Marc Forster understands pain. It’s knowledge he’s had since childhood, when a globetrotting mother and physician father left him in the care of a full-time nanny, and a schizophrenic older brother forced him to ponder life’s deeper questions.
To escape the loneliness, Forster invented imaginary worlds under the snowcapped Alpine peaks near his family home in Davos, Switzerland—kingdoms where heroes performed courageous acts and good always triumphed over evil.
“We’re all storytellers to a certain degree,” says Forster earnestly. “We’re actors in our own stories. Every day we make decisions as to how our movies turn out.”
It’s no wonder that the man who eventually directed Monster’s Ball—which made Halle Berry the first African-American woman to win a Best Actress Oscar—chose to go into filmmaking. After all, films provide not only a blank slate for the imagination, but also the perfect escape from reality.
“Every creative person is inspired by parts of their own life and experiences,” Forster says, sitting on the sofa of his suite in Atlanta’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel. He’s here promoting his latest film, Finding Neverland, which stars Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. “I grew up trying to escape day-to-day life.”
Forster is a quiet, unassuming man. Wearing jeans and a faded blue T-shirt advertising Paul Frank, he moves softly around the room, shyly smiling and offering me a drink.
He’s living the dream of any filmmaker, surrounded by A-list stars and sought out by successful producers. But despite his achievements, which afford Forster little time to enjoy his beachfront home in Venice, Calif., the 35-year-old director is nervous. He sits on the edge of his chair and rubs his hands together, speaking with quiet intensity.
“The ultimate test is your own death. You have to let go of your body,” he muses. “Life is about being in the moment and letting go.”
He was close to his brother, Wolfgang, he says, who committed suicide several years after Forster graduated from film school.
“Wolfgang was a brilliant intellectual—a genius—but the medicine destroyed his mind. It numbs you,” Forster explains, his blue eyes widening for just a moment. “He loved me especially, because I took him seriously. He trusted me more than anyone else. We had a bond.”
It’s not surprising that Forster’s next film, Stay, now in post-production, tells the story of a psychologist whose suicidal client makes bizarre predictions that come true.
“We’re all slightly schizophrenic as human beings,” says Forster, lifting two slender shoulders. “We just don’t share it.”
His brother’s suicide, he says, was painful, but like everything else in Forster’s life—including his father’s passing in 1998—he moved on from it, choosing to focus on his work.
He cloaks the pain well, keeping it deep within his reserved manner, but it continually hovers, pulling back and then reaching forward again, as if touching his elbow to remind him of its presence. But always Forster ignores it, shrugging off its clutches.
“You can’t live in the past,” he says. “We only have the now. The past forms us, but it’s not relevant to the present.”
In addition to the other harrowing lessons of his youth, Forster also discovered the fleeting nature of wealth. After growing up in various homes populated by servants, Forster’s father sold his medical practice, then lost everything to poor investments. Suddenly, the family had no way to pay Forster’s college tuition.
“My father was never interested in money,” he says simply.
So the young Swiss, in a move foreshadowing his future career, began fundraising. He’d caught the film bug at 13, after seeing Apocalypse Now; he knew he wanted to attend film school. Determined to study in the United States, he wrote letters to his parents’ wealthiest friends, requesting assistance.
Persuaded by the young man’s passion, an advertising executive and family friend agreed to pay for his first year of classes at NYU film school. After seeing Forster’s student films, the Frenchman agreed to fund the rest of Forster’s education, including his living expenses. Forster estimates his benefactor must have invested at least $100,000, and he has refused to let Forster pay him back.
“He did it because he believed in me,” Forster explains. “Without him, I wouldn’t be here today. It was a miracle.”
After graduation in 1993, Forster produced two documentaries for European television and then moved to Los Angeles, determined to direct features. He loved New York but couldn’t take the crowds. He shakes his head, as if to ward off the memory. “It was too much city—too many people.”
Forster’s debut film, Loungers, an absurdist musical he wrote about a group of wannabe lounge singers, won the 1996 Audience Award at the Slamdance International Film Festival. Forster also wrote the screenplay for his second film, Everything Put Together, which was released in 2000. It starred Radha Mitchell as a mother ostracized by her community after the death of her baby from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The film premiered at Sundance and earned Forster the Movado Someone to Watch/ Independent Spirit Award.
