From Acclaimed Ads to the Andes: Director Dougal Wilson’s Charming Feature Film Debut “Paddington in Peru”
Arguably the world’s most beloved (fictional) British immigrant, Paddington the Talking Bear arrived in London from South America in 2014 by way of the eponymous animated hit movie. Three years later, he returned for a sequel opposite Hugh Grant. This month, PG-rated Paddington in Peru (in theaters) continues the adventure as the marmalade-loving creature, based on Michael Bond’s children’s books and voiced by Ben Whishaw, returns to his native land in search of his beloved Aunt Lucy.
Trekking through the Amazonian rainforest, Paddington and his adoptive family (headed by Hugh Bonneville and Emily Mortimer) get sidetracked by Olivia Colman and Antonio Banderas’ shifty characters searching for the lost city of El Dorado.
Key players in the Paddington franchise braintrust, including animation director Pablo Grillo and VFX head Alexis Wajsbrot remained on board for this installment, but British director Dougal Wilson makes his feature film debut here on the strength of his quirky music videos and TV commercials. Wilson says, “I was flattered but very apprehensive — in fact I was terrified — because those first two films are held in such high regard.”
Speaking from Sydney, Australia, the site of his next project, Wilson explains how he and his team situated an animated bear within the mountains, rivers, and jungles of Peru.
The Paddington franchise had grossed nearly half a billion dollars worldwide when you were hired for Peru, yet you’d never directed a movie before. How did you get the gig?
Good question. I’d been quietly doing my day job—commercials and music videos—when the Paddington people approached me about doing the movie.
What was it about your shorts that convinced the producers you were their guy?
My stuff tends to be quite quirky, for want of a better word. In the UK, I directed commercials for a shop called John Lewis, which sometimes involved a CG character. People tell me they have a deadpan charm to them, and maybe it’s too much to claim for a TV commercial, but they also had a bit of pathos. I did a commercial for Channel 4 about the Paralympics that had a lot of energy, so that maybe showed the producers that I could do chases and action scenes. I’ve also directed music videos, like the [puppet-action] one for Coldplay [Life in Technicolor]. With all those things combined, I guess the producers thought I could go from two minutes to 90 minutes. It was a bit of a leap of faith, and maybe they’d exhausted all their other options [laughing].
Unlike the first two pictures, Paddington is seen here mainly in South America rather than merry old England. How did you pull that off?
With great difficulty. I was very nervous about the story not being set in London because the first two movies provided a built environment where Paddington could be a fish out of water. Many of the set pieces and goofs are produced by that mismatch. We were now going to take that same character and put him inside a natural environment. To use a slightly tortured analogy, he’s a fish out of water who returns to the water but has forgotten how to swim. Somehow, that threw us into the idea that this could work.
What was involved in preparing for the shoot?
I traveled to Peru and Colombia with our location manager, Eddy Pearce, production designer Andy Kelly, and our DP, Erik Wilson. We looked at rivers and mountains and bits of forest. Then the film got delayed, and I stayed in Peru because I hadn’t spent any time in South America before. I went to Machu Picchu and Lima and traveled right into the rainforest, got a little motorized canoe, and went up an Amazon tributary to spend time in this reserve. It was fantastic. So, I got the country under my skin a little bit. The next year, we went back and did the film.
How did you place this animated character in the thick of what looks like an Amazonian rainforest?
The cost would have been prohibitive to have the full main unit and main actors in Peru, but we had the whole story very tightly storyboarded and pre-visualized, so we sent out the second unit. They filmed mountain backgrounds, shot the river with 360 cameras, went up into the Andes, had their Steadicams running down corridors [of Incan ruins] in Machu Picchu, and got all this information about the lighting. Then, they brought all these environments and backgrounds back to London. We prepared the foregrounds for our actors. With the help of our incredible VFX supervisor, Alexis Wajsbrot, we blended all this stuff together.
Paddington and the Brown family get tossed around on a riverboat trying to navigate ferocious rapids. The sequence looks very exciting, but it must have been complicated to create.
The riverboat sequence was one of the biggest challenges because filming our actors in a boat in the Amazon would have been nigh on impossible. So we constructed a boat on a big hydronic gimble in the middle of a backlot at Sky Studios Elstree in London.
No kidding!
We surrounded [the rig] with Chroma key [green] screens and added wind, water, and movement. The actors had to be strapped in harnesses, which were painted out later, because it was wobbly and windy. Since we weren’t really on a river, we were able to play with the performances, do multiple takes, and tweak the camera movements.
The action comes through strong.
It helps that this film has a slightly heightened storybook style. For Werner Herzog’s Aguirre Wrath of God, one of our references, they literally went to the river and put people on a raft! We weren’t quite as rock and roll as they were. Fitzcarraldo was also a big reference for us. But we were more in the storybook style of Indiana Jones and Hergé’s “Tin Tin” books, so we did have a license for our film to be a little heightened.
Who is Lauren?
Lauren Barrand is a smaller person, a fantastic actress in her own right, who dresses as Paddington and wears the hat and the coat when we’re blocking scenes. Off-screen, someone who sounds a bit like Ben Whishaw reads Paddington’s lines, and Lauren mimes to those lines. We shoot a few takes with Lauren, and then she steps out. By that point, we’ve established eyelines, and all the actors know what they’re doing. But I hope that’s not ruining the magic for anyone. That’s when Paddington himself comes out of the trailer, and we only have one take. He’s a very busy bear!
Which comes first with Paddington: the animation or Ben Whishaw’s recordings of the dialogue?
Ben actually comes afterward. Once we’ve shot and edited this [live-action] stuff, we take it to a sound studio in London, and Ben’s there. The animation is not fully done yet: Sometimes, it’s rudimentary or just a pose or, worse still, one of my drawings. Ben then has to imagine the wonderful animation that’s going to come. We film Ben’s face to inform the animation, but it’s not motion capture; I want to emphasize that. There are no green dots. We edit the bit of dialogue we want for that shot, which goes to Pablo and his team. They construct the animation around Ben’s performance, which is then swapped in with the live actors.
Ben Whishaw has this beguiling quality even when playing a hitman in the new Keira Knightley thriller Black Doves. What’s he like to direct?
I was blessed to have Ben do Paddington because he understands that we’ve shot the scene before he gets involved. He’s not precious whatsoever about doing a line slower or faster, putting a pause here, or emphasizing that word. Ben’s a great actor, and he has infinite patience.
You spent nearly three years helping to create this new Paddington story, which has already grosse $129 million overseas. Why do you think people respond so well to this character?
Paddington always assumes the best in everybody, which is, I think, a very endearing quality. He has a slightly childish innocence, especially in the way that Ben performs him and the way he’s been animated by the very clever Pablo Grillo and his team at Framestore. The design, the animation, the voice, the script, and the outlook all combine to present this lovely character who’s almost wise but, at the same time, very innocent. To me, that makes Paddington very watchable.
Paddington in Peru is in theaters now.
For more upcoming films from Sony Pictures, check out these stories:
Issa Rae on the Importance of Filming “One Of Them Days” on the Streets of Los Angeles
“28 Years Later” Trailer Releases Hell in Director Danny Boyle’s Long-Awaited Zombie Thriller Sequel
Featured image: Paddington in PADDINGTON IN PERU. Courtesy Sony Pictures.
