FINDING NEVERLAND

Finding Oscar-land

If anyone out there has Johnny Depp's address, please send him a DVD of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Though he clearly adores his Finding Neverland costar Kate Winslet, he's never even seen the other movie that may earn her an Oscar nomination this year.
''I'm going to see it for Kate,'' he promises.
''You're so full of s---, I love it!'' says Winslet, sitting nearby.
''Film is the greatest tranquilizer in the world for me,'' he explains. ''I fall asleep during opening credits. I go right out. Any film. Cartoons, I'm up for days. Movies, it's over with in seconds.''
Depp should hope the rest of the Academy doesn't get so sleepy. Just one year after scoring his first-ever Oscar nomination for Pirates of the Caribbean, Depp could find himself in the Best Actor race again thanks to his whimsical performance as Peter Pan playwright J.M. Barrie in Neverland. In the emotionally affecting drama (loosely based on true events), Barrie develops a friendship with ailing widow Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (played stoically by three-time nominee Winslet) and her four young sons, one of whom, named Peter, inspires Barrie's most famous work. So far, the movie has won Best Film honors from the National Board of Review, as well as five Golden Globe nominations — one for each hankie it requires.
At the heart of Neverland is the innocent yet scandalous relationship between Winslet and Depp, who weren't an obvious screen pairing — which is precisely why director Marc Forster chose them. ''Kate has a real earthiness to her, a strength of will power,'' says Forster, who guided Halle Berry toward her Oscar for Monster's Ball. ''Johnny has this very creative spirit, out there and floating and everything. So the two of them juxtaposed I think makes an interesting match.''
On a wet and windy Friday afternoon in Paris (the halfway point between Winslet's home two hours outside London and Depp's villa in the south of France), the pair rolled their own cigarettes (one thing they do have in common) and chatted about the movie they wrapped two and a half years ago.
EW Most people don't realize that you filmed Finding Neverland before Pirates of the Caribbean and Eternal Sunshine. How do you talk about something you made so long ago?
JD You lie. You make stuff up.
KW I've had another baby since then, so I've lost brain cells. So I had to go and watch the movie several times, just to have an understanding of what the whole thing was really like.
EW Did you ever get impatient and want it to just come out already?
JD I knew that there had been some weirdness because of the Peter Pan movie [Universal's 2003 fantasy, which contractually had to be released before Miramax's Neverland]. It started to feel like it was shelved or something, you know what I mean?
KW Also as actors, don't forget, you never get told anything, really. They just call you up when they need to roll you out on a few red carpets.
EW The movie has so many traditional tearjerker elements: fatherless children, fatal illness, the transporting power of art. What efforts did you make to temper that so it didn't go over the top?
JD We used to have these little sessions — Kate, myself, and Marc — where we'd go through the thing and locate the potential problem areas.
KW Locate the smush. Sometimes we would just rejig things a tiny bit, shave off a few edges, shortening lines here or there that perhaps made too much of a moment that could be said more simply by just seeing two people in a frame together.
EW So there's not an example of an entire scene that was taken out?
KW There was a scene that was taken out, actually. There's a scene when we first arrive at the cottage in the country, and we're sitting outside drinking tea and Johnny's smoking a pipe...
JD I was getting ready to vomit from that pipe.
KW There's a line that I say to Johnny, something along the lines of ''Sometimes I wonder if you realize how much you've come to mean to us all.'' And he says, ''Well, the boys are young.'' And I say, ''Yes, but for me.'' If that scene had been kept in, the suggestion of something more intimate between the two of them would have been much, much bigger. I love the fact that in the film, there's never the clinch or the kiss or the moment.
EW The movie indicates that Barrie and Sylvia's friendship was quite the scandal in 1903. How do you think today's society would react to such a relationship?
