Heyday Films’ Rosie Alison has been on the Paddington train from the very beginning and is lead producer on the third film. She tells Screen about the journey to creating a beloved big-screen franchise.
“It is so close to my heart,” says Rosie Alison of her connection to the Paddington film franchise, which goes right back to the very beginning, even if it is only now she is getting her full due as producer, credited with that title for the first time on Paddington In Peru. She takes the baton from her boss at Heyday Films, David Heyman, who had the credit on the first two films, for which Alison was listed as executive producer.
“Our Paddington journey has been a particular joy, and I was delighted that he encouraged me to produce this third film.”
Paddington In Peru has picked up where the first two films, 2014’s Paddington and 2017’s Paddington 2, left off for financier-distributor Studiocanal – connecting with UK and Ireland audiences to the tune of $39.8m (£31.3m) after six weeks on release. Whether it is able to match or surpass the UK box office for the first two films, which grossed $48.5m (£38.1m) and $54.2m (£42.6m) respectively, remains to be seen, but it is already the sixth highest-grossing release of 2024 in its home market. And without Alison, there might never have been a successful family film franchise based on Michael Bond’s literary creation, first introduced to the world in his 1958 book A Bear Called Paddington.
When Alison joined Heyday Films in 2001, it was she who proposed a big-screen adaptation for Bond’s marmalade-loving bear from darkest Peru. “David hired me to look for different film projects while he was busy on Harry Potter, and one of the things I proposed was Paddington,” says Alison, meeting with Screen International in Heyday’s central London office. “In those days it was a slightly dormant book series but obviously an incredible character that Michael Bond had come up with. He’s almost like Chaplin’s Tramp, with this wonderful universal resonance. I thought at the time, ‘That would be a lovely way to look at London, a storybook London, with this walking, talking bear.’”
At the time the screen rights were tied up with a Canadian animation company so Heyday had to sit tight for that option to play out. Once the rights were secured, Hamish McColl was hired to write an initial script, but the plans for a big-screen adaptation “really came alive when we met Paul [King],” says Alison, who was pitched on the young writer/director by King’s agent Hugo Young at Independent Talent.
At the time, King had yet to make a film but had found success directing Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, aka comedy duo The Mighty Boosh, in their cult TV series of the same name.
Young told Alison that King was a huge Paddington Bear fan – “and my daughter was a crazy Mighty Boosh fan so I thought, yeah, absolutely. The moment I met Paul, I thought, what an amazing person. It was so clear that he was very interested in the storybook theatricality [of the original FilmFair-produced late 1970s TV series] and would come to Paddington bringing that world alive, a sort of world creation. That was what one could see Paddington might be – you didn’t want something like Alvin And The Chipmunks.”
“It did take me a while to persuade David to meet Paul,” she adds with a smile. “He kept saying, ‘I’m sure he’s wonderful but he’s not directed a film yet.’”
After King had made his 2009 feature debut Bunny And The Bull, which Alison and Heyman sat down to watch in the cutting room, “it became clearer and clearer that there was a fabulous imagination there”. Although Warner Bros, where Paddington was initially set up, ultimately passed, Studiocanal quickly stepped in and King went back to the drawing board with the script, working closely with Alison, Heyman and a trusted team of writers (including Simon Farnaby) and creative confidantes from the comedy world.
“I worked closely with Paul through the whole script development, with us trying to figure out who Paddington was, what this world was – very much led by Paul and embracing his imaginative brilliance,” she says.
It was not plain sailing by any stretch, from the often “agonising” journey to turn an illustrated bear into a photo-real screen character through VFX and motion-capture performance, to original Paddington voice actor Colin Firth being replaced by Ben Whishaw (“the wonderful heart of the series”), to the “creepy Paddington” memes that greeted an early still image.
When the first film was released, some also voiced concern that Nicole Kidman’s evil taxidermist – who wants to stuff Paddington and was inspired by classic Disney villains as well as the bloodthirsty Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities – was too frightening for children, leading to the decision, says Alison, to follow a more comedic line with the villains in the two sequels.