Insiders had long dubbed Monster’s Ball—the love story of a white, prison guard and the black widow of an executed death-row inmate—as one of the best scripts in Hollywood, so it was somewhat surprising when the relatively inexperienced Forster was tapped as director. But, like Forster’s education, the risk paid off. Monster’s Ball received two Oscar nominations and established Forster as a director capable of portraying raw emotion with unflinching honesty.
And Monster’s Ball convinced producer Richard Gladstein that Forster was the right director for Finding Neverland.
“The depth of character and subtlety in all the performances convinced me that Marc would bring something unique and special to the project,” Gladstein says.
In Finding Neverland, Johnny Depp portrays Scottish playwright J.M. Barrie, author of the great classic, Peter Pan: The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this December. The movie was shot at London’s Kensington Gardens, the historic Saville Club and Brompton Cemetery, and the Richmond Theatre in Surrey, a lavish stage built in 1899 that was recently restored.
Finding Neverland begins during opening night at one of Barrie’s productions. When the play is panned, he’s disappointed but not surprised. Long bored with the confines of traditional theatre, Barrie lets the feeling creep into his writing.
The next day, while walking his St. Bernard in Kensington Gardens, Barrie meets the Llewelyn Davies family: four fatherless boys and their recently widowed bohemian mother, played by Kate Winslet. Touched by their grief, Barrie befriends the family—to the dismay of the children’s grandmother (Julie Christie) and Barrie’s socialite wife (Radha Mitchell). Together, Barrie and the boys find a new life together through the fantastical games Barrie creates.
Despite the initial doubts of his wealthy American backer, the real-life Barrie found great success with his story about three young children who learn to believe in the impossible and discover the magical world of Neverland after a visit from Peter Pan and his companion, Tinkerbell. Reporters wrote that during the play’s opening performance at the Duke of York Theatre in late December 1904, audience members clapped so heartily to proclaim their belief in fairies that the actress playing Peter Pan burst into tears. Curtain calls lasted late into the night.
David Magee’s screenplay was adapted from Alan Knee’s award-winning stage play, The Man Who Would Be Peter Pan, and is inspired by true events in Barrie’s life, including his friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family—the source of Barrie’s inspiration for Peter Pan.
“The screenplay I wrote is not a factual retelling of what happened to James Barrie when he wrote Peter Pan,” says Magee. “I wanted to tell a story about what it means to grow up and become responsible for those around you. I hope people see the film as a respectful tribute to Barrie’s creative genius and come away with a feeling that, as human beings, we can grow up without losing all aspects of childhood innocence and wonder.”
Finding Neverland telescopes the seven years Barrie actually spent with the Llewelyn Davies family into a much shorter period. And while there’s no evidence Barrie and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies actually had an affair, Barrie did propose to her; onscreen, however, their relationship is more ambiguous.
“At the end of the day, this is a love story, but it’s about the love between Barrie and a whole family,” says Winslet, who plays the unconventional widow.
“The film never seems to go quite where you expect it to go,” says Depp. “It never turns into a sentimental love story of two people destined to be together or that sort of thing. Instead, it’s a much more complicated and moving relationship between two people who need each other on a level that’s really beyond explanation or words.”
Magee worked on the script just before the birth of his first child and the death of his father, who lost his battle with cancer.
“I was thinking intensely about what it means to grow up and to become aware that time really is chasing after all of us,” he says. “For me, this story is about a man who is starting to face these issues in his own life.”
Magee also wanted to explore the juxtaposition between life and art and how the two inform one another.
“There is this notion that creative people hold onto their childhoods longer than the rest of us, but there are moments throughout our lives that weigh on us heavily that we need to explore through storytelling and art,” he says. “Barrie’s brilliance in Peter Pan is that he expressed both the joy in childhood and just how bittersweet it is when you have to leave it behind. He took this very real and universal experience and made it something magnificent and special.”
“When I read the script,” says Forster, “it touched me in a profound way about the music of life, immortality and reality versus fantasy. There was something magical about it.”
But before taking on the project, the director first had to tackle the issue of Barrie’s legacy, which had been sullied by vague allegations of misconduct between him and the Llewelyn Davies boys. Fortunately, Forster’s prodigious research revealed those accusations to be highly unlikely.
“I didn’t want to make a movie about a pedophile, but he wasn’t,” Forster insists.
The script met with the approval of Nico Llewelyn Davies, the youngest of the five boys. Although Nico is not portrayed in the film, he lived with Barrie after his mother’s death and regarded Barrie as his father. His daughter has a brief cameo in the movie, as a theatergoer who proclaims that one of the Llewelyn Davies boys must be Peter, to which the boy replies, “No, I’m not Peter—he is!” and points to Barrie.
