Inside Wendy ’s New Neverland
When filmmakers Eliza Zeitlin and her big brother Benh were little kids in Manhattan, they had a terrible fear of growing up. “I remember watching our little park get paved and just being horrified,” she says. “I was afraid I was losing who I was.” That’s why the story of Peter Pan resonated so soundly with the siblings: “It’s a dream of eternal childhood. And the characters became their own in us.”
Now the Zeitlins have turned their high-flying imaginations into the visually dazzling family adventure film Wendy. Loosely based on the classic J.M. Barrie novel, the film (in theaters Friday, February 28) chronicles Wendy (played by Devin France) and her twin brothers (Gage and Gavin Naquin) as they find themselves on a mysterious island where aging doesn’t exist. Benh, the Oscar-nominated director of the acclaimed 2010 drama Beasts of the Southern Wild, is behind the camera; he wrote the screenplay with Eliza, the Rhode Island School of Design grad who also handled the production design. “We disagree a lot,” she admits to Architectural Digest, “but our disagreements are one of the most important driving factors of our creative process.”
That process includes eschewing detailed sketch drawings. Instead, Eliza starts with a general idea, then constructs the sets herself from materials already on hand. “I approach a set as looking at the pieces of a puzzle and figuring out how to put it together,” she says. A greasy-spoon diner in Wendy was built from the ground up in New Orleans—and it’s located near a full-size hobby train that ultimately transports the kids, along with their new friend Peter (Yashua Mack), to the mystical Neverland.
To capture its magic, “we didn’t want to film another landscape and just pretend it was an island,” she explains. They toyed with relocating to an island off Georgia or the Carolinas, but quickly ruled it out. “Neverland is described as having many different landscapes all crammed together, so we wanted it to feel like that—like it’s always changing as you move through it. We wanted to keep it natural and clean so we could just release the kids and have them run free. It’s always tempting with Neverland to create tree houses and props.”
Eliza and Benh chose the Caribbean island of Montserrat because of one special geological feature that figures prominently in the narrative: “We decided early on that we wanted to find a volcano that’s still active,” she says, adding that the smoke and steam are what keep the habitants of Neverland young in this version of the story. “We were researching and we came across Montserrat. It’s totally different than any other island I’ve seen. The sand is black and magnetic because it came out of the center of the earth. And the water is very dark and turbulent. It feels dangerous and mysterious, not like a paradise resort with crystal blue water you’d see on a postcard.”
Parts of Wendy were also filmed in neighboring Antigua and Barbuda. The latter possesses caves and a rock formation called “Hell’s Gate” in the ocean, befitting the exploring Lost Boys. (Eliza notes that the young actor Mack is a native of Antigua.)
One of the main sets was a shipwreck called the Mañana, created using a boat that has a rich and colorful history with the Zeitlins. The 1940s-era vessel was used to tow a junk raft in Benh’s 2008 short film Glory at Sea. The captain of the Mañana then died, and the craft was left to rot in a harbor near New Orleans. “We decided it had to be the boat we used in Wendy, which presented all sorts of problems,” Eliza says. She and her team had to get it out of the water, replace 70% of the exterior, repaint it to look like a shipwreck, and bring it safely via barge to the Caribbean. “It was a very bizarre process but it’s an enormous part of the production,” she says.
But the hard work for Wendy proved worthwhile. In fact, Eliza calls the experience one of the many benefits of adulthood. “We wanted to tell this story so kids can get excited about growing up because, in the end, I did love growing up,” she says. “It can be a wonderful thing because it means that you can live the stories that you could only imagine as a child.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
