Emma Thompson talks about playing Mary Poppins’ author, Pl Travers, in Saving Mr Banks. She says she was the most complicated person she ever encountered
What was the difference between the book Mary Poppins’ character and the Mary Poppins on screenIJ
Mary Poppins on-screen had been very much Disneyfied. There’s this somewhat sugary quality to her. She’s not exactly sentimentalised because Julie Andrews made sure that she had a bracing quality but if you read the books, she certainly wasn’t beautiful in the way that Julie’s beautiful. Shepherd’s drawings of Mary Poppins were based on a little Dutch doll, which had a funny little button nose and a little pointy mouth and little black button eyes.
There is darkness to the Mary Poppins character in the movie. Do you agreeIJ
Dark is perhaps the wrong word but she’s certainly not like that in the books at all. You have to take the two things as separate entities. The books have a very particular atmosphere and are rather different to the movie, which has Disney’s and the Sherman brothers’ extraordinary, bubbly-champagne-like life force. Americans have a kind of energy and life force that’s very, very different to Pl’s and to her designedly and forcefully British outlook.
Pl’s one of those people who came to london and became almost more English than the English, correctIJ
Yes. She was born in Australia and her father was Irish. She adored and worshiped her father. He was an alcoholic and emotionally abusive and neglectful actually. He would give and then take away and he landed an awful lot of stuff onto Pl’s very young shoulders. She experienced a lot of trauma as a child in Australia. Her deep desire to be more British than the British, may have come out of a desire to lose her Australian roots, which she perhaps found a bit shameful, and buy into this sense of the mythmakers, the Celtic storytellers, the Irish gift of the gab, which her father so personified for her. Ireland meant so much to her. That mythic quality, which she couldn’t find in Australia for all sorts of reasons, she found in Ireland and in her love of the Irish writers that she adored. She had an extraordinary young womanhood, given the fact that she was the child of a family who didn’t have much and having an alcoholic father who died of drink when she was 10.
What was it like to play this very difficult person, Pl TraversIJ
Pl was a very difficult person to get to know well enough to play. It took me a long time to work it out because she is so complicated. She’s not one thing or another. She was stiff in her posture but sometimes she was not. One moment she would be lounging about in a kimono really at ease with herself and then the next moment be very stiff. I’ve never played anyone more full of contradictions, which makes it fascinating because she oscillates all the time. Her early life interfered so radically and so successfully with her capacity to have relationships and particularly with her relationships with men. Her father had been so emotionally unstable and unreliable that for her, love was always a very tricky thing. There was a brokenness and an emptiness in her. One of the best essays she ever wrote is a piece on sadness and it’s an absolutely fantastic bit of writing because she understood sadness very well. She understood its importance. So there’s something deeply tragic about her but at the same time she was also very funny, inadvertently. I don’t think she meant to be funny. She was a wonderful case study, requiring so many different shades. She’s one of the most complicated people I’ve ever encountered.
Did you learn anything about Walt Disney while you were doing this filmIJ
Walt Disney is the most fascinating character. I had no idea about his childhood. Walt’s childhood was brutal. The trouble is that as children we think that everything our parents do is right. So he thought it was right that he should be sent out at 5:30 in the morning in snowdrifts eight-feet high to deliver newspapers and do that again at night when he could barely move. He was far too young to be worked in that way. He would fall asleep in the snowdrifts — it’s a wonder that he survived. Disney didn’t know anything about Pamela Travers’ childhood. He didn’t know about her difficulties and the fact that she had to prevent her mother from committing suicide and became responsible for her siblings. What she suffered as a child makes it very clear why she behaved the way she did in later years. Dick Sherman, when he was watching us make the movie, said that he wished he had known because it would have made things easier to comprehend.
Is it hard to imagine anyone else playing Walt Disney but Tom HanksIJ
Yes, it’s difficult to imagine anybody but Tom playing Walt Disney. We have known each other for a long time, so when this was being cast I rang him up and said, “This is just so perfect.” Tom’s fascinated by Disney and knows a lot about him. There’s something faintly similar to the pair of them-their enduring popularity and their sort of every man quality and a huge kind of a charm.