After 16 years of “Wildwood,” Travis Knight has a finished film and a lot of feelings about it. Laika’s stop-motion adaptation of the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy and illustrator Carson Ellis had its world premiere Oct. 11 at the BFI London Film Festival and opened in U.S. theaters Oct. 23.
Knight, who directed and produced the feature, traced that long road in remarks at the London premiere and in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Laika optioned the book in September 2011, weeks after it was published, but cameras didn’t roll until 2021. From there, the film needed 231 weeks of production, The Hollywood Reporter reported.
Knight’s count starts earlier than the deal. He got his first look at “Wildwood” before Meloy had finished writing it, and he held off because Laika hadn’t yet developed the tools the story required, he said at the Annecy animation festival, according to Animation World Network.
How stop-motion shaped the long wait
Knight broke down the mechanics behind that timeline for the London crowd. Laika builds thousands of tiny objects, photographs them, moves them “a microscopic distance” and shoots again.
“And we repeat that process over and over until either the film emerges or society collapses,” Knight said, according to Variety.
Knight, 53, has led Laika as president and CEO since 2009. He is the son of Nike co-founder Phil Knight. At the premiere, he measured the wait in jokes.
“When we started Barack Obama was a fresh-faced president in his very first term,” Knight said. “I could have become a medical doctor twice in the time it took us to make this movie. A child who was born when we started this could have driven me to the premiere.”
Reaching the finish line after all that time came with a letdown, he told The Hollywood Reporter.
“It’s been a part of my life for more than half my career. So I’m going through a little bit of a depression,” Knight said. “It’s this thing that occupies so much of your time and your thoughts and your emotions — and when you’re done with it, it’s like, ‘What do I do with all this?'”
Author Colin Meloy on handing off the adaptation
Meloy and Ellis were minimally involved in the production, Publishers Weekly reported, though they weren’t shut out.
“We have made many trips up to Laika, and we’ve been shown art in progress,” Meloy said. “They did give us early drafts of the screenplay, which we gave notes on. So they had our input from that standpoint.”
Beyond that, Meloy was comfortable letting Knight’s team take the story from there. “We were pretty okay with handing it off,” he said. “I like the idea of letting somebody else make that adaptation without me being over their shoulder.”
He’s excited for audiences to see the film’s teeming closing battle, and he’s just as impressed by the scene “in which Curtis is imprisoned in the coyote warren, where cages are hanging from the ceiling.”
That distance became clear in the music. Meloy, frontman of the Decemberists, proposed a song for the closing credits before he saw a rough edit, working from what he called “the thesis, as far as I knew it, as the writer of the book.” Knight suggested the film concluded on a changed note.
“And it was true,” Meloy said. “I ended up writing a completely different song. It underscored how different a vision [there can be] between the writer of a book and the filmmaker, even though it’s ostensibly the same story.”
“The Better Part of Bravery” now plays over the closing credits, and Laika has submitted it for Oscar consideration, Variety reported. The other song, “I Want to Be Lost,” landed on the “inspired by” record released alongside the film.
Ellis, for her part, waited until the London premiere to watch the film, according to Publishers Weekly.
Cast, rating and release details
Chris Butler wrote the screenplay, and the film runs 2 hours, 12 minutes. The voice cast includes Peyton Elizabeth Lee as Prue McKeel, Jacob Tremblay as Curtis Mehlberg, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali and Angela Bassett.
“Wildwood” is Laika’s first PG-13 film. The Motion Picture Association gave it that rating for strong fantasy violence and bloody images, thematic material, suicide-related material, brief partial nudity and language.
Knight chose to release the film through Fathom Entertainment in part to guarantee a full theatrical run, The Hollywood Reporter reported. “Wildwood” is now playing in theaters.
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