JD Oh, Jesus Christ, we live in the era of reality shows and people going to the toilet and millions of viewers watching. No, I don't think it would be a shock.
KW I saw a show last night called Greatest Embarrassing TV Moments. And I'm sorry, I'm a sucker for all that stuff. So I'm sitting there and there was this guy on this show called Celebrity Detox. One thing they had to do was their own colonics. And then they had to push it through a sieve. This guy showed the world his poo. So I don't know if it would be that shocking, necessarily.
EW I noticed that Barrie very rarely touches or hugs the boys. Some people accused him of having inappropriate relationships with them. Did you make a conscious decision to limit your physical contact with them to avoid such talk today?
JD That whole thing, I thought it was such a load of hearsay, like a nasty rumor that had been around since then. I don't buy into that. I thought it would be really wrong to give any weight to that at all. Of course it had to be mentioned, it had to be dealt with.
EW In one of Neverland's few negative reviews, The New York Times critic said she didn't think you were ''pushed to [your] limits'' in the movie.
JD How does she know? That's her opinion, but how does she know Kate's limits or my limits, especially in the context of a story?
EW Maybe it's because you weren't running down the streets naked and screaming.
JD I do that on weekends.
KW Every character is different.
JD You do what is called for.
KW Perhaps she was picking up on the fact that Marc was trying to get something that was quite subtle. His general feeling was: Let's not act it up here just because we're all doing a period film. I mean, Barrie's not Edward Scissorhands.
EW In the first scene, we see that Barrie gets intensely nervous before his play begins. Have either of you suffered from stage fright?
KW Most recently, can I just mention f---ing Saturday Night Live? Oh my God. I felt like my ass was falling out. It's hard to even talk about now, it was so terrifying. They made me tap-dance, so if I missed a beat, that was it. Live, moment gone.
JD My biggest stage-fright moment is anything where you have to go and talk in front of people. Doing the work on set, that's fine. But an appearance, anything where there are a lot of people, especially if you have to say something. Even just standing there I feel like an idiot.
EW Barrie's wife in the film doesn't understand or appreciate his creative side. Both of you, on the other hand, are involved with artistic people [Depp lives with pop singer Vanessa Paradis; Winslet is married to director Sam Mendes]. Do you think that's important?
JD Probably, on some level. For me, regardless of what your partner does for a living, whether they're a singer or a director or a plumber, what's important is that they have a passion for what they do. Vanessa and I never talk about our work.
KW It turns out that is important, yeah, but I didn't set out to find somebody who was involved in the same world as we are. It just increases the level of understanding that you can have with the person that you love. There's nothing about what I do that I've ever had to explain to Sam because what he does for a living is understand actors.
EW Barrie sees flashes of himself in Peter. Do you ever see yourself in your own kids?
JD Every day. My daughter, who's 5 and a half, already she's an unbelievable mimic. It's astounding. This guy we were working with, a Scottish guy, she started imitating him perfectly. My [2-year-old] son, Jack, he's always getting into stuff. He's like a little pirate. I was on the phone with my sister the other day, saying ''Was I this nuts when I was little?'' ''Yeah, you were.''
KW My daughter came running up to me the other day and said [dramatically], ''Mom, I have to tell you something. Just promise me one thing. When I'm a big girl, Mom, let me be in a movie! I know I can do it!'' Beating her fists against my thigh.
EW And she's how old?
KW Four. And then the really scary bit: I sat her on the kitchen counter and I said, ''I know you can do it too. You're going to be great.'' And she said, ''Yeah, I know.'' I phoned my dad and said, ''Tell me I wasn't like this when I was 4.'' He said, ''I hate to break it to you — you were like that when you were 3.''
Entertainment Weekly: January 14, 2005 issue

