'We do Tenet for 9-year-olds': 'The Magic Faraway Tree' director Ben Gregor made an old-school adventure with modern techniques

Elisabetta BianchiniSun, August 23, 2026 at 8:28 PM UTC

0

Bringing whimsy and fantasy back to movie theatres, The Magic Faraway Tree (now in theatres), based on Enid Blyton's book series, adapted by Simon Farnaby and directed by Ben Gregor, has the kind of charm and multigenerational appeal reminiscent of films like Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. While the book series began its release in 1939, the movie, with a star-studded cast including Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Nicola Coughlan, Jessica Gunning and Rebecca Ferguson, was adapted for a modern audience in a way that makes its themes more relevant than ever.

The film is centred on the Thompson family, beginning when Polly (Foy) resigns from her job after discovering that the company she works for has installed hidden cameras in the smart fridge she designed to spy on consumers. That's when Polly, her husband Tim (Garfield) and their three children, Joe (Phoenix Laroche), Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy) and Fran (Billie Gadsdon), move to a remote village, close to where Tim grew up.

Near their new home is a tree inhabited by magical characters, including a fairy named Silky (Coughlan), and the kids are transported to different fantastical worlds and have enchanted adventures that ultimately help the family reconnect.

What's clear in The Magic Faraway Tree is the real commitment from everyone involved to make a movie that feels robust, detailed, and fantastical, visually impressive and has a strong sense of wonder. That includes the film's stars, including Bridgerton and Big Mood star Nicola Coughlan, who brought such a deep sense of magic to the film.

"For a lot of the film, … she is smaller, in fairy mode, flying around, and normally you don't get an actor for that, you just read them in. … But Nic just turned up every day, sitting in a hoodie, and this is when she was doing all these massive fashion shoots, and we just had her just in a chair, just reading in for the kids. She's like, 'Well, if it's going to make the kids' performance better, I'm going to be there,'" Gregor told Yahoo Canada in Toronto. "Nic brought such heart and creativity to the role of Silky. We were so lucky to have her."

The Magic Faraway Tree (VVS Films)'That's how we beat the machines, is by teasing them'

From the most magical moments of the movie to its more grounded character-driven elements, Gregor wanted to ensure there was a "unified tone" for the film, which included a very "wholesome" feel across every tangible element in The Magic Faraway Tree.

"I had this phrase, 'Blytopia.' It's Enid Blyton and utopia together. And we would just … check things like, 'Is it Blytopia?'" Gregor saidin Toronto.

"We decided to have no plastic, there's no plastic in the whole film, and all the things that they have in their barn … were all real, salvaged things, so there was a real sense of a found, thrift shop vibe about the whole thing, and ingenuity. Claire Foy, playing Polly, she is this amazing designer, and to start with, she's designing an AI fridge, and it's all very tech and digital, but all her design work is done with … a drawing board and tracing paper, and everything becomes about tapping into a sort of wholesome way that things used to be done, but for people today, and the joys of that."

There's a real timelessness to this story, but in the way it references tech advancements and AI, one of the film's biggest strengths is the way those elements are addressed directly, but without losing the playfulness of the movie's overall tone.

Advertisement

"We wanted to explore technology, but in a fun, playful, teasing way. That's how we beat the machines, is by teasing them," Gregor said. "They will never have a sense of humour. I think that having a sense of humour and looking at the joys and pains of parenting, and being a kid in a world of technology, where you've got so many distractions [and] as parents, you have to answer emails on a Sunday night, so yes, the kids are going to get an iPad or whatever."

"It's hard. The expectations are too much on making the perfect family in a modern context. … So we didn't want to be preachy at all, but we wanted to explore what happens when you just go into the woods. We wanted to explore what happens when you have a real, spectacular adventure of the old-school variety. Of the kind of Narnia, Hook … variety."

'We do Tenet for nine-year-olds'

Leaning into the "old-school" adventure element, there are nods to movies like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Wizard of Oz, and another core element for Gregor was to have that "sense of play" from those movies, but with "modern technique."

"There's a little-known British filmmaker called Chris Nolan," Gregor joked.

"He did a film called Tenet, and a lot of that was backwards. … We're like, 'Yeah, we can do backwards with kids and food,' and we do Tenet for nine-year-olds. And so we played with technique, and it's really playful on screen. We had a whole split-screen section where we ran the time backwards."

To find the balance between VFX and practical elements, their own visual effects house was put together for The Magic Faraway Tree, resulting in a cohesiveness between the real and the VFX elements.

"We use VFX, but we brought them in from the beginning, from day one, and we made our own VFX company in an abandoned kind of railway station," Gregor said. "The VFX guys were just in with us the whole time and felt like they were really part of the creative process."

"That meant that what we couldn't afford to build, we would work with digitally. But it was exactly the same tone. So the whole thing has got this kind of patina-like, painterly quality. … There was also enough around the kids so their eyes would light up and they'd be excited. So they could eat and touch the set and run around in it, and jump down the slippery-slip."

LONDON, ENGLAND - MARCH 22: (L-R) Andrew Garfield, Nicola Coughlan, Claire Foy and Ben Gregor attend "The Magic Faraway Tree" UK special screening at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on March 22, 2026 in London, England. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images)'There are a lot of lands waiting for us'

While elements, like the slippery-slip, were pulled from Blyton's text, Gregor did make some changes. Particularly, the upside-down element of The Land of Topsy-Turvey shifted to back-to-front, but Gregor isn't shutting out the opportunity of using that element in the future, if there is an opportunity for more films.

"I had quite a long sequence there explaining upside down and back-to-front, and writing things out and saying them out backwards. And I just thought, oh my gosh, this is going to take a really long time. Kids aren't going to get it," Gregor said. "I didn't want to leave anyone out at any point. This movie works if you're five or 55. … So I just made it back-to-front just to clean it up, and then taught everyone how to go backwards. But upside down could still happen. I've got many more lands to go to. There are a lot of lands waiting for us."

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”