This is a mockery.

Make me your vessel.

I invite you

in.

Oh, my gosh.

I'm flesh and blood.

Well, I'm confused.

both.

When it came to returning for this, was there anything you wanted to do with your characters, particularly to push them on? Simon, Julian leaves Buttonhouse, gets a pair of trousers, but is there anything new to Julian in this? Does he learn? Does he grow as a person? Well, I

think...

He does go on a massive arc, a big journey.

But I said that as a joke, but it's sort of true, he does.

It was really more about sort of the clash of his reality, you know, just going to...

A shop and seeing how much cigarettes are.

You know, they'll have been sort of £1.80 in his days, and that's for 20.

Yeah.

So what's your approach when you're thinking about these characters and trying to update them?

Um, I think the approach is, I mean, to make a big story that will appeal to people.

I, I wasn't really worried...

The characters were already there, and in a way, with Paddington as well, the character is there to a certain extent, and really, you have to find a, a sort of structure around it to allow those characters to sort of breathe and be themselves and be...

So, so I, so I didn't wanna change anything in the way...

So, you know, I wanted Moonface and Silky and all the characters in the tree, and they were...

I was always like, "They're gonna be fine."

Yeah

And so when it came to The Faraway Tree, what was the core thing that you were trying to preserve?

Yeah, it was the sense of the tree and the characters in the tree and... um the sense of sort of playfulness and uh the sense of nature you know going into that enchanted wood and and um it's been gratifying to hear people saying that it chimes with their memories of reading the books because very often people read them in their childhood and they're coming back to them and makes them feel quite sort of emotional and It was important to me that we made something that connected with what people had in their heads of the faraway tree.

Do you know what I mean? Absolutely.

And so I didn't want to do anything radically different, really.

Although some people are like, oh, why did you have a modern family in it? I mean, that was a no brainer for me.

Like I just went, I read the stories to my daughter when she was sort of three, four, five.

And she would really laugh.

that

When it came to both of you separately, did you both instinctively see the challenges there, or did you just see the opportunities?

I mean, I saw the opportunity, really.

I was actually reading the stories to my daughter, who was then three.

or maybe four.

And, um, I'd been reading them and they were, and she really laughed a lot.

Even actually when I didn't know why I was going, this is so what the guy can't hear.

And he mispronounces things like, but she'd be howling.

I mean, did you feel like you just had to almost start afresh with a solid foundation for what this film could be over the course of, you know, 100 minutes or so?