Interview (Part 3): Kelly Marcel

Scott Myers

04 Dec 2013 • 5 min read

London-based writer Kelly Marcel wrote the 2011 Black List screenplay Saving Mr. Banks which was produced starring Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Colin Farrell, and Paul Giamatti. She is involved writing several other high profile movie projects including The Little Mermaid and Fifty Shades of Grey.

Kelly and I engaged in a wide-ranging Q&A, the focus of which is her thought process in writing Saving Mr. Banks. You will find her responses insightful, frank and hugely entertaining. Today in Part 3, Kelly sheds light on some of the unconventional choices she made in writing Saving Mr. Banks:

Scott: The script [Saving Mr. Banks] is notable not only for the craft that went into writing it, but also many of its many creative choices which run counter to Hollywood’s conventional wisdom. For starters, the standard advice of agents or managers is for a writer to put out a spec script that can appeal to as many buyers as possible, yet Saving Mr. Banks is a story where there is only one potential buyer: Disney. No one else could touch a project that stars Walt Disney and features one of the company’s most beloved movies Marry Poppins. Could you describe your thought process in deciding to take on this project despite the extremely long odds against it ever getting sold, let alone produced?

Kelly: I was incredibly naïve. I never ever considered that it could only get made by Disney before or during writing it. I just wanted to do it. I loved it, I wanted to write it, and that was that. It was only afterwards that I thought: “Oh fuckitty shitballs! This ain’t EVER getting made. Oh well, it’s a nice sample. Onwards.”

Luckily, Disney had other ideas; they embraced the script and moved very quickly to buy it and make it. And that’s also when I stopped saying “fuckitty shitballs” because you can’t say that if you work for Disney.

Scott: Disney not only bought the script, they made the movie. Is it fair to look at Saving Mr. Banks as a testament for writers to pursue stories they’re truly passionate about, no matter the odds?

Kelly: 100 per cent. 100 million gazillion per cent. And a million gazillion doesn’t even exist but that’s how much I think writers should only pursue stories they are passionate about. I say this from experience. I say this as someone who has written things I am not fervent about and they are 100 million gazillion per cent SHIT.

Scott: Another thing: Saving Mr. Banks is a period piece, taking place between two time periods, 1906 and some five decades later. Conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that period pieces are both harder to sell to audiences and add costs to the budget due to costumes, sets, and so forth. Did the concern of writing a period piece ever cross your mind?

Kelly: Gosh. Is that so? I didn’t know that so, no. Oops, writing a period piece right now! Bugger. Oh well, don’t care! I’m all about making it as hard for myself as possible it seems.

Scott: One hears constantly in the halls of Hollywood: Create a sympathetic protagonist. Yet the Pamela Travers we meet and get to know in Act One seems to do pretty much all she can to put off people around her. Were you at all concerned when you were originally writing the script, you’d get this script note: Make Pamela more sympathetic? Did you ever receive that note?

Kelly: I never ever received that note during the writing of the script. Alison trusted me to let it unfold. However, I did have to give the note to myself. Not that I wanted PL to be more sympathetic but that I felt we needed to see a tiny shard of light, a sliver of humanity and that’s how Ralph came to be. He was a very very late addition to the script. I had finished the draft and it still didn’t feel right to me. Her core felt like it remained unseen. I needed someone to like her, and Ralph did and could, because he simply didn’t see her darkness, so overwhelmed with the darkness in his own life was he.

Scott: One of the dynamics that is so delicious in the story’s setup exists precisely because Pamela has such a stern, joyless persona and that is the expectation of her iceberg colliding with Disneyland, the Happiest Place on Earth, and its founder Walt Disney. How important was that dynamic to you in developing Pamela’s character and the story’s set-‐up?

Kelly: I didn’t really think about the dynamic in that way. I don’t believe that the soul of Disney was the happiest place on Earth either. I was much more interested in the idea that these two people would eventually find out they were the same. They had just chosen different paths. Different ways of dealing with past pain and moving forward whilst still clutching onto it. Disney had clearly found the better, healthier way, but both of them were defined by what happened to them in their formative years. They just couldn’t see it in each other until everything was on the line for both of them.

Scott: One other narrative element in Saving Mr. Banks that cuts against conventional wisdom: the use of flashbacks. In your script, you not only use flashbacks, you embrace them as an essential story device, by my count employed at least a dozen times. Could you delve into your rationale for framing the narrative cross-‐cutting between these two timelines: The adult Pamela circa 1960 and the young girl Ginty in 1906?

Kelly: The upshot of the whole story depends on us knowing what happened to Pamela in her childhood. It could not be done any other way. The hard part of it was to make it feel like the flashbacks were part of a whole movie and not a singular film in their own right.

Pamela’s whole life was affected momentously by the death of Travers. She could not find a way to bring meaning to his demise. She couldn’t forgive herself for not saving him and so journeyed to another world to find relief. But even in creating a magical nanny, she could not find the closure she needed. We had to understand the smaller her so that we cared about the bigger her’s catharsis in the end. We had to earn it with her.

Scott: So in a way, there is a story within a story within a story: There is the overarching presence of “Mary Poppins” as written by Pamela Travers; the narrative of how that story went through script development at Disney; and the narrative of Pamela’s past focusing on the relationship of Ginty and her father, a creative but deeply troubled soul. What were some of the challenges you had as a writer in balancing all of those narratives?

Kelly: As above, it was very hard not to make it feel like all the stories were their own little tales. It was imperative that they spoke to one another. The challenge was in making sure the emphasis was never in one place for too long and that each timeline had its own merit. That each moving story part impact the next moving part and caused a domino effect, keeping the story moving forward at all times. It could never be still, until the monologue at the end. I was concerned that we would wish we were in another timeline when we were in the one at hand, that the Disney story didn’t overwhelm the Australia story and vice versa. Each had to keep us wanting more.

And yes, it was a total bugger to achieve. If anyone heard wailing and a head banging against a wall in a shed in a garden in Twickenham at that time, then it was most probably me.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Kelly gets into the mechanics of handling the numerous time transitions in Saving Mr. Banks and how much fun it was to write dialogue for the Pamela Travers character.

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