by Lucy V Hay
Saving Mr Banks is one of those rare beasts: a British, female-led, female-centric true story (that’s also non-linear!), involving copyrighted material, by one of the biggest studios in Hollywood. There must have been many in the movie’s journey who declared Saving Mr Banks to be an ‘impossible task’, yet here it is and it’s not difficult to see why. PL Travers was both a talented and fascinating woman, seemingly years ahead of her time: deeply spiritual, she studied Buddhism, was an actress and even had affairs with women. Yet, as is so often the case with true stories about real people, choices had to be made regarding what to include in the story. ‘So much of her life was colourful and challenging and fascinating, but we chose simply to tell the story of two weeks she spent in Los Angeles in 1961,’ says co-writer Kelly Marcel. In the spec pile, dramas that are true stories often falter: they simply include far too much, muddying the story, message or theme and the characters’ motivations. So whilst some viewers of Saving Mr Banks may have felt frustration at the depiction of PL Travers, it’s important to note we can see only a ‘snapshot’ of her and her experiences of those two weeks spent with Disney himself. ‘Movies are windows into a special experience that one person had – an experience that holds universal relevance for us all,’ Kelly says. This notion of ‘universal relevance’ is what many spec drama screenplays get horrendously wrong, especially when the scribe in question is writing an autobiographical screenplay, or s/he hangs on to the notion that, because certain events ‘really happened’, they should be included. But this is not possible when creating what is, in essence, fiction. ‘When you write the story of someone’s life, you’re not actually writing the story of their life,’ explains Kelly. ‘It’s not possible or desirable.’ This does not mean that spec drama screenplay writers can do what they like with a true story, though: ‘There is no carte blanche to be taken because there are people, relatives of Pamela and Disney, still living and to whom we owe integrity,’ Kelly asserts, quite rightly.
Now one of Hollywood’s hottest screenwriters (after a decade’s worth of ‘overnight success’!), Marcel is the daughter of cult writer/director Terry Marcel, becoming an actress at the age of three, when she was eaten by an alien in one of her father’s films. Many bit parts followed, though she never enjoyed acting and ‘retired’ in her mid twenties, deciding to become a screenwriter instead. Though she did do an uncredited rewrite on prison biopic Bronson (2008), Saving Mr Banks is, officially, Marcel’s first film. Kelly met with Alison Owen from Ruby Films about the project in 2010; there was a previous script by Sue Smith about PL Travers’ relationship with her adopted son (who, interestingly, later became an alcoholic like Travers’ own father). However, Alison felt she wanted to tell a different story and was, Kelly tells me, immediately hooked, recounting how Mary Poppins (1964) had been a Christmas tradition in her house growing up, going on to say: ‘It fascinated me that [Mary Poppins], with talking umbrella and daisy-decorated hat, was born from so much pain.’
It’s perhaps this notion of personal pain that drives Saving Mr Banks: PL Travers is a tortured individual, desperate to hang on to her beloved Mary for personal reasons. She is also the character the audience perhaps knows least about. Her story is not what we expect, and we are party to the machinations of her psyche in a way the other characters in the movie are not. This is why PL Travers is the protagonist of the film, rather than the antagonist – a version which would have cast Disney as the hero instead, clawing the Mary Poppins rights from a troublesome and hysterical artiste. ‘I didn’t think Walt’s version was that interesting. He wanted something, someone was being difficult about him getting it, the end,’ Kelly declares. ‘I preferred the idea that the audience knew something he didn’t.’
Moving on from the true nature of the story, then, we must consider its non-linearity. How difficult was it to structure? ‘Non-linear storytelling is a bugger,’ Kelly says frankly. ‘It’s really hard to find a rhythm and a feel for where the transitions should be when you’re dealing with two timelines.’ Saving Mr Banks contrasts PL Travers’ ‘present’ with flashbacks of her difficult childhood that act as an elucidation of the various choices our author makes in her battle of wills with Walt Disney. A key element of the present-day thread’s journey, however, is Ralph, PL Travers’ driver, an entirely fictional creation of Marcel’s who plays a vital role in the story, helping the audience understand PL Travers. ‘I don’t know where Ralph came from. He just popped into my head one day. Sometimes you just pull the right balloon down from the ceiling,’ Kelly smiles.