Finding Neverland Boys 'n' the Hook

AYE, MATEY, EYE PATCHES CAN GET YOU OSCAR NODS Depp works his gentle magic as the man behind Peter Pan

Johnny Depp doesn't always play gentlemen, but even when he takes on the role of a slurry sea rascal (Pirates of the Caribbean), an opium-hooked Holmesian detective (From Hell), or — still his greatest character — the worst filmmaker of all time (Ed Wood), he inevitably comes off as a gentle man. It's the essence of his on-screen nature. He's the rare actor whose exquisitely chiseled, ''perfect'' features communicate not just romantic and erotic charisma but a kind of spiritual ideal. Call it grace. In Finding Neverland, Depp, as the Scottish-born turn-of-the-century playwright J.M. Barrie, portrays a fellow who is openly gentle to the core, and the actor just about wraps the movie around his lilting delivery and quiescent gaze.

It's 1903, and Barrie, a celebrated figure within the London cultural world, has slid into a bit of a valley. His latest play, Little Mary, is a bomb, and his marriage appears to have hit an even deader spot than his career. In his cozy town house, seated at dinner in a crisp tuxedo, he exchanges icy pleasantries with his wife (Radha Mitchell), a beautiful yet terribly proper Victorian killjoy who is anxious to expand her husband's social connections but shows no interest in stoking his creative fire. But then Barrie, strolling through the casual green grandeur of Kensington Gardens, meets the newly widowed Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) and her eager, restive brood of four boys. To entertain them, he pretends that his Saint Bernard is a circus bear, and he dances a merry waltz with the animal right in the middle of the park.

It's a lovely scene — silly in the best sense, which is to say that in Edwardian London, the willingness to appear ridiculous in public is really a rebellion against civility. It's Johnny Depp committing what no other actor can perform quite as well: a gentle blasphemy. Sylvia, played by Winslet with a winsome melancholy, has no income to speak of and must therefore kowtow to the wishes of her mother, Emma du Maurier (Julie Christie), a puritan scold who serves the same wet-blanket function within the Llewelyn Davies home that Barrie's wife does in his. Taking refuge in each other, Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies clan envelop themselves in a conspiratorial bond of play, imagination, and innocent romance. The boys enjoy a surrogate father who teaches them to fly kites and make up stage plays. Barrie, meanwhile, finds the warmth he has been missing at home, as he and Sylvia cultivate a quiet platonic love. This surrogate family of latter-day childhood moves him to write the play he calls Peter Pan.

Finding Neverland is a caressingly sweet literary fairy tale ''inspired by true events'' (though there's evidence that Barrie and Sylvia were not, in fact, platonic). The director, Marc Forster (Monster's Ball), working from a script by David Magee, has crafted a placid domestic variation on Shakespeare in Love, with Barrie drawing his inspiration, and much of the detail, for his revolutionary play out of a relationship that has infused him with life. There are additional echoes of Dreamchild, the splendid 1985 Dennis Potter fantasia that dramatized the forbidden underpinnings of Lewis Carroll's invention of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. If Finding Neverland is a lesser movie than either of those two, that's because its portrayal of Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family is more touching and fully felt than anything about his actual creation of Peter Pan.

Barrie, we learn, had already invented Neverland: It's the paradisiacal lost world he wrote about in his diary as a boy, when his brother's death forced him to grow up before he expected, or wanted, to. Finding Neverland flirts with childhood as a kingdom of haunted purity, yet as Barrie conceives and stages Peter Pan, the film grows literal-minded and a touch scattershot. He sees the four Llewelyn Davies boys jump up and down on their beds in a pillow fight and imagines them floating out the window — a beautiful notion that, for some reason, becomes almost a trivial afterthought when the young actors begin to fly around on their wires on stage. When Barrie envisions Sylvia's mother with a hook instead of a hand, we giggle knowingly — but that's virtually the only nod to the vengeful captain. The movie depends so much upon our foreknowledge of Peter Pan that it never discovers the story's magic anew. Finding Neverland is studded with little pleasures, like Dustin Hoffman's marvelously crusty turn as Barrie's cynical theater backer (I guess that counts as a Hook reference), and there's an irresistible three-hankie moment near the end when Barrie's stage actors perform the play at home for the ailing Sylvia. The movie glows, all right. It just never soars.