“There are always doubts,” says the producer. “In retrospect, people love these two films but, for example, when we did the first film, people thought him coming in the bath down the stairs was too big, and him putting his head in the toilet is not Paddington, and putting his toothbrush in his ears is too gross-out.”
Despite it now being hailed as one of the best family films of all time, Alison admits they even had doubts about how Paddington 2 would land with audiences. “We kept agonising over whether it was a flawed structure – that Paddington got separated from the Browns for huge stretches of it, that he was off in prison and they were outside, that we had two different villains, Knuckles and Phoenix Buchanan…. But it came together and nobody’s ever said that! The film completely works.
“I feel the same with the third Paddington, I hope,” she continues, “even though some people were like, ‘It’s not going to work if you take Paddington outside of London’.”
That was actually King’s idea – he has story and executive producer credits on Paddington In Peru along with Farnaby. Tapping into the separation-and-reunion themes that are at the heart of the franchise, the third film sees Paddington visit his native Peru because Aunt Lucy is missing him. On arrival, he and the Browns discover she has gone awol and they embark on an Amazonian quest to find her – and the lost city of El Dorado – again with two ostensible villains along for the ride: Olivia Colman’s crooning Reverend Mother (“Paul’s suggestion – an evil nun,” says Alison) and Antonio Banderas’s riverboat captain with a shady family history.
Alison admits there was always hesitation around whether to do a third Paddington “without Paul”. It was clear that King’s career was skyrocketing and taking him to pastures new (his name was – and is – attached to multiple major studio projects as a writer and director, with last year’s Wonka, produced by Heyday for Warner Bros, his first post-Paddington release).
With Heyman also tied up on a multitude of big features, including Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Alison took the reins to Paddington more firmly (not least producing Paddington’s tea at Buckingham Palace with Queen Elizabeth II). Her role at Heyday, she explains, has always been to work on film and TV projects that she has proposed or championed, ranging from The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas to Testament Of Youth (“a passion project”), The Light Between Oceans, The Secret Garden and TV series The Capture. She also continues to work on Paul King projects, including Wonka, due to their close relationship from the first two films.
Of her longtime boss, she says, “I feel very fortunate that I was able to join this wonderful company with David, who is this incredible, formidable producer. He’s the most charming and diplomatic man you’ll ever meet, but he’s also incredibly creatively exacting. You’re never allowed to settle – you have to keep pushing and pushing. I’m well-schooled in the David Heyman school of persevering, of always striving to reach a film’s full potential. It’s a very rigorous creative process that we go through here.”
Prior to joining Heyday, Alison had forged her career in arts documentaries, working for ITV’s The South Bank Show for many years as a researcher, director and associate producer, and later joining the BBC’s Omnibus and Bookmark series. “By the time I arrived at Heyday, I wasn’t afraid of the filmmaking process,” she says.
Team builder
Embarking on Paddington In Peru, Alison set out to recruit new writers – and a new director who could pick up the “imaginative, creative, hand-crafted filmmaking” trail that King had laid. She settled on experienced writer Mark Burton, whose screenplay credits include Madagascar and multiple Aardman films and who had been part of King’s “round-table braintrust” on the second film, and James Lamont and Jon Foster, who showrun The Adventures Of Paddington TV series, now in its third season.
Around 2019, they had a script they were happy with, and Alison started searching for a director, eventually landing on Dougal Wilson, an award-winning ad and music-video director whose commercials for the likes of John Lewis, Apple and AT&T showed the visual inventiveness and technical mastery she was looking for.
“I’d had my eye on him for a while,” she says. “You could see he was a proper maverick, imaginative inventor. We did meet with several people, but I felt when I met him that he had that Paddington spirit. He’s eccentric, he’s funny, he’s big-hearted and he’s got a rigorous imagination.”
Rather than interrupt their momentum, the pandemic allowed Alison and her new creative team to further shape the project, giving Studiocanal more time to lock down the finance plan, with Paddington In Peru the most expensive film in the franchise (“more bears and more visual effects,” she explains).