Biographer Andrew Birkin, in his definitive biography of Barrie, J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, noted that Nico was unequivocal about any possible misconduct between the playwright and the Llewelyn Davies boys. “Had he had these leanings in however slight a symptom, I would have been aware,” Birkin wrote. “He was an innocent, which is why he could write Peter Pan.”
Part of a celebrated circle of writers that included Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson, Barrie was one of the most successful and wealthiest playwrights of his generation. His work includes more than 40 plays (many of which were major stage hits, largely due to their biting satire of London’s class-driven society), six novels, seven works of nonfiction, and numerous collections. However, Barrie is most remembered for Peter Pan. Not only did the production become an epic story; it demonstrated children were a viable audience and sparked a revolution in children’s literature. It also left a cultural and linguistic legacy that included the Peter Pan collar, the girl’s name “Wendy,” and—of course—the word “Neverland.”
Depp says he was drawn to the lead role by his own memories of Peter Pan. “It’s truly a work of genius,” he says. “It’s a masterpiece of imagination, and the result of the most remarkable inspiration. It’s one of those rare perfect things in the world that will always be with us, and this was a wonderful opportunity to explore where such a powerful story might have come from.”
Dustin Hoffman took the part of Barrie’s benefactor, Charles Frohman, because he was impressed with Forster’s direction—and because he wanted to work with Depp. He was also intrigued by the impresario’s profound commitment to the arts.
“What interested me about Frohman is that he’s quite hesitant and reluctant to produce Peter Pan, a play with fairies, pirates and crocodiles that he can’t imagine will be accepted by sophisticated London theatergoers,” says Hoffman. “Yet Frohman was the rarefied producer who had the ability to sense that, by definition, genius is excelling at something that hasn’t been done yet, something in which the artist goes out on a limb. He let Barrie take a risk, and it paid off for the whole world.”
The real Charles Frohman—known as “the Napoleon of drama”—was renowned for his ability to spot new talent. In addition to Barrie, Frohman sponsored Oscar Wilde and W. Somerset Maugham and made Broadway stars out of—among others—John Drew, Ethel Barrymore, Julia Marlowe and Henry Miller. He died tragically at the height of his career, when the ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine.
Echoing his playwright protégé, Frohman’s final words were reportedly, “Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.”
Though Neverland recounts the turning point in a renowned writer’s life, Forster resists comparisons to Shakespeare in Love and Topsy-Turvy. “They are about the transformative power of theater, whereas Finding Neverland is about the power of imagination.” That power, he insists, is something rapidly eroding for children today. “In Western society,” Forster continues, his voice rising for the first time in an hour, “we live off consumerism. Parents have less and less time to spend with their children, especially since both are working. Ultimately, that’s not human, and I hope that children will rebel against this trend of television and video games. In the Victorian era, we thought of childhood as a special, magical time. We need to recover that.”
It’s this urgency to return to the simpler things of life, Forster says, that he hopes to portray in this film. Appropriately enough, he takes his inspiration from Barrie himself.
In his stage directions, the playwright wrote, “All characters, whether grown-ups or babes, must wear a child’s outlook as their only important adornment.” This instruction became Finding Neverland’s guiding light and was included in early drafts of the script, so that not only the actors but also the crew would understand the intention behind the film.
The result is a luminous work infused with many of the same themes that make Peter Pan so resonant: the surprising power of creativity, the nostalgia for childhood innocence and the longing to believe in something more enchanted than everyday life.
Today, critics still argue about the message in Peter Pan. Did Barrie believe clinging to childhood was a triumph or a bittersweet tragedy? The historical record remains silent, but those like Marc Forster who rewrite history through the lens of cinema cling to the playwright’s message about—what else?—the wonder of the imagination.
“I saw the film as a story about the power of a man’s creativity to take people to another world, and about the deep human need for illusions, dreams and beliefs that inspire us even in the face of tragedy,” Forster says. “For me, it’s about the transformative power of imagination—as being able to transform yourself into something greater than you are, even if nobody believes in you.”
But can a story about fairies really do all that?
“Believing in fairies is like believing in unconditional love, opening your heart to life,” he insists.
As I listen to him, I wonder if perhaps Marc Forster has finally found his Neverland, after all.
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