers in mortal danger.
Bougainville Island, an isolated place largely unknown to the world, a territory of Papua New Guinea, was the inspiration for the award-winning novel ‘Mister Pip’, by New Zealand author Lloyd Jones. He says that many years after he had researched the 1990s civil war between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and the Papua New Guinea Government military forces, the story came to him: “I was writing about certain aspects to do with faith, and the voice of Matilda came to me and I thought, ‘goodness me, where is this place?’ And I recognized it as Bougainville.”
It’s a fictional story weaving threads of Charles Dickens’ classic novel ‘Great Expectations’ with contemporary characters in the shape of an eccentric Englishman, Mr Watts, a misfit transplanted into a Pacific island, and the villagers he lives with in Bougainville - a real place in the throes of civil war in the 1990s.
The film takes Jones’ interweaving of time and place even further: the imaginative Matilda conjures up Dickens’ 19th Century English world, with an unexpected twist. Her “Pip” is an imaginative fusion of the descriptive material in the book with the environment and the people she knows on the island. Hence the film portrays Dickens’ characters, costumes and settings in ways never seen before – a wildly imaginative, vividly colorful hybrid world, visually stimulating and utterly compelling.
Director Andrew Adamson, who wrote the screenplay, says, “When I first read Lloyd’s book, I thought it was very cinematic. It wasn’t until I got into trying to make it into a movie that I realized how tricky Lloyd had been - how much he leaps around in time and perspective and point of view. It was actually very difficult to adapt.”
As a teenager, from the age of 11 to 18, Adamson lived in Papua New Guinea, so he connected to the power of the story immediately: “I read ‘Mister Pip’ on a transatlantic flight and it had so much impact. I just couldn’t put the book down. As soon as I landed, I started asking about the rights.
“I just related to it straight away. I recognized a lot of the characters – Dolores, Mr Watts – they were people that I knew and so for me the book came to life immediately.
“I loved the fact that the book was about the power of story. It was about colonization through literature. And it was about a place I was familiar with personally. It was also set against a real conflict that tore Bougainville apart, so it was an important story. All those things just coalesced to the point where I couldn’t not make the film.”
Meanwhile, producer Robin Scholes (Once Were Warriors, Rain)was also captivated by the book and had set about acquiring the film rights. “I was blown away by the book. I thought it was very filmic and it was an important story. So I said to Eyeworks’ Julie Christie ‘If you never make another film in your life, please make this one. It’s going to be extraordinary.’”
Scholes’ ideal director was Andrew Adamson, “He had combined in his previous work a sense of drama and fantasy, so I thought he would be perfect. What I didn’t know then, but what made him even more perfect, was that he had grown up in Papua New Guinea.”
She was unable to reach Adamson, so she went ahead with the rights bid without a director. Then, when she was at the final stages of the negotiations, Adamson’s inquiries about the rights led him to contact her and they decided to work together.
Once they had developed a screenplay, they worked through Adamson’s agency, UTA, to secure financing. UTA made the connection with Olympus Pictures’ Leslie Urdang and Dean Vanech (producers/financiers of Rabbit Hole and Beginners), who joined forces with Robin Scholes and James Dean of Daydream Productions to co-finance it as an independent feature film.The New Zealand Film Commission, NZ on Air and New Zealand Television network TV3 also invested in the project.
“Every so often I read a script and just as I get to the end of it, I say, ‘I have to make this movie.’ Mr Pip was one of those scripts,” said Leslie Urdang.
Andrew Adamson says, “Story has the power to transform. For good or bad, a well told story will touch us and leave us changed. This is the effect that ‘Great Expectations’ has on Matilda and the villagers of Bougainville Island, and this is the effect that the novel ‘Mister Pip’ had on me.
“It is a personal journey of a young woman who learns the power of her own imagination.The power to overcome the darkness invading her world. The power to choose between good and evil.The power of her own voice.”
As he worked on the adaptation, Adamson realized he needed to find a way of visualizing the interior monologue used by Jones to convey Matilda’s imaging her own version of ‘Great Expectations’.
“I started thinking about seeing inside Matilda’s head, seeing her version of ‘Great Expectations’ and I was exploring artistic methods of expressing that. Then I had an experience with another book: I was reading it with British accents, until I realized it was set in Boston, and then all the accents changed. It became apparent to me that you really put yourself into what you’re reading. So I thought if Matilda was imagining ‘Great Expectations’, she had no reason to imagine it as anyone other than herself, so naturally, she would imagine the story to be told with people like herself.”
For Adamson, the important thing was the relationship between Matilda and her “Pip”. “Lloyd says in the book that she never thought she would find her best friend in a book, as opposed to somebody that she met up a tree.”
‘Great Expectations’ and her imagining of it offers Matilda “escape from a life that’s getting worse. A darkness is creeping into her life. So it offers her a whole new world. Ultimately, it offers her a chance to let go of her past and to move on. At the end of ‘Great Expectations’, Pip says that he can never go home, but I think Matilda realizes that she actually can. Pip made a lot of bad decisions, but through watching Pip, Matilda learned to reinvent herself in a positive way.”
Lead actor Hugh Laurie was immediately attracted to the story: “I read Lloyd Jones’s ‘Mister Pip’ shortly after it came out and was absolutely entranced by it. I thought it was a very beautiful story, beautifully written. When I heard that there was a film in the offing, my ears pricked up because I was absolutely gripped by the story. The news got even better when I heard the script had been written by Andrew Adamson - a very clever fellow. He’s been brave with it. Brave but respectful, which is a very hard balance to pull off.”
Author Lloyd Jones says, “You always hope that the person making the film has an intimate understanding of the book and Andrew had read it very deeply. He picked up all the different layers and resonances and I am grateful for that. I think he’s done a terrific job. And when I heard that Hugh Laurie was to play Mr Watts, a penny dropped: ‘Well, of course. Who else?”
Director Andrew Adamson on casting Hugh Laurie to play Mr Watts: “I’ve always been a huge fan and when I thought about everything he’s done from Fry & Laurie to Blackadder to House, I knew that he is an actor who is capable of anything. Someone who can make those leaps, can easily make the leap to a character as unusual as Mr Watts. The thing that I really liked about Hugh in that role is how unexpected he would be and yet how perfect he would be. And he was brilliant.”
Laurie says of Mr Watts: “He’s a misfit. He’s a man with a mysterious past. One of the puzzles of the film is to try and work out how this character wound up in the position he’s in.
“Mr Watts is not a religious man, but ‘Great Expectations’ is his religious text. For him, it’s a novel that has a message and an inspirational power that changed his life for the better. He feels it can do the same for these children. And Matilda just eats it up. The spell works for her. She becomes completely absorbed by the story of ‘Great Expectations’.”
In ‘Great Expectations’, as Laurie sees it, “Pip yearns to be something else, someone else, somewhere else. Matilda isn’t Pip. She doesn’t see herself as Pip, but she does form a very close relationship with the Pip of her imagining and she understands and shares that yearning to look further and go further. She herself has great expectations.”