Finding Neverland (2004)
Trivia
At the end of the movie, when J.M. Barrie is showing the play to Sylvia at her house, Peter Pan asked them to clap their hands to save Tinker Bell. Julie Christie's reaction to this was to immediately start clapping. This was unplanned, and the children had no idea how to respond to it. The look of shock on their faces is real.
During the opening scene, most of the extras wanted to go through the left door so they could shake Dustin Hoffman's hand.
Johnny Depp was so impressed with the performance of Freddie Highmore during filming that when Depp was cast for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), he specifically requested Highmore to play the title character of Charlie.
In real life, Michael Llewelyn Davies was J.M. Barrie's inspiration for Peter Pan. Michael, not Peter, was said to be Barrie's favorite of the children. It's not certain why Barrie chose to name the main character Peter. One idea is because of his brothers, Peter behaved the most like an adult at a young age. Barrie wished he'd had more of a childhood, so he immortalized him as the symbol of youth.
During the formal dinner scene, Johnny Depp placed a "fart machine" under Julie Christie's chair. He had a remote control that he used to trigger a fart sound from the device. The children are laughing more at that than from playing with the spoons.
In the film, Sir James Matthew Barrie (Johnny Depp) spies Charles Frohman (Dustin Hoffman) reading through the Peter Pan Playbill, mocking the character names. The original script, however, called for Dustin Hoffman to be dressed in Captain Hook's costume as he playfully read the Playbill. Upon reading that scene, Dustin said to director Marc Forster, "I'm not being Hook (1991) again!" The script was then changed.
When J.M. Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies family are travelling by buggy to James' wife's cottage, a flock of sheep stops in front of the buggy, forcing it to stop. The buggy is an original from the late 1800s, and it had to be pushed over a hill to make it go. To cover for stopping suddenly at the base of the hill, director Marc Forster decided to have sheep block the road.
Director Marc Forster decided to schedule one of Freddie Highmore 's toughest scenes (where he tears up a book and demolishes a playhouse) on his second day of filming, deliberately, so other cast members could see the child act, and change their attitudes towards working with him.
At the beginning of the movie, when Barrie is seen pacing the corridor outside the auditorium, the carpet under his feet is worn and thread bare, suggesting that many playwrights had paced there many times. This was inspired by the playwright Neil Simon, who makes mention of it in his autobiography, which one of the film's writers had read.
This film was originally scheduled to be released in fall 2003, but Columbia Pictures, which had the rights to Sir J.M. Barrie's play for their film Peter Pan (2003), refused to allow Miramax to use certain scenes from the play in this movie if it were released at the same time. Miramax agreed to delay the release of this movie by one year, in exchange for the rights to use Barrie's words.
In the movie, Arthur Llewelyn-Davies has already died before Sylvia and James meet. In real life, the couple were alive and well, even at the premiere of J.M. Barrie's play Peter Pan.
Johnny Depp was the first cast member to sign on to the film. Kate Winslet was next.
The cowboys-and-Indians scene begins with a sign for the "Great Ormond Mining Co." This is a reference to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, which owns the rights to the play.
Dustin Hoffman appeared in two films about "Peter Pan" (Hook (1991) and this movie). Following his appearance in Hook (1991), close friend and former roommate Gene Hackman began calling him "Hook" as a joke. The name stuck, and his contemporaries call him by that nickname to this day.
There were actually five Davies children. The fifth child, Nicholas "Nico" Llewelyn Davies, has a hard-to-notice spot in the play. He is part of the inspiration for Michael Nicholas Darling. Since he was very young, and many people in the play don't notice him, he wasn't included in the film. His daughter, Laura Duguid, appears in the film. After the first performance, she says something like, "You're Peter Pan?"
According to producer Richard N. Gladstein, more than fifty directors passed on the project.
This movie was created into a Broadway musical that opened on April 15, 2015. The opening cast included Matthew Morrison and Kelsey Grammer. The production closed on August 21, 2016 after five hundred sixty-five performances.
