Behind the reception desk of Working Title Films in Marylebone, London, there is a large board displaying graphics from each of the 100-odd films produced by this company.
Many of them are household-name movies, several of them starring Hugh Grant such as Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually and About a Boy. This is the company behind the Bridget Jones franchise (there's a new one incoming) and Hot Fuzz, Dead Man Walking and most of the Coen brothers' films, including Fargo and Hail Caesar! More recently they made Tom Hooper's The Danish Girl.
They are also the outfit behind the unlikely rip-roaring indie success Billy Elliot, a film from 2000 about a small boy from a Thatcher-era mining town in northern England who has big dreams of becoming a ballet dancer.
0 of 5
While there have been some worrying mutterings lately about "Bridget Jones the Musical", so far Billy Elliot is the only one of these Working Title movies to have made it to the stage. It's safe to conclude that the adaptation was a clever move by the producers, who also include the Old Vic Theatre and Elton John's partner David Furnish; Elton John wrote the music for the production.
Since it launched in 2005, the show has has been seen by more than 10 million people, gathered countless gongs including 10 Tony awards and travelled across the world including to America, Australia and even Korea. After 11 years of leaving audiences laughing (and weeping) in the aisles, the curtain closed last week in London for the final time. Billy is going on tour across the UK and Ireland, including a six-week run at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin in July.
Sitting in his office a few weeks ago, Eric Fellner, producer of Billy Elliot: The Musical, who runs Working Title Films with his business partner Tim Bevan, is looking ahead to that final curtain. "It will be emotional, because we are all so proud of the show," he says. "Proud of what we have achieved in terms of an original English British musical, and there's not many of them.
“It’s been an amazing thing. We make movies and you move on, you have to, so I’m sure we will just move on, but it’s emotional because hundreds and hundreds of people have been involved in the show over the years.”
Bullet-proof
Fellner calls Billy Elliot "a bulletproof story", one of those universal modern-day fairy tales about a boy with dreams and ambitions and his fight to realise them against all the odds. Fellner tells the story of the first time he read the script. "Film ideas come in to us in many different ways. This one came in as a script, which is very, very, very rare. Usually it's an idea, or a conversation, or an article or a book," he says.
“Lee Hall, who wrote it, sent it to us and I read it and cried my eyes out, and at the end I was like, ‘This is so annoying because it’s such a great story’, because the second criteria I have to apply to every decision about movies we make is the business one: it stars a little kid, it’s set in the north, it’s about a mining village . . . It’s about a kid who wants to be a ballet dancer. There is nothing that I can market in that outside of a few square miles, and as such the commercial potential for it is probably incredibly limited. However, it’s such a great story and it’s such a great script we have to make it. So to get over the business threshold not looking very good, we were lucky enough to find a way of making it for very little money.”
The logic was if they made the film on a tight budget (it cost $5 million) and nobody wanted to go and see it, “you don’t lose very much . . . We made it purely because we were passionate about the story and it ends up being an amazing film that Stephen Daldry directed.”
In the end the film made $110 million. So far, he says, the musical has taken $600 million at the box office.
He says he never would have "dared" doing Billy Elliot: The Musical without the right creative team on board. "We are lucky enough to have Lee Hall and Stephen Daldry as creative partners on the musical. Both of them were immersed in theatre. And Peter Darling did the choreography. Without that team I would never have dared to give it a go. I only wanted to do it if they wanted to do it. Lee wrote the lyrics, Stephen directed, and we were lucky enough to have Elton on board from day one. He loved the movie and he said, 'If you ever want to do it as a musical, I would love to write the music.' A few months later we went back to him and said, 'Were you serious?'"
A Billy moment
Fellner grew up in Sussex. He is a thoughtful character, politely wary of media and careful with his words. He doesn’t give many interviews. His is no Billy Elliot story but he did have a sort-of Billy moment of realisation when he discovered the world of theatre, a world far away from the one his father, a businessman, wanted him to inhabit.
“My father was in business and I was from a very closeted background. It wasn’t a mining background by any account. It was expected that I would do something professional,” he says. “My background is very boring. I went to a decent school where I got interested in theatre, and my Billy Elliot moment, if there was one, was at school when I got the opportunity to produce and direct plays. It was, ‘Oh my god, there is something different out there. There’s something I can do that doesn’t involve putting a suit on every day.’ ”
Does any particular school production stand out? "It was a Shakespeare play, Comedy of Errors. I remember we did it outdoors. It was really exciting. School is a very regimented environment, and the minute you are doing something like the school play, you are outside of the normal rules, you are working late or you don't have to wear your uniform, or you miss lessons . . . and basically that's what my life is now. I can stay out late, I can miss lessons. I do whatever I need to do and every single day is challenging and exciting, so it's that initial excitement that I had as a kid has been replicated in my professional career."
What did your parents think? “I didn’t really care. I didn’t stay to listen to their reaction.”
