Re-Imagining Peter Pan
Film-maker Ben Zeitlin's debut was an Oscar-nominated success. But there was a long wait for a follow-up.
Benh Zeitlin is one of the most unconventional filmmakers I have ever met. Born in New York to a Jewish father and Protestant-raised mother, both of whom are urban folklorists, the 38-year-old was thrust into the spotlight in 2012 when his ambitious debut feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, became the talk of the Cannes Film Festival, before garnering four Oscar nominations.
Until then, he had operated in his own bubble, crafting artisanal shorts as part of a collective of like-minded creatives called Court 13. Beasts, a dynamic bayou fable told through the eyes of a spirited six-year-old girl, put them on the map, and left many excitedly wondering what they would do next. Incredibly, it has taken until now, and the release of Wendy, a loose and passionately-realised adaptation of Peter Pan, written by Zeitlin and his sister Eliza, to find out.
“The Oscars were like visiting another planet,” recalls Zeitlin from his home in New Orleans. He fell in love with the city while filming Glory at Sea, the poetic short that opened the door for Beasts, in Louisiana, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina. Then, “it was like a ghost town, and really dangerous,” he told me in Cannes. He’d been planning to return to New York. “But, right near the end, I started to realise I was not going to go back. That I somehow had my feet stuck, essentially.”
No wonder the Oscars, with their glitz and feverish media buzz, made him feel discombobulated. “It was a world that I had only seen on television,” he says today, “and it felt like being propelled into a TV show. It was mind-blowing and incredibly surreal. And, you know, amazing.”
If there was external pressure and expectation, it wasn’t this that concerned Zeitlin and his collaborators, so much as that the rights to their next film were owned by Fox Searchlight (now Searchlight). Beasts had been backed by Cinereach, a non-profit that allowed the filmmaker to work in the same organic, intuitive, time-consuming way he’d always done. This was unusual in an industry where “efficiency becomes kind of the number one principle,” says Zeitlin, explaining that when they cast a film, “we’re going to search until we find the one person who can play this role, no matter how long that takes, and wait to shoot the film until they’re exactly the right age. . . Obviously, this film took took a very long time.”
Read the full article at
https://www.thejc.com/culture/film/re-imagining-peter-pan-1.519412
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