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NANNY MCPHEE AND THE BIG BANG
“RED IS PARTICULARLY BRILLIANT ON THE FUJIFILM STOCK... IT REALLY JUMPS OUT AT YOU.”
➤ SaysThompson:“Wewerein Russia showing Nanny McPhee to children there and I had an idea of a story which was to do with a bomb and about it being put into a bed, rather like the horse’s head scene in The Godfather, but this case in a film for children.
“What I like about this one is that I think it’s even more original the last one. Everything’s new apart, of course, from my character who doesn’t change at all. This time, it’s more like a western; she’s the Clint Eastwood of the nanny world,” laughs Thompson.
“Was it my dream to create a franchise? No, and I can say that with my hand on my heart. I thought it might make a nice film but it never occurred to me at the time it might make two.
“I’m the one who has to sit down for years and years and write the damn thing, and then make sure it’s good enough to spend all this money on. The same will apply again if we do another after this.”
Inspired by Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda books, Nanny McPhee And The Big Bang now brings the action forward by about a century from the mid-19th Century of the first film, to a kind of wartime Forties setting in this. But this, as Thompson and her regular producer Lindsay Doran remind us, is once again a sort of parallel universe where magic happens and you don’t have to be slavish about period detail.
The countryside-set story itself centres around a harassed young mother (Gyllenhaal) trying to bring up three troublesome children and run a farm while her husband is away at war. Just the sort of “wanted the least, needed the most” mission
for time-travelling Nanny McPhee. Joining Thompson, Gyllenhaal and Ifans in the cast are Maggie Smith, Asa Butterfield and Ralph Fiennes.
As well as a new story and a new cast, the film also boasts a first-time feature director in Susanna White, a BAFTA-winner for the BBC’s Bleak House as well as an Emmy nominee for Jane Eyre and, more recently, David (The Wire) Simon’s tough Iraq War miniseries Generation Kill.
Explains White: “They came to me when I was shooting Generation Kill in South Africa, and I really connected with the material here. I liked the character of the housewife at the heart of this. She’s struggling to hold everything together and in many ways is a very modern woman. I also loved the comedy and the emotion of the piece.”
She then recruited a number of previous collaborators like production designer Simon Elliott, cinematographers Mike Eley and Tony Slater-Ling (for 2nd unit) and operator Ian Adrian.
Eley was shooting on Fujifilm, as Henry Braham BSC had done on the first film. “I think I would have done anyway regardless of that. It’s a film stock I’ve worked with quite a lot and feel comfortable with. The reds come up very strongly and that seemed to be especially apt here and I also like the way it deals with the skin tones.”
Inevitably there were those moments when it was a battle against unseasonal weather. Eley: “I quite like the soft light that comes with a thin layer of cloud. Of course, with this sort of film it’s vibrancy you’re after. It’s that sun-kissed image you want especially when you’re in the middle of the countryside.
“There’s no getting away from it,” notes Eley. “Everything’s trans- formed when the sun comes out.”
According to White: “Kirk Jones, who directed the first film, had done two huge things which I’ve tried to carry over: one was a real sense of colour and the other was creating the Nanny icon.
“With the colour, I’ve used it in a different, more selective way. This is more in touch with reality than the first film but still with a strong sense you’re entering a particular world. This is not austerity World War Two but more the world as a child would see it using lots of low angles and wide-angle lenses to accentuate both height and smallness.
“I particularly had a sense of how I wanted London to look. Instead of a bombed-out city, it’s more a kind of
children’s storybook capital. So I’ve limited the colours in the whole design of London to black, white and red – which is particularly brilliant on the Fujifilm stock because it really jumps out at you.
“As for the icon, I absolutely loved it and decided not to mess with it in any way. I felt it was wrong to update her. Even though she’s made it through time, it was very important we should still keep her essentiallythesame.” QUENTINFALK
Nanny McPhee And The Big Bang, which opens in the UK on March 26, was originated on 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA 500T 8573, ETERNA 250T 8553 and ETERNA 250D 8563
THE DP VIEW
MIKE ELEY
At one of the first meetings I
was asked for my view on films “for children and especially the use of colour in them. I couldn’t say I’d done a children’s film before my- self but I found the discussion very interesting especially on the back of the original Nanny McPhee.
The thing about doing a sequel is that you’re always half looking over your shoulder about what the first
one did. It establishes what you might say is a sort of house style.
In the first film, the colours were very vivid and probably a bit more heightened than this time round. The thing about Nanny McPhee was you couldn’t really place it in time: it could have been anything from Victorian to Edwardian.
This one’s more rooted in a particular era so the colour scheme was able to be more organic. Colour is still very important to the
feeling of the film but is now perhaps a bit more naturalistic.
”
Photo main previous page: Nanny McPhee and the children; inset: Emma Thompson
above l-r: scenes from Nanny McPhee And The Big Bang and Director Susanna White behind camera (photos: Liam Daniel)
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