Director James Griffiths and actors/writers Tim Key and Tom Basden always meant to turn their 2007 short film “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island” — about a lottery winner who pays his favorite musician to come to his private island — into a feature film. They just didn’t anticipate that it would take 18 years.
Key, who reprises his role as the eccentric music fan Charles in “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” co-wrote the feature film with Tom Basden. “It felt like we’d missed a trick in a way, in having not done it for so long,” Basden, who once again plays musician Herb McGwyer, said while sitting in TheWrap’s Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt. “We just all loved working with each other so much. We were all so passionate about that short when we finally galvanized ourselves to do it.”
The new film adds more band members who reluctantly agree to the paid reunion, including one played by Carey Mulligan. The “Promising Young Woman” Oscar nominee was pregnant with her third child when she got the pitch, but told TheWrap, “I loved the script immediately, and I thought it was amazing. I thought the short was incredible. I told them, ‘I want to be in it, but I’m going to have a very small, like a three-month old baby.’ And they were like, ‘A mascot, great!’”
Read an except from TheWrap’s interview with the “Wallis Island” team below, and watch our interview in the video above.
This is a crazy good idea. Where did it come from?
Tom Basden: The genesis was about 2007. We had a long list of ideas, and we were trying to work out ones that we thought were funny and found interesting. You read a lot of stories about musicians being flown out by a billionaire to play a gig somewhere, and we felt that was a really fertile subject for a comedy. And the relationship between the client and the artist, there was a lot you could do there. That was the basis for the short.
Tim Key: There’s an inbuilt thing where that’s maybe a bit distasteful, that someone’s got too much money and is kind of a mercenary. The trick was to make them sympathetic characters. It is a very self-contained little fairy tale where they don’t get on, and then they begin to get on, and it ends in a very lovely, warm way.
Tim’s character, Charles, is so particular, so now it makes more sense that you’ve lived with him for a long time.
T.K.: I was in my 20s when we did it the first time, and now it does feel about right. And then with this bit of story that we’ve added, it makes more sense for him to have a past if we find him when he’s a little older. So his relationship and his previous life with this band could have been 15 years ago.
Carey, when did you get involved?
Carey Mulligan: [James Griffiths] and I were in touch about something else. I was a big fan, and I had asked him to host a charity fundraiser, which he flat out refused to do years before. But he had my email address, and so he emailed me. He said, “I don’t want to help the children, but I would like you to be in my film.”
How did you work on building your backstory?
C.M.: They had written such a solid script. Tom had written all the songs and put a harmony in for all of my bits. It felt like so much of the story and their backstory and their history was baked into the script and then also into the songs.