Now consider the most troublesome element of Saving Mr Banks – the fact that it takes in copyrighted material, the actual adapted movie of Mary Poppins. Permissions for things like songs and movies can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, yet Disney as a corporation is also known to be fiercely protective of its beloved founder. Could a ‘bunch of women from London’ really create a story involving Walt himself? The answer to that is, of course, evident, because not only did Marcel, Smith and Owen satisfy Disney, the studio actually came on board in making the picture. Remembering that initial meeting with Alison Owen, it would seem Kelly’s gut instinct about the project was right: ‘It was one of those meetings that you very rarely have, where you just “know” you absolutely have to do a project. Money or no money,’ she says. Sometimes, belief in a story’s potency and its ability to ‘speak’ to an audience is all you need.
My Take on Saving Mr Banks
PL Travers behaves in a frequently ghastly way throughout the ‘present-day’ thread of Saving Mr Banks. We might have expected our author to be the antagonist instead, getting lambasted by this storyline (or at least the characters around her) for her behaviour, especially given the overt sexism of the period it is set in, not to mention the latent misogyny of the film industry in general. Instead, both brittle and sharp, Travers for me brings to mind Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets (1997). There is the same kind of incredulous disbelief reserved for her most brazen moments, and even a bizarre sympathy for her unreasonable disgust at discovering a giant Mickey Mouse toy on her bed in her hotel room, a gift from Disney himself! Later in the film, we again find ourselves feeling sorry for her as, feeling lonely, she takes the toy into bed with her for a cuddle. This is especially refreshing for a female protagonist, as these are frequently cast against troublesome men, in both the spec pile and produced content, as if women are all automatically ‘nice’ (!) or, conversely, two-dimensional ‘bitches’.
As anyone who has read the original book or seen the movie realises, Mary Poppins as a character feels quintessentially ‘English’, so it is perhaps surprising that Saving Mr Banks begins not in the UK (or even the US), but Australia. It’s here that PL Travers – or ‘Ginty’ – grew up. The family’s real surname was Goff, with Ginty the eldest of three children. All of them were ruled over by the whimsical, yet tortured, alcoholic father figure, Travers Goff, whose Christian name our author will take as her pseudonym in later years. Ginty’s mother, Margaret, was young and put-upon, hoping for the best but too often getting the worst of her husband’s excesses; her life the epitome of the triumph of hope over bitter experience. Despite this, Ginty appears to see her mother as a killjoy and possibly even a usurper, getting between her and her father, whom she adores. Ginty’s close relationship with her father is painted in glorious Technicolor from the outset, but it is important to note it is not a relationship built on emotional or sexual abuse. Instead, Ginty is Travers’ favourite child and her father is quite literally our author’s world. It is Travers who captures and inspires Ginty’s imagination, but more than that, in those moments he is the father ANY child would wish for. Travers is heavily idealised, with eyes only for Ginty, the other two children (or, indeed, Margaret) barely getting a look in.
However, as the flashbacks become ever more tragic, PL Travers’ steadfast resolve in the present thread begins to unravel. We see chinks in her armour and begin to understand not only why she acts the way she does, but how she
might have turned out had her father not died… or, rather, had she been able to ‘save’ him, like she can the fictional Mr Banks (who appears in both Mary Poppins the novel and its subsequent screen adaptation). In the past-tense thread, it becomes apparent Travers is set on self-destruction as his alcoholism becomes more and more out of control. It is his death that creates a void in our author she is never truly able to fill, especially as she blames herself for his loss. Believing her mother to be withholding alcohol from Travers out of spite, Ginty brings him a bottle, thus sealing his fate. Soon after, there is an impressive moment when Margaret appears at Ginty’s bedroom door in only her nightdress, her face full of incredulous disbelief and horror at her eldest child’s betrayal. But she says none of this, instead telling Ginty to look after her sisters (suggesting Ginty should take Margaret’s place as the matriarch; she has been the ‘other woman’ in Margaret and Travers’ marriage, essentially). Margaret then walks out of the family homestead into the darkness, barefoot, forcing Ginty to follow on horseback, calling for her mother to return. Heartbroken, Margaret appears unable to hear her daughter, wading into the creek as if to drown herself. Ginty plunges in after her, grabbing her mother; Margaret finally comes to her senses and the two of them are reconciled, hugging, still in the water. Margaret realises she must take her family back; Travers is dying and she will be the only parent. She cannot leave this to Ginty.
