Pan director Joe Wright followed up his Comic-Con appearance by unveiling his first foray into blockbuster-scale movie-making to a UK audience, revealing an ambitious new take on an well-known story. Not that he was as daunted by Peter Pans that had gone before as he was by “taking on a film with this scale and using CGI, which I’ve never done before,” he admitted.
Wright described Pan as “a love letter” to the source material rather than an adaptation.
The footage didn’t only confirm its prequel-ish origin-story approach (how Peter — newcomer Levi Miller — gets to Neverland; how Hook — Garrett Hedlund — becomes, er, Hook), it also showed his twists on the tale: setting it during World War Two (flying galleons versus Spitfires!), getting Hugh Jackman to push himself to new dark and crazy places as bad-guy Blackbeard, feeding in contemporary elements (the Lost Boys — or Lost-Boys-to-be — singing 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'), and bringing his own bold, colourful style to the spectacle (one fight scene takes place on a huge trampoline).
“It’s a world as envisaged by a boy,” Wright explained of his unique aesthetic. “A pre-pubescent boy, so it’s not about all that teenage cool. I tried very hard not to make anything cool!” At the same time, he rooted everything in real-world locations, like Mexican crystal caves, Vietnam, the jungles of the Congo, which, he said, “we could then exaggerate.”
As to why a serious, grown-up filmmaker would want to take on a famliy film, he cited his own son as an inspiration, while half-apologetically adding that in making it he discovered his “own inner child.” Yet, he adds, “it’s quite a mischievous film. There’s quite a lot of silliness that will appeal to adults. It’s quite anarchic, it’s quite open-hearted. With a bit of Nirvana in it… for the dads!”