Re-imagining Peter Pan

Benh Zeitlin is one of the most unconventional filmmakers I have ever met. Born in New York to a Jewish father and Protestant-raised mother, both of whom are urban folklorists, the 38-year-old was thrust into the spotlight in 2012 when his ambitious debut feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, became the talk of the Cannes Film Festival, before garnering four Oscar nominations.
Until then, he had operated in his own bubble, crafting artisanal shorts as part of a collective of like-minded creatives called Court 13. Beasts, a dynamic bayou fable told through the eyes of a spirited six-year-old girl, put them on the map, and left many excitedly wondering what they would do next. Incredibly, it has taken until now, and the release of Wendy, a loose and passionately-realised adaptation of Peter Pan, written by Zeitlin and his sister Eliza, to find out.
“The Oscars were like visiting another planet,” recalls Zeitlin from his home in New Orleans. He fell in love with the city while filming Glory at Sea, the poetic short that opened the door for Beasts, in Louisiana, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina. Then, “it was like a ghost town, and really dangerous,” he told me in Cannes. He’d been planning to return to New York. “But, right near the end, I started to realise I was not going to go back. That I somehow had my feet stuck, essentially.”
No wonder the Oscars, with their glitz and feverish media buzz, made him feel discombobulated. “It was a world that I had only seen on television,” he says today, “and it felt like being propelled into a TV show. It was mind-blowing and incredibly surreal. And, you know, amazing.”

If there was external pressure and expectation, it wasn’t this that concerned Zeitlin and his collaborators, so much as that the rights to their next film were owned by Fox Searchlight (now Searchlight). Beasts had been backed by Cinereach, a non-profit that allowed the filmmaker to work in the same organic, intuitive, time-consuming way he’d always done. This was unusual in an industry where “efficiency becomes kind of the number one principle,” says Zeitlin, explaining that when they cast a film, “we’re going to search until we find the one person who can play this role, no matter how long that takes, and wait to shoot the film until they’re exactly the right age. . . Obviously, this film took a very long time.”
Some things were non-negotiable. He was “adamant” that the “core principles” that defined how they’d made Beasts were respected. This meant being able to work with many of the same team, going all the way from his producers to his sister, who doubled as production designer and writer on Wendy, and the kind of multi-disciplinary artists who’d helped give Beasts its uniqueness, to employing non-professional actors.

“I don’t know if [Fox Searchlight] exactly knew what they were signing up for,” Zeitlin laughs. “But the process and the film are so inextricable from one another that once we’d set the cast in motion, once we’d set the locations in motion, they were so integral to what the film was, and they were so insanely challenging, that there wasn’t a way out, other than through. And we kind of designed it that way.”
For their Neverland, Zeitlin chose the Caribbean island of Montserrat, whose capital city, Plymouth, was destroyed in the 90s by the still-active Soufrière Hills volcano that broodingly dominates the southern part of the land mass. Given he’d also shot Beasts in post-Katrina Louisiana, I suggest that he seems drawn to environments where people live precariously.
“Both films are sort of addressing places where nature is an active element of your life on a daily basis,” he says. “Walking through Plymouth gives you this incredible perspective of just how fragile human civilisation is and how small we are relative to this incredible organism that we live on, that can just wipe us away in an instant. And I think that feeling is something that I am really interested in in my work.”
Using Montserrat “protected the film from being taken away or whitewashed or normalised,” says Zeitlin, who spent four years, on and off, scouting locations and embedding with the locals. “There was no way to come in and turn this film into a Hollywood product. Executives weren’t going to show up on a remote island, under a volcano.”
It was difficult enough for the filmmakers. Just getting to their locations, far away from “any evidence of human habitation”, was “like planning an invasion”, he says. “It was like [referring to his cast] mobilising an army of old people and children.” They prepared meticulously, employing zip wires, building staircases down cliff faces, and constructing a road “through the volcano”, but there were still surprises.
“The nature is extreme there and it’s constantly shifting,” says Zeitlin, describing how a beach they’d decided to utilise, disappeared overnight. “Every day was like the adage that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. It was a daily physical challenge, and we wanted that quality in the film, but I don’t think we could have imagined just how hard it was going to be.”
Zeitlin can’t remember a time when Peter Pan wasn’t in his life. For him and Eliza, the ageless boy was somewhere out in the world, choosing children to join him on Neverland, where they’d stay forever young. The siblings had “incredible anxieties about growing up”, he says, and Pan’s failure to appear frustrated them. They’d read how the Lost Boys “transform into just regular, boring adults that are all around you, and be like, ‘Oh God, is that going to happen to us?’”
Wendy is a repudiation of the story’s message. It is also a response to the way that Beasts had launched them, says the filmmaker, “out of this artistic Utopia into the, quote/unquote, real world, up against these corporate forces and people that wanted to change who we were and how we work. It was us really living all of the dreams that we had as children, in real life.”
The theme of wildness runs through Beasts and Wendy, and Zeitlin tells me that for him it connects to freedom and how, especially in the new film, that relates to joy as something that has to be fought for.
“When I think about wildness, I think about what it meant to have fun as a kid, which to me was to come home with dirt and blood, I don’t know what, on your pants [trousers], and your mum is horrified, and you’re like, ‘I just had the best day of my life.’
“So much of growing up has to do with breaking down our wildness. School is just training you to sit there and obey, and I think that that carries on into 90 per cent of the jobs you can have in the world. The antithesis of that is to be wild and free, and get out of the structures that people build for themselves, and be fearless about it.”
As a child, he’d sometimes accompany his parents as they researched lives “on the edge”. This included going to birthday parties with them at the Coney Island freak show, where he’d hang out with the likes of Elastic Man and Otis the Frog Boy, or “meeting people fighting for their identity over any sort of practicality. That was the sort of people that they raised me around and celebrated in their work. And that’s always something that I’m looking for in my characters and my collaborators and in places.” Unsurprisingly, his father’s approach to Judaism was unorthodox. “It was like a comedy routine,” Zeitlin chuckles. “Dad’s main jam is Jewish humour, and he does lectures, largely at Jewish retirement homes, where he tells jokes and gets jokes.” The family, meanwhile, would keep “the emotional elements” of traditions such as Shabbat, he says, “without keeping any of the religious elements. [But] the idea and the intent was always there, and a lot of love.”
Because of his nervousness about adulthood, I ask how he felt about the barmitzvah writers often mention in articles about him. Zeitlin admits that it was really just a barbecue, when he was 15, that they playfully dubbed a “barbe-mitzvah”. His parents still laugh about the speech he gave questioning why “we willingly let go of things that make our life rich and fun and imaginative”, but, he says: “This is something that I’ve been certainly thinking about since that time.”

Recently, he has also been thinking about how we’re increasingly routing our lives and imaginations through screens. This has been accelerated by Covid, but was already noticeable, he laments, when they were casting Wendy.
“I grew up on an alley in New York, and that alley was a universe of bugs and plants. We found our way to that stuff, even in a concrete jungle. And that just felt so absent from so many of the kids that we were talking to, and we really went out and found ones who were still enagaged with the world in a visceral way.”
He didn’t realise at the beginning that it was what they were making, but the film became a “rallying cry” against our growing disengagement from physical reality.
“I think it’s a f****** disaster as big as the pandemic,” he says, “and it’s going to continue to eat away at fundamental things about who we are as people, as cultures, and it needs to be fought with a lot of intentionality. Wendy was definitely that.”