At 19, Fellner followed his showbiz instincts and landed a job as a runner with a music video company, in the days before MTV or VH1, when the music video industry was about to explode. “I did that for about a year in a small company and a small industry. Before I knew it I was doing all the big bands in the 1980s: Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Ultravox . . . I did hundreds and hundreds of music videos as a producer.”
Sid and Nancy
After five years, Fellner decided he wanted to tell longer stories and he became a film producer. "I didn't know what that meant, but I would try to do it." He sold his music video company and the proceeds gave him enough money to live for a year. He says his lucky break was meeting Alex Cox, who had a script called Love Kills, about Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. The resulting cult biopic, Sid and Nancy, was the beginning of his movie career.
While working with his company Initial, Fellner says he kept "coming up against this guy Tim Bevan and Working Title Films, and we'd be competing for material. Then in 1991 he was changing the way his company operated, and we started to talk and decided to merge. His company's name was far better than my company's name. We decided to keep Working Title and we rebuilt it in the form it's in now."
Earlier, in the reception area, Atonement director Joe Wright stands waiting for the lift. Fellner has just come out of a meeting with the team behind Bridget Jones's Baby, which is due in September. The film is being edited in the basement of the building. It's all go in this office, where you would never know who you might bump into. I was fervently hoping to encounter another Working Title stalwart, Rowan Atkinson, and – okay, I admit it – Hugh Grant.
Fellner, a father of five, says he is not a workaholic but he does think about work “24-7”. He is ambitious and hugely driven, he says, “by what I don’t know”. His parents died before they got to see his success, but he won’t be drawn on that any further, preferring to talk about the work. I mention the big board of film credits in reception and ask when he thinks he will have done enough.
“When it’s twice as big,” he says.
He confirms that in addition to the other Working Title projects in production – there are lots, including a serial killer drama based on the Jo Nesbo thriller The Snowman – there is talk of a movie version of Billy Elliot: The Musical. "It's a bit trippy," he says, "but we are talking about it."
He continues: “You’ve got to move forwards. My business partner, Tim, taught me very early on that if you hang around to enjoy the success of something for too long, you end up creating a big vacuum in the future, so you’ve got to keep finding new oxygen, because breathing the same air gets a bit stale after a while.”
The night before, in the beautiful Victoria Palace theatre in the West End, waiting for Billy Elliot: The Musical to start, a woman down the row from me confides she has seen the show twice before. She is bringing her husband for the first time. Her eyes shine with delight at the thought of seeing it again. He looks less convinced. "I get something different from it each time I go," she says.
Elton John’s tears
The production is exhilarating. Better, even more powerful, than the movie. Because of child labour laws, three different actors play Billy; they get a turn each night, and the talent of Brodie Donougher, who stars the evening I go to see it, is breathtaking. Director Stephen Daldry has said playing Billy is “like running a marathon while playing Hamlet”. During the initial rehearsals, one of the Billys was so exhausted he got sick in a bucket.
If the performances are astonishing, the songs are also powerful – Fellner recalls Elton John leaving the screening of Billy Elliot in Cannes with tears running down his face.
In fairness to Elton, my mascara is all over my face by the end of the performance. If I wasn’t laughing my head off at the witty (expletive-laden, it must be said) script and expert physical clowning, I was sniffling through the most poignant parts of the story: Billy’s attempts to express himself through dance, his ongoing communication with his dead mother or the solidarity of the workers during the 1984 miners’ strike, their community destroyed, their livelihoods disintegrating.
The musical lands a much heavier punch politically than the film, too, notably in one scene where the miners put on a Christmas show. A song about Margaret Thatcher contains the line: "We all celebrate today, cos it's one day closer to your death." (When Thatcher's death was announced in 2013, audiences were asked to decide whether the song should be included in the show or taken out as a mark of respect. They decided to keep it in.)
Fellner will be in Dublin for the opening night of Billy Elliot: The Musical. He has seen the show across the world and says he is curious about how this "bullet-proof" story will go down with Irish audiences. "Another thing I really like about it is that it brings a lot of people back into the theatre that wouldn't go into the theatre . . . it's a classless production. A classless, classy production," he smiles.
The show is also an emotional juggernaut. Looking around the theatre, it seems only the most admirably self-contained audience members fail to be run over. Even the dour-looking husband who had been dragged along by his excited wife is brimming over with enthusiasm as we spill out after 2½ hours into the crisp London air.
Fellner is right. Even if you don't like the theatre, even if on a normal day you can't stand musicals, this is one show you shouldn't miss. It's like theatre critic Charles Spencer wrote in the Daily Telegraph in one of the first reviews of the show back in 2005: "The whole cast is blessed with a freshness and sincerity I have rarely seen equalled, and one leaves this triumphant production in a mist of tears and joy."
Eleven years after the curtain first rose on the show, Fellner, a man who has made a very good living from knowing the kinds of stories that move people, says he still cries every time. Go and see Billy Elliot: The Musical. And, people, wear waterproof mascara.
- Billy Elliot the Musical is at the BGE Theatre, Dublin, July 26th-September 3rd
