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her magic as child-taming Nanny McPhee
T he magic’s not just in the meteorology (and my lips
are sealed as to the precise nature of the spectacular weather) but also in a series of extraordinary, eye- boggling and colourful sets
dotted around this tree-lined location. Deep inside a carefully-patrolled
corner of the rolling 1500-acre estate in the heart of leafy Buckinghamshire, they’re making an ambitious new $30 million, effects-packed British family comedy film to match.
Nanny McPhee, written by and star- ring Emma Thompson as the epony- mous domestic with fantastic powers, is based on the three Nurse Matilda books, written for children between 1964 and 1974, by Christianna Brand. It’s being directed for Working Title and Universal by Kirk Jones, as his long-awaited follow-up to Waking Ned.
If the author’s name seems familiar, that’s because she’s probably even bet- ter known as an Edgar award-winning crime-writer, one of whose recurring characters, Inspector Cockerill, was
immortalised by Alastair Sim in the clas- sic 1946 British film, Green For Danger.
Brand drew on her own experience as a governess to pen the popular world of Nurse Matilda, whose unusual powers in a bygone age managed to bring order to the Brown family home, where seven wayward children regu- larly ran riot. As the rampant septet reformed so the ugly nanny would appear progressively prettier.
Producer Lindsay Doran admits that when the plan for a film version was first hatched some seven years
ago, the project was, in the general cli- mate of film-making, a tough sell.
Not to her, mind you, for as the then head of production at United Artists she could option books and ‘greenlight development’ without ask- ing anyone’s permission. She also had a creative history with Thompson, first, in 1991, as producer of Dead Again and then, to huge awards and box-office acclaim, Sense And Sensibility four years later.
So when Thompson, who won an Oscar for her Austen screenplay and a
8 • Exposure • Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video
CASTING A COLOURFUL
Oscar-winning screenwriter-star Emma Thompson weaves