Again, challenges abounded, including missing a weather window to shoot in 2022 while Studiocanal lined up a new domestic partner to replace Warner Bros, which had distributed the first two films (after the awkward extraction of rights from The Weinstein Company in the wake of #MeToo); Sony Pictures finally boarded for most territories outside of Studiocanal’s own direct-distribution markets in early 2023.
And it was a big blow, admits Alison, when Sally Hawkins decided not to return as Mrs Brown. “We all thought, ‘Well, can we continue or not?’” she says. “She had such a close relationship with Paul, and she’d done what she felt she could do with that character. So, fair enough – these things happen. And I think Emily [Mortimer]’s wonderful.”
Mrs Brown is once again the beating heart of the third film, and has a focal scene near the end where Paddington makes a decisive choice: “A lot of people find this the most emotional one.”
“Delicate dance”
In a “complex jigsaw” of a shoot, Paddington In Peru finally went before cameras in spring 2023. There were 16 shooting days each in Colombia and Peru between April and July – led by second-unit director John Sorapure and mainly to capture river, rainforest and village background plates – with the main UK shoot taking place over 58 days from July to October, based out of Sky Studios Elstree but also creating several Peruvian scenes including the dockside, home for retired bears and Colman’s Sound Of Music-style hilltop musical number at Berrybushes Farm near Leavesden. The UK main unit photography was blended with South American locations in post, with the cast never setting foot on the continent.
“It was a delicate dance. Thankfully the weather gods were with us and we were able to match Colombian and Peruvian sunshine with our sets in Hertfordshire,” says Alison, who is quick to pay tribute to the production’s “Rolls-Royce crew” including a number of key creatives who have worked across all three films, among them cinematographer Erik Wilson and animation director Pablo Grillo.
And, she adds, “It’s been very exciting for me working with directors who are finding their way and finding their own voice as filmmakers. All three films are a celebration of inventive British filmmaking.” (King took a back seat on Peru, not wanting to step on Wilson’s toes, but did give feedback on drafts of the script and watch cuts along the way.)
Studiocanal has opened Paddington In Peru in the UK and Poland so far, and Alison says they feel confident the film will travel well as it rolls out across the globe, starting with Australia on January 1 and in most European markets in January and February. Sony Pictures moved the US release date from January 17 to February 14, she adds, to put more distance between the US holiday family franchises likely to still be in cinemas. “They’ve moved it to Valentine’s Day, and it’s also Presidents’ Day and half-term. So it’s a better slot, really.”
As she keenly watches Paddington In Peru travel the world, Alison says further film adventures for the Peruvian bear will ultimately depend on the third instalment’s global box office (with $609m worldwide for the first two, it has a chance to become a billion-dollar franchise).
“We have to wait and see how this one performs in the rest of the world and the States, as we hope it will,” says Alison, describing as “premature” an announcement by a Studiocanal executive at a brand licensing convention in September that Paddington 4 was already in the works to tie in with the 70th anniversary of Michael Bond’s creation.
“We will see how things look by Easter. But hopefully. There’s a very clear hint of what might happen next at the end of this film,” she says. “Obviously I love the first two films, but I feel very protective about the third film – mindful that we were going to be up against it if everybody was saying, ‘It’s not as good as Paddington 2,’ but feeling that it does have its own qualities and that it was worth doing.”
Meanwhile, Alison has several other Heyday projects on the go, including Taika Waititi’s upcoming sci-fi feature Klara And The Sun and a long-gestating feature adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies that is a passion project she has been developing with BBC Film. Dominic Cooke, who directed the National Theatre’s acclaimed 2017 revival starring Imelda Staunton that earned raves from Sondheim himself, is attached to direct and has written “a sparkling adaptation”. But, Alison admits, “it’s not an easy one to get financed” and she is currently working to “align an inspiring cast” that will attract a significant partner.
Whatever she produces in the future, though, her bond with Paddington will always remain a strong one. “One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed working through the films and on the character is trying to figure out, which are the bits of Paddington that really shine out? They are stories about being lost and found, being separated and reunited.
“He is the quintessential immigrant story,” she continues, “and it felt natural that the heart caught between two homes had to form part of the third film – and that [at the end] he gets to make his own choice.”
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