Elephants In The ‘Garden"

What happens when the writer of ‘Edward Scissorhands’ and the director of ‘Europa, Europa’ get together on a children’s classic After I’m told that Tuesday would be the best day to visit the set of THE SECRET GARDEN, since the earthquake scene is scheduled and the elephants will be there, I am thrown into confusion. Earthquakes? Elephants? It has certainly been a long time since I read the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel about a little Edwardian girl who discovers a garden that changes her life and that lives of those around her, but I feel sure that I would have remembered the inclusion of an elephant.

A robin is featured heavily, and a crow, and the wind on the Yorkshire moors wuthers, but hardly to the extent that might suggest a movement of the earth. I sit down to reread the book. Mary is a forlorn and spiteful child, and when her parents die in a cholera epidemic in India, her temper is not improved. She is shipped to England to live with her uncle, a miserable hunchback who wants nothing to do with her or anyone. Slowly Mary begins to make discoveries. She finds a clue to the source of her uncle’s unhappiness: She comes across her cousin Colin, shut up in the house, bedridden, and with a temper more vile than her own. Helped by a robin and a country boy named Dickon, she discovers the one thing that brings them all together--the secret garden. It is Tuesday, and I’m standing alone on the earthquake set. There are a pair of giant marble feet, a lot of rubble, and a few Indian looking reed screens, but no sign of a camera crew. It transpires that the day’s filming has been rescheduled as the sky (the backdrop to the earthquake) was damaged by rain over the bank holiday weekend, and even though the real sky looks identically menacing, an alternative scene has been set up. The elephants have been returned to their circus and are on standby for the reminder of the week. I am led into a studio where, at one end, on a stage draped with black velvet and roses, three children dance around fire. A girl in a leotard urges them on, and occasionally a small, gruff-voiced woman in a Wild at Heart jacket orders, "Smile". The children dance on, unperturbed. Eleven-year-old Kate Maberly, who plays Mary, brandishes two large lighted staffs without a murmur of complaint.

"And hold, hold, hold" (even my arms are beginning to ache). "And cut." One of the children whispers, and the cry goes out with the urgency usually reserved for black coffee or illegal substances. "Apple Juice!" A motherly woman hurries forward with a cartoon, while the crew members stop to stare as they witness the invigorating effects of apple juice. A burly lighting technician smiles ruefully to himself. Refreshed, the children resume their dance. They are making magic to lure Mary’s uncle back to Misselthwaite Manor so that he can see how his invalid son, Colin, has recovered his health and the use of his legs. Strange foreign-sounding words rise in volume as the children chant.

I ask the scriptwriter, Caroline Thompson, where this song originated from-as it wasn’t in the book-and it transpires that, having discarded several attempts by prestigious Hollywood songwriters, they eventually chose a string of nonsense words invented by the twelve-year-old nephew of Polish director Agnieska Holland (the lady in the Wild at Heart jacket). I take this opportunity to talk to Thompson about how she came to write the script, hoping that I’ll discover the mystery of the earthquake and how exactly the elephants fit into the story.

We start at the beginning: "On my 21st birthday, my mother sent me a card that said, ‘If abortions had been legal in 1965, you wouldn’t be here today.’ " I gulp. Thompson smiles. She responded by writing Firstborn, "a book about an abortion that comes back to hunt its mom." Director Penelope Spheeris optioned the book, and Thompson sold it to her cheap in exchange for allowing her to cowrite the screenplay. Firstborn never got made, but it pulled her into the business, and in eight years, she’s hardly looked back. Thompson remembers hearing that Francis Ford Cappola’s company, American Zoetrope, had bought the rights to The Secret Garden and thinking, "Oh man, I wish I could do that." The first draft was written by Carroll Ballard, who was to direct it after he finished The Black Stallion, but the right script never materialized, and it was passed from one screenwriter to the next over the years. Meanwhile, Thompson was making it in Hollywood. She became friendly with Tim Burton, and, inspired by a drawing that he had done in high school, wrote the popular Edward Scissorhands in just three weeks. She has since cowritten The Adams Family and Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey.

Two years ago, she was offered the job of adapting The Secret Garden. "Eventually, I guess it was my turn." I am given a script to read. Mother are Featured heavily (they are scarce in the F.H.B. book), and the prevailing theme is sex. The film even starts with what could only be described as a bang. In one of the first scenes, Mary is hiding under her parent’s bed when they arrive home from a party. "Mary’s POV. . . In come her parents . . . He moves her over to the bed. Their feet disappear as he sweeps her up onto it. Above Mary the mattress dips. Then all at once a rumble begins and the whole room pitches and sways. Furniture starts to slide across the floor. The massive bed begins to shake. The walls groan and fall. . . . "Yes" It’s the earthquake that wipes out Mary’s family. (It’s a lot more efficient a disaster than the plague, which could get pretty disgusting," says Thompson.) I notice that on the previous page there is an alternative scene, which is the same except that the bed above Mary is empty. For America, I’m told. As in the book, there is a large focus on sprouts, shoots, and buds bursting out of the dead earth, but in Thompson’s script the overwhelming sexual pull of the garden threatens to turn a close friendship among three children into a love triangle. In one scene, Mary and her friend Dickon, carried away by a game of swing, find themselves drawn breathlessly together, their lips nearly meeting in a full-blown kiss, when they are interrupted by a furious shout from Colin, who, overcome with jealousy, chases Dickon from the garden.

