The new family adventure Bookworm stars Elijah Wood (Lord of the Rings) as a once-famous Vegas magician unexpectedly thrown into fatherhood when his estranged daughter’s mother has an accident. They go on an adventure in the New Zealand wilderness, searching for the mythological Canterbury Panther, hoping to earn the reward for a sighting to pay off her medical bills.
Bookworm is an adorable, wholesome, and poignant adventure flick with great performances from Wood and his young co-star, Nell Fisher. At the film’s Fantastic Fest US premiere, we spoke with Elijah Wood and its director, Ant Timpson, about making the film and why it stands out in the pantheon of family films. Check out the interview below!
Bookworm Interview
FandomWire: This is the second film you guys have made together after Come to Daddy. What do you think works so well about this collaboration?
Elijah Wood: Well, we’re friends first, I guess.
Ant Timpson: Yeah. Usually, I’ll leave it to the audiences and the critics to judge. But look, we just really had fun working together, and a lot of the same team that worked on Bookworm worked on Come to Daddy, so we kind of hit the ground running in that respect, creatively. So, it just feels like a bunch of good friends hanging out and playing, which is what I think all films should be.
Wood: Making the kind of things that we like. We have really shared sensibilities, and we enjoy the same movies and the same reference points. The creative process is fun; it was really fun on Daddy. We were friends before that. The thing we collaborated on before that was we produced Jim Hosking’s film The Greasy Strangler. And, you know, it’s really fun to work with your friends.
FandomWire: I’ll also say this is a significant departure from Come to Daddy in terms of tone, content, and genre. Why did you take such a massive swing in the other direction?
Timpson: Toby and I, who work together — the writer, Toby Harvard, who did Come to Daddy as well — we didn’t really set out to say, “Hey, we need to make a family-friendly film because we’ve been doing all these crazy outlier, grotesque projects.” It was like, “Let’s just work on some characters that we’re interested in and situations that we think we can mine for comedic effect.”
That was basically the singular idea of us as dads cracking the bed in a time of crisis. Shitting the bed in front of our kids at a moment when we’re supposed to step up as men. So it’s playing within masculinity and father figures, and then it’s how we can mine that for comedic effect. Which I think that’s what Toby and I really like — mining personal trauma and exploiting it and using Elijah as an avatar for those neuroses.
And how can we emasculate them even further? By putting him with a 12-year-old and throwing them into the wilds of New Zealand to face and overcome some obstacles and see what they do under external pressures. And in the film is a mystical, mythological creature called the Canterbury Panther, which is sort of based on myth and fact in the south of New Zealand.
FandomWire: Mr. Wood, Bookworm is a full-circle moment for you. Your most iconic role was in an adventure movie where you answered the call, and in Bookworm, you’re, in some ways, playing the character that gives the call (and, in other ways, answering a different call himself). How did this feel?
Wood: That’s funny; I didn’t put those two things together, but certainly the return to New Zealand, and specifically to the New Zealand wilderness, and being out in the wild on an adventure, kind of was a similar sort of thing. But for me, I was just thrilled to come back to the country and work in a country that I love.
That was a part of the idea from the beginning: we could go and make this in New Zealand. And my family had never been there, so this film afforded me the opportunity to share that with my family and my kids. I could run around in the wilds as well, which is really special. But, yeah, it felt amazing to return. It’s a country that’s very close to my heart, and wonderful to be able to tell a very different kind of story.
FandomWire: I’d love to hear from both of you on this, but why do you think New Zealand makes for such a great setting for adventure movies?
Wood: The actual landscapes are extraordinary.
Timpson: To be honest, and I’m being really honest, nothing. Nothing that any other country can’t provide. But the irony of New Zealand is that there’s nothing outside of the landscape itself, really, that can hurt you. There are not all these natural dangers like grizzly bears or cougars or these Disney standards that could hurt you. We wanted to emulate those films, but we don’t have any of that. We had to come up with a mythological creature that we all talk about down there.
Wood: That is a real thing, by the way. When I read the script, I thought it was invention. I thought the entire myth was invention, and then realized that it was actually a real myth. And there are genuine sightings and have been for decades.
Timpson: Yeah, we talked to a few people–
Wood: That had seen this cat. So that’s kind of fascinating — telling a fictional story within the context of something that may or may not be fiction. That was really fun, being in that zone and speaking to locals who had their own history with that particular creature that may or may not exist.
Timpson: It’s an adventure film where the stakes are more relationship-based. Those are high stakes, and everything else is like window dressing. It’s more atmospheric. The actