What Do ‘Candyman’ and ‘Peter Pan & Wendy’ Have in Common? A Director Explains.

It was “E.T. the Extra-Terrestial” that turned David Lowery right into a lifelong fan of “Peter Pan,” particularly the scene during which a mom reads the part about Tinkerbell’s doable demise to her daughter whereas the pleasant alien hides within the closet. “You just watch E.T. listening to that story, and it’s so emotionally resonant that it hooked me to ‘Peter Pan,’ no pun intended, more than any film version of it did early on,” Lowery mentioned.

For his second live-action retelling of a traditional Disney movie — following “Pete’s Dragon” (2016) — Lowery imagined his personal variation on Neverland in “Peter Pan & Wendy,” with the younger actors Alexander Molony and Ever Anderson within the title roles and Jude Law because the villainous Captain Hook. Initially, nevertheless, Lowery underestimated the duty.

“When I first took the job, I thought, ‘It’s Peter Pan, how hard could it be?’ It turned out to be the hardest but most exhilarating creative endeavor I’ve done to date,” he mentioned. The issue, he thinks, stemmed from his need to introduce a brand new shade to a fairy story whereas honoring the story’s legacy.

The authentic J.M. Barrie novel about Peter Pan and Wendy in addition to the quite a few movie variations — Steven Spielberg’s “Hook,” P.J. Hogan’s “Peter Pan,” Joe Wright’s “Pan” and, after all, Disney’s 1953 animated rendering, amongst them — all swirled in Lowery’s thoughts as he reconsidered the boy who by no means grows up.

Speaking throughout a current video interview from Cologne, Germany, Lowery, 42, laid out a number of the much less apparent influences for his reimagining of “Peter Pan & Wendy,” now streaming on Disney+.

Peter Pan’s Flight at Disneyland

To stay trustworthy to Disney’s tackle “Peter Pan,” Lowery carefully noticed Peter Pan’s Flight, one of many authentic rides at Disneyland based mostly on the 1953 movie. The attraction, he mentioned, “represents the movie distilled into a physical experience.” Although stunningly crafted, some the animated movie’s defining iconography, most notably the picture of Captain Hook straddling the jaws of the crocodile, has a larger affect on youthful audiences after they see it immortalized in three dimensions in Peter Pan’s Flight.

That the old school theatrical illusions the journey employs, like using compelled perspective for London’s skyline, might nonetheless elicit surprise even in an age of digital results, impressed him. Lowery rode Peter Pan’s Flight whereas making ready to shoot “Peter Pan & Wendy,” and listening to the excited reactions of youngsters and adults alike reminded him of how beloved the animated model is. “Seeing this film condensed into a theme park ride, I realized the weight that these stories, as told by Disney, have in popular culture,” he mentioned.

‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’

Lowery first watched the Steven Spielberg motion journey on the tender age of seven, and it instantly ignited his artistic aspirations. “It’s a real kitchen-sink experience,” he mentioned. “It’s a musical, it’s a drama, it’s a romance, it’s a horror film.” For the emotional method to “Peter Pan & Wendy,” Lowery drew on the eclectic tone of “Temple of Doom” in addition to its juvenile humorousness.

When creating the pirate hideout Skull Rock, Lowery tried to evoke the underground mines, in a cavernous area illuminated by lava, the place the movie’s Temple of Doom was situated. “There’s also one shot in particular of Tiger Lily, the Lost Boys and Wendy looking down as John and Michael are about to be executed that is a direct homage to Indy, Willie Scott and Short Round looking down into the temple as the poor gentleman is about to be sacrificed to Kali,” Lowery defined.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Lowery sought to reconceptualize how Peter Pan and Tinkerbell are launched to the Darling youngsters. As he wrote the sequence during which Tinkerbell sprinkles Wendy with pixie mud, ostensibly to drift her all the best way to Neverland earlier than she wakes up, the picture of the sleeping girl levitating within the Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s surrealist “Mirror” (1975) got here to thoughts. He added a display seize of that second to his look-book after which replicated it with Wendy.

‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World’

To differentiate his film from conventional pirate movies, together with Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, Lowery seemed to Peter Weir’s 2003 high-seas saga, which knowledgeable how he considered Captain Hook and his crew. Instead of mere scoundrels, Lowery noticed Captain Hook’s males as pirates playacting as troopers and Hook himself as a decaying model of Captain Jack Aubrey (performed by Russell Crowe in “Master and Commander”).

“I believed, ‘What if Captain Hook at some point commandeered a Napoleonic vessel and executed all the other soldiers on board and he and his pirates took over this ship and he now thought of himself as an admiral on the HMS Bounty?” Lowery said. To help the actors, the director brought in consultants to teach them how to realistically operate a ship. One bit of unexpected synchronicity: John DeSantis, who plays Bill Jukes in Lowery’s fantasy, additionally appeared in Weir’s Oscar-winning movie.

Since Captain Hook is horrified on the notion that he has grown up, Lowery launched the concept that he dyes his hair. “He wants to maintain his youth as an affront to Peter,” Lowery defined. The inspiration got here from Luchino Visconti’s “Death in Venice”: In the Italian director’s historic drama, an growing old composer performed by Dirk Bogarde colours his hair and wears make-up to seem youthful. “At the end, when he’s on the beach, the hair dye just starts running down his face, exposing the deceit at the heart of Bogarde’s character,” Lowery mentioned.

Bill the Butcher and ‘Candyman’

For Captain Hook’s picture, Lowery drew from a number of sources. When he first pitched the undertaking to the studio, he edited a hook for a hand onto a photograph of a mustachioed Daniel Day-Lewis in Nineteenth-century apparel as Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York.” “That became the Captain Hook I saw in my mind while I was writing the script,” he recalled.

With the hook itself, Lowery wished to steer clear of the exact, shiny units utilized in different variations, like Spielberg’s “Hook.” The one Jude Law would wield in “Peter Pan & Wendy” needed to appear like a much less refined, “pugilistic instrument of violence.” Lowery gave the prop division a picture of the actor Tony Todd in Bernard Rose’s 1992 horror movie “Candyman,” a few ghostly killer with a hook for a lacking hand. “We want it to be rusty,” Lowery added, “and to feel like it was a piece of metal that he pulled from the boat and had a blacksmith hammer into a barely usable form.”

‘Raising Arizona’

There’s a vivid montage close to the top of Lowery’s film that reveals Wendy’s grownup life. She overcomes nostalgia and embraces the potential that lies forward. “I wanted to capture the idea that growing up could be a beautiful thing,” he mentioned. The montage is an allusion to a sequence, generally known as “Dream of the Future,” within the offbeat Coen brothers comedy “Raising Arizona,” specifically the shot the place the kidnapper H. I. McDunnough (performed by Nicolas Cage) imagines himself and his spouse in outdated age with their massive household gathered round a desk. “As someone who is still in the process of growing up, it’s really helpful for me, on a therapeutic level, to see a character look at the future with a sense of wonder and anticipation,” Lowery mentioned.