"The Secret Garden was one of my favorite books as a child," Thompson says, "but when I reread it to adapt it, I was appalled by the flatness of the language and the heavy-handed plot. It was the memory of the book that I cherished. I tried to write a movie more like my memory." And the sex? "It’s gotten more piquant with Agnieska--the blooming sexuality. It also interested Cappola a great deal. In my early drafts, it was more implied than expressed, but Agnieska was interested in the blossoming sexuality." She smiles diplomatically, "I tried to find my way through it." Back in the set there is a break in shooting as little Kate has got a splinter in her foot and is whisked away by the nurse. The two boys open packets of crisps and become instantly hyperactive. They rush about, jumping over cables and attempting to rile the crew. They swap their own jokes. "Scoutmaster," they shriek, doubling up with laughter, "brown socks," and then move quickly on to more universal preoccupations: "Did you know you’ve got a carrot and two peas down your trousers?" I sit gingerly in a chair marked PRODUCER and find myself chatting with the mother of Heydon Prowse, the twelve-year-old playing Colin. Mrs. Prowse is an atypical stage mother. "When he auditioned, we didn’t think he stood a chance, but then when it looked more likely, we stared to wonder how we could stop it. Of course, now we’re glad, as it’s given him so much confidence, and really there hasn’t been a day when the children have been anything other than patient and happy. Most of the Film has been shot during the summer holidays, and Mrs. Prowse is eager that it not run too far over schedule and into the autumn term. I manage to catch Heydon’s attention as he rushes past. "Do you think you’ll continue acting when you’re older?" He stops, instantly polite. "No, I want to be a teacher." In fact, I discover that of the three, it is only Andrew Knott (Dickon) who is pretty sure he wants to make a career as an actor. He is thirteen and has already played a small part in the British soap Coronation Street. He re-creates it for me then and there in a thick Lancashire accent: "Yeah. Boris. She’s out. Don’t know. It’s Boris" I have to tell him that I missed that particular episode. "But," I ask getting back to more recent events, "do you think the romantic scenes in the film are realistic, when they gaze into each other’s eyes and Dickon nearly kisses Mary?" Andrew is down-to-earth. "That’s true," he says, "I think he’d really like Mary. Mary fancies Dickon, and Dickon fancies Mary." Kate reappears, limping a little, not from the splinter but from the injection to remove it, and we all go off for lunch. Most of the conversation revolves around whether it is possible to get chocolate ice cream, which isn’t on the menu. I ask Kate if she is anything like the character she plays. "No, in real life I’ve got short hair," she tells me, flicking a strand of wig out of her eye. As she is in practically every scene, I ask whether she ever gets bored with all the standing around. "No." Or nervous? "No."

She is very academic, ahead at school by a year, and having joined the swimming club at five, was the 1992 county champion. And yes, it is possible to have a double helping of chocolate ice cream. I arrive early the following day, as I have been promised a tour around the actual secret garden. The story of the garden is a winter-to-summer story, with emphasis (as I have discovered) on spring, but for purposes of filming, the shooting schedule has been revised. "It is a lot easier to pull the leaves off trees than to stick them back on," says production designer Stuart Craig (Oscar winner of Gandhi and Dangerous Liaison). As it is nearly the end of the shoot, the garden is the eerie dead place that Mary first discovers at the beginning of the film. Threes have been stripped and plants injected with formaldehyde to make them appear dead, although, I am assured, with no lasting ill effects. Originally Craig and Holland were keen to find a real garden to film in, but it soon became clear that anyone with a really beautiful garden was not going to allow a film crew anywhere near it. They were in Yorkshire looking at locations when they found themselves at Fountains Abbey and were both struck by its beauty. Craig then thought, Could we build a garden in the abbey? and was quickly told no, he couldn’t; it is one of the most visited ruins in the whole country.