When Charles Frohman (Dustin Hoffman) is told about the idea of a boy who would never grow up, his hand is in his jacket. Hoffman had been sitting in a folding chair that collapsed, severing the tip of one of his fingers. The doctor ordered that his hand remain above his heart.
Ian Hart, who plays Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had played Doyle's creation, Dr. John Watson (travelling companion and biographer of Sherlock Holmes), in The Hound of the Baskervilles (2002).
There were three scenes deleted from the film. Directly after filming these scenes, Johnny Depp told Marc Forster that they would end up deleting those scenes. He was right.
Although Barrie requests 25 seats in his audience for the orphans, there are only 15 orphans credited in the cast.
Jim Carrey was considered for the role of Sir J.M. Barrie.
While George is the oldest of the four boys, Nick Roud, who plays him, is actually a year younger than Joe Prospero, who plays his younger brother and the second eldest, Jack.
Although Johnny Depp was only slightly younger making this film than J.M. Barrie was at the time of the events depicted, he is too tall for the role (Barrie was notably short, and sometimes joked that he was smaller than his dog) and plays it clean-shaven, whereas Barrie was almost always photographed with a huge walrus mustache.
Although Sylvia's mother is named as "Mrs. Du Maurier", the film makes nothing of the fact that Sylvia's father, who goes unmentioned, was the famous Victorian novelist George L. Du Maurier, author of "Trilby" and "Peter Ibbetson". This is curious, as the latter novel was greatly admired by J.M. Barrie, and his dog, Porthos, who features prominently in this film, was named, not after the character in "The Three Musketeers", but after Peter Ibbetson's dog in the novel. The real Barrie was very much aware of the theatrical and literary connections of the Llewellyn Davies family, which are not alluded to in the film.
The American theatrical producer Charles Frohman, played by Dustin Hoffman in this film, often worked in London and was indeed J.M. Barrie's usual impresario, also introducing the author's plays to Broadway. However, when "Peter Pan" opened for the first time in London, he was actually in New York, not present at the opening as this film shows. Also, whereas Dustin Hoffman's Frohman is repeatedly shown as being extremely dubious about the enterprise, the real Frohman was extremely enthusiastic about "Peter Pan" from the outset; it was J.M. Barrie who felt certain the play would flop.
As of 2018, the only time Dustin Hoffman has appeared in a Best Picture Oscar nominated film and does not play a lead character.
Toby Jones & Mackenzie Crook have been in a number of projects together:
- Christopher Robin (2018)
- Detectorists (2014)
- Muppets Most Wanted (2014)
- The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
- Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010)
- City of Ember (2008)
- Finding Neverland (2004)
Johnny Depp, Mackenzie Crook, and Angus Barnett all appeared in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) the previous year. Depp uses the Captain Jack Sparrow accent during the pirate fantasy scene.
This is Toby Jones and Marc Forster's first film together. Their next film is Christopher Robin (2018).
Tied with Women in Love (1969) for the most BAFTA Film Award nominations without winning a single award, with 11 nominations.
Director Cameo
Marc Forster: One of the workers when J.M. Barrie visits the costume room at the playhouse.
Spoilers
Laura Duguid, the youngest child's daughter, brought to the set the engagement ring that Sir J.M. Barrie wanted to offer to Sylvia with a proposal in real life. Sylvia died before he had the chance.
Peter Llewelyn Davies, Sir J.M. Barrie's child muse and inspiration for Peter Pan, was troubled by the public moniker. In 1963, at the age of 63, he threw himself under a train. George Llewelyn, a soldier in the First World War, died at the age of 21. Michael Llewelyn drowned at the age of 20 under mysterious circumstances.
There is no wrap-up information about the characters at the end of the film, as is quite often the case with true stories when filmed, probably because the future stories of many of the leading characters proved to be tragic ones. Two of the "lost boys" predeceased J.M. Barrie, who is said to have been broken by these deaths, whilst the impresario Charles Frohman was, in 1915, one of many Americans who lost their lives as a result of the sinking of the "Lusitania".