After this turning point, Margaret calls her sister, the children’s Aunt Ellie, to help. Immediately the parallels between Aunt Ellie and Mary Poppins are obvious: like the fictional character, Aunt Ellie appears dressed in black, wearing a large brimmed hat and sporting a carpet bag. She is efficient and organised, ensuring the children realise their own places in helping their mother. During her stay, Travers inevitably dies and Margaret wishes to shield Ginty from this, but it is Ellie who insists the child must see the body. Ginty views her dead father, appreciating for the first time the gravity of her actions in giving him that final bottle of alcohol, but we get the impression our author will spend a lifetime processing this, which relates brilliantly to the struggle PL Travers finds herself in with Disney via the ‘present’ thread.
Being a true story, one of the biggest threats to the audience’s suspension of disbelief is the fact we all KNOW Travers must have signed the agreement, because Mary Poppins is an adapted movie we have all at least heard about (being one of the most famous in the Disney canons). This means the stakes in the present-day thread are called into question from the offset, which is why the addition of the past thread is so necessary. What’s more, as PL Travers is – at least on the surface – so disagreeable a character, the audience wants an insight into why she’s the way she is, especially given there are moments in the present-day thread where her motives seem at odds with her resulting or previous behaviour. This is illustrated best when examining her relationship with Ralph (played to perfection by a scene-stealing Paul Giamatti), the driver she is assigned by Disney when she travels over to the US. Ralph, a fictional creation by writer Kelly Marcel, provides the audience with the tools to see past PL Travers’ brittle, and even sometimes nasty, exterior. Ralph is a simple man, yet makes keen observations with a childlike logic that is strangely compelling. Ralph is the catalyst for two crucial moments in which Travers is forced to question her cynicism, not only about Disney, but about her fellow man in general: first, when he joins her, without a second’s thought, digging in the ground outside the studio; and, second, when he meets his hero, Walt Disney, for this enables our author to see Disney through Ralph’s eyes and appreciate, finally, the joy Disney is able to bring his audiences, even if she does not care for Disney’s films herself. This leads later to her giving Ralph a signed book for his disabled daughter, Jane, telling him that just because Jane has problems does not mean she cannot achieve. Here, PL Travers is, in essence, returning the favour for the insights Ralph himself has given her during her stay in America.
Female characters are too often ‘likeable’ characters in produced content, yet PL Travers proves that a complicated, irascible and ultimately disagreeable character can not only work (regardless of gender), but that we can still relate to her. Saving Mr Banks took on a gargantuan task, both in attempting to bring such a character to the big screen in the first place, and in the story itself. As Kelly Marcel freely admits, there was only one studio that could have produced the movie: Disney itself! Had Disney not wanted to get involved, the whole project would have been dead in the water. But the team at Ruby Films did not let this sabotage their aspirations. They pushed ahead and were rewarded handsomely for it, which is as it should be, for the movie will undoubtedly become a classic, just like its predecessor Mary Poppins.
What We Can Learn from Saving Mr Banks
Write Tips:
• Pain may be the factor by which an audience comes to understand a character, as we do with PL Travers; but, crucially, we are not reminded of this every second of the movie. PL Travers is brusque, infuriating, even funny at times; she does not sit by a window weeping copiously about the tragic loss of her father when she was a child. Instead, this is hinted at by cleverly constructed motifs, such as the pears, which remind her of her father’s death.
• Remember that the characterisation of female protagonists is often underplayed in both spec and produced content. An unusual and seemingly paradoxical character like PL Travers may gain your drama screenplay attention in the marketplace BUT only if you balance her rare qualities against those we can readily recognise.