Developing the idea that Colin’s dead mother might have planted her garden around a ruined abbey on the family’s land, the filmmakers decided to re-create it on the grounds of Pinewood Studios. With the same team that helped him realize the jungle set in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, Craig began work, gathering and planting so that the garden would be in full bloom when shooting started in June of last year. They began by growing the old-fashioned grasses, cornflowers, daisies, roses, violets, foxgloves and a vast quantity of replacement plants, which would be potted in place when technicians and equipment had trampled the others into the ground, but just before filming began, there was an unexpected heat wave, and all the carefully selected flowers bloomed early and died. This was followed by days of intermittent driving rain, which meant they were unable to film and the summer garden had to last two weeks longer than anticipated. Thousands of extra plants were needed, particularly the not-so-easily obtainable old-fashioned roses, and people were dispatched to raid every nursery and garden center, sometimes buying up entire stock--even, at times, resorting to cut flowers, which lasted only the day. Relief must have set in when, in a five-day operation, the summer garden was transformed to winter.

But even today, shooting is held up because the sun unexpectedly bursts out from behind a cloud when, for continuity’s sake, overcast is what’s needed. As we wait for the sun to disappear, two men set about spraying the trunk of a cedar and the ivy around it with a white substance that looks live frost. I have been told repeatedly that this is a "green" film. Research was even done on how many leaves could be pulled off without harming the giant chestnut around which the garden was built. "What are you using?" I ask slyly, expecting a guilty answer, only to find that the spray is a solution of water and finely shredded paper. Eventually, I pluck up enough courage to talk to Holland, who has discarded her jacket and looks a little more approachable.

The Secret Garden, it transpires, is a classic in Poland and a childhood favorite of her own. She tells me sternly that it is exactly the sexual notion of the garden that has made is such an important lasting book. Four new editions came out in Poland last year, Holland says. (So why is it, I wonder, that instead of sexuality liberating me as a child, it only sowed the short-lived ambition to become a gardener?) After the success of Europa Europa, Holland was much feted in America.

"I was looking for something I could do for an American audience while at the same time something that was in my culture." But it was also for therapeutic reasons that Holland chose to take on the project. "The situation the world is terrible, so dangerous, and in this book there is hope." She wanted to make a break from the taxing kind of films she has worked on in recent years: Europa Europa, set in Nazi Germany; and her latest film, Oliver Oliver, based on harrowing real-life events. "It is, of course, very different working for a large American company, being watched over, but the important thing is that we do all want to make the same movie."

(The Secret Garden is a Warner Bros. picture). An added bonus for Holland has been the chance to fulfill a dream and work with Maggie Smith, who is, she believes, the greatest living actress. Smith plays Mrs. Medlock, the austere housekeeper at Misselthwaite Manor and one of the few adults in the film. "I didn’t want her to be cliché wicked housekeeper, or the heavy," Holland said, and indeed, in Thompson’s script we get to see a more frivolous side of her nature when Mary discovers her in a hat and underwear, admiring the effect in a full-length mirror. It is the end of the week, the elephants still have not been recalled, and we are on location on the grounds of Luton Hoo, a stately 18th century home. "Winter or Summer?" I ask when I arrive, and I’m told by a woman in a floor-length padded coat that it is summer. A particularly beautiful glade is being used as part of the grounds of the manor, but until the clouds disperse, nothing can be done.

I am chatting idly with a minute adult stand-in, agreeing that it looks like rain, when unexpectedly the sun edges out and the crew members spring to attention. "Action." The three children run off down the hill. A goat, a deer, two ducks, and a goose obligingly follow. "Cut." Halfway through the shot, the sunshine is evaporated. We wait, and then when, half an hour later, the crew goes for a second take, the animals seem to have forgotten their parts. The goat runs in a circle, the deer heads for the tea table, and the goose and ducks flap their wings as if they no longer see the point of running down a hill they have already run down. The children are, as ever, perfect. They run happily up and down the hill for the rest of the morning. "Are the children always so professional?" I ask the tutor, who, since Kate’s school has started, must be on the set today. "They don’t get drunk, they go to bed at a reasonable time, and they’re good friends. Early on" he concedes " they did get a little homesick." Eventually, just before lunch, in a miraculous display of synchronicity, the sun comes out, the children run, and all five animals remember what they were supposed to do and skip, trot, and waddle after them. An animal trainer comes out from behind a tree, mopping his brow. Of all the numerous animals, the only one that caused serious problems was the robin. Because of laws against capturing robins, sparrows were used for the long shots. For close-ups, wildlife photographers came in and shot endless footage of actual robins, coaxing them with worms and waiting patiently for just the right look or gesture. At lunch, the children have extra helpings of chocolate pudding. It is Andrew’s and Heydon’s last day, and they deny they are looking forward to going back to school. I ask how they’d feel about becoming a child star like Macaulay Culkin, making films all year round and earning millions of dollars. Kate looks up from her bowl, a little chocolate pudding on her chin, and surveys me with dark serious eyes. "That would be quite cool," she says. And the others agree.

By Esther Freud