Should anyone really be surprised that Finding Neverland is a Best Picture nominee? Let's see: It stars Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Dustin Hoffman, and Julie Christie — a group of actors who have 16 Oscar nominations among them. It's directed by Marc Forster, who showed with Monster's Ball that he can mine gold-plated performances out of his stars. It's a bittersweet period piece about love, art, and the unquenchable spirit of youth. And it's an end-of-the-year release from Miramax — a studio that courts the Oscars as if its very survival depended on it. Okay, strike that last one.
Based on a stage play by Allan Knee, Finding Neverland is the loose (some say very loose) story of how Scottish playwright J.M. Barrie created the children's classic Peter Pan. A world away from the slurry, high-seas shtick of Captain Jack, Depp's Barrie is a misunderstood eccentric, a boy at heart trapped in a chilly, loveless marriage to a social-climbing wife (Radha Mitchell). But when Barrie forms a touching friendship with the four sons of Winslet's widowed Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, he finds the inspiration for his masterpiece about refusing to grow up. ''What I liked very much is that it didn't feel like the kind of movie that you see all the time,'' says Depp. ''I thought it was sweet and heartbreaking, but in an honest way. It didn't feel like it was trying to be something, it felt like it was something.''
But Finding Neverland isn't so much about the creation of Peter Pan as it is about the touching relationship between Depp's and Winslet's characters. Depp's loony grace and Winslet's sadness and humanity are what stick with you when the theater's lights go up. After all, Peter Pan may have taught us how to fly, but Finding Neverland shows us actors who know how to soar.
From Entertainment Weekly's Look at 2005's Oscar Nominees

Is It Just Us...

...or did you shuffle out of Finding Neverland whimpering and runny-nosed? So dubbing the Oscar-nominated weepie the ''feel-good movie of the year'' — as a recent ad from the movie's studio, Miramax, does — seems like a case of cruelly misguided marketing. Without spoiling the ending, let's just say that cupcake of an actor Freddie Highmore isn't cartwheeling down some hill. Big fat tears are plooping down his little cheeks.

Finding Neverland

Fortunately, ''Neverland'' features a stud farm of Oscar pedigree. In addition to ''Monster’s Ball'' director Forster and three-time nominee Winslet, there’s Depp, hot on the heels of his Best Actor nod as Captain Jack, playing prominent Scottish playwright J. M. Barrie, a misunderstood, boyishly mischievous eccentric. In other words, a character right in Depp’s wheelhouse. The film traces Barrie’s touching friendship with a widowed mother (Winslet) and her sons who inspired Barrie’s masterpiece, Peter Pan.

''Neverland'' has been awaiting release for over a year, hindered by Universal’s 2003 ''Peter Pan,'' which was contractually allowed to bow first. Now that it’s opening, the film may steam up some literary scholars who argue that Barrie’s life may not have been as pure as Neverland. ''There were a couple of ways you could go with Barrie,'' says Depp. ''One was riding on the coattails of all the negative hearsay. The possibility that maybe he was a little sideways with the children. But f -- -, that’s an obvious way to go, isn’t it?''

Winslet, who, it should be noted, played Wendy in a stage production of ''Peter Pan'' at age 15, says Depp was perfectly cast: ''He’s like Peter Pan.'' In fact, Depp got along so well with one of the child actors, 12-year-old Freddie Highmore (who plays Peter), that he helped him land the role of Charlie in his and Tim Burton’s upcoming ''Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.'' Winslet adds that during one stuffy dinner scene in the film, Depp secretly rigged a handheld whoopie-cushion device that had the child actors nervously giggling exactly as the script called for. ''The boys didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry,'' she says. When reminded of the whoopie-cushion incident, Depp cracks up, then deadpans, ''There are certain elements of boyhood we can’t escape. And farts will always be funny.'' And in the right hands, maybe even a little bit sweet. WHAT’S AT STAKE Depp’s long-overdue first Oscar. (Nov. 12) ~ Entertainment Weekly