• Non-linear movies must ‘restructure their structure’ so the narrative thread(s) dealing with past events support the story being told in the present; flashbacks and their like mustn’t simply fill in gaps, or be disjointed for the sake of it.
• Why not try writing TWO outlines and/or scene breakdowns: one dealing with the present, the other the past? THEN weave them together to make up the whole.
• Assess whether your drama screenplay really needs to be non-linear: what does the addition of non-linearity bring? It cannot be just style over substance.
• Remember that being faithful to the story and characters does not necessarily mean you have to recreate every single event, person or thing exactly as it happened. Whilst you ‘owe’ something to the person (or their loved ones) whose life you are rendering as image, faithfulness is more about emotional truth.
Selling Points:
• One of the biggest challenges of writing and selling true stories as drama screenplays is that audiences potentially already know the outcome of the situation we are writing about: so instead think, ‘How can I bring new insights to that true story?’ In the case of Saving Mr Banks, the audience would probably expect it to be Disney’s story, but instead the focus is on why PL Travers behaved the way she did, with an insight into the tragic loss of her father and why Mary Poppins means so much to her.
• Costing approximately £35 million, Saving Mr Banks has the highest budget of all the produced dramas in this book. Watching the movie, it’s not difficult to see why. Adding to the bill are a large cast, including child actors and animals; period costumes and locations in three different countries; crowd scenes; and singing and dancing. But it’s important to note that £35 million is NOT that great an amount to a studio like Disney, who funded Bridge to Terabithia (2007) for a similar amount, albeit with no real stars. On this basis, if you think your drama screenplay could appeal to a studio or network (like Film 4), by all means go for it – but you will need a really compelling story to get a meeting, never mind a read request. But, hey, anything is possible, as Ruby Films showed here!
• Generally speaking, including copyrighted material in your screenplay – movies, books, songs, imagery, and so on – adds thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) to the budget and should be avoided. However, there are always special cases: Saving Mr Banks arguably could not have been told to its fullest potential without including material from Mary Poppins. So if you feel you have to include co
pyrighted material in your spec drama screenplay, make sure there is a valid STORY reason for it.
• Sometimes a story will just ‘speak’ to you and you will find yourself unable to stop thinking about it. So be brave like Kelly Marcel, Sue Smith and Ruby Films. They let nothing – not even copyrighted material! – get in the way of their vision… and their steadfast resolve and belief in the project brought Disney itself on board.
THE PSYCHE AND CONFLICT
EMOTIONAL RESPONSE
If ‘eliciting an emotional response’ is the ‘point’ of drama, it could be argued the point of ALL stories is to do this, genre OR drama! Horrors are designed to horrify us; thrillers to thrill; comedies to make us laugh. Even a martial arts movie with a paper-thin plot and characters to match is designed to excite us, at the very least. So it’s important to note that it’s not so much the type of emotion inspired by a drama as the way it is brought forth. Whilst genre pieces may ask us to imagine ourselves in characters’ places, dramas invite us to see into the character’s psyche and world view, and why that is causing conflict in their lives for some reason. Whilst spec screenwriters are often comfortable with the notion of conflict being driven by a character with some sort of goal (usually because s/he ‘wants or needs something’), what they don’t always appreciate is that a drama character’s goal, need or want is frequently ‘internal’, whereas a genre character’s is ‘external.’ But how do they differ?
INTERNAL VERSUS EXTERNAL CONFLICT
When it comes to characterisation in ANY screenplay, it’s certainly true that, in most stories, it’s desirable to have a character who wants something and/or has a specific need or goal, leading to their being pitted against certain obstacles in their struggle to achieve it (including, but not limited to, an antagonist character). This causes many writers to question the notion of ‘character-led drama’. What does it mean? Perhaps the most straightforward way of figuring out the differences between drama and genre films is by thinking not of their stories as a whole, but of the conflict that underpins them. Is it internal or external – does it come from within your characters, or from an outside situation? The difference is as follows: