
But I found enough actual footage of him in interviews when he’d really like to be done with the subject. There’s a billion hours of video, of Walt performing as Walt Disney, being a great guy. It’s just the hardest work that is to be done. Hanks I was immediately dry-mouthed by the prospect. But if we quash it, we’ll look like we’re trying to hide something. It’s a great script, and if we don’t do it, that means somebody else might be able to do it, and we’re going to look heartless. We have to make this movie about Walt Disney.

said: “Look, we have a bit of a circumstance here. Can you walk us through what sounds like a strange job offer? Meanwhile, Tom, you’re playing the fellow who created the company whose movie it is. Hanks She hated the script that she’d already read. She wouldn’t even eat with them in the commissary here when they were working together. We can’t forget that she made absolutely no effort whatsoever to go out with them, to socialize with them. Thompson I think she sounded like that most of the time. How much of that distress came from being alone in a foreign country and outnumbered by Disney staffers? You can hear the distress, the tension and the resistance, just the purposeful sabotage in her voice. Thompson They were the biggest tell, the tapes. Emma, how much of your own experiences adapting “Sense and Sensibility” and “Nanny McPhee” for the screen offered insight into Travers and what she was going through? These are excerpts from the conversation. At one point this Oscar-winning pair even burst into a few bars of a Disney tune. Thompson met with Margy Rochlin to talk about “Saving Mr. On a recent evening at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, Calif., Mr. Thompson, imbuing Travers with equal amounts exasperation, fierceness and vulnerability, has already been nominated for a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award, and seems to be on track for an Oscar nod, as well. Hanks’s performance as a grinning international impresario unaccustomed to being stonewalled, while Ms.

Banks” opened last month, critics have praised Mr. Novak), struggled to collaborate with her.

Travers (Emma Thompson) for nearly 20 years, finally lured her to California, where Disney staff composers, the Sherman Brothers (Jason Schwartzman and B. The other story is of two weeks in 1961 when Walt Disney (Tom Hanks), who had been trying to secure the film rights from Ms. Travers’s sad past as an Australian girl with a hard-drinking father and a suicidal mother. In flashback, it reveals the “Mary Poppins” author P. Banks,” written by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith, shares two less cheerful tales.

For nearly 50 years, moviegoers have embraced “Mary Poppins” as a whimsical Disney classic about a magical English nanny, a twinkly chimney sweep and a London banker’s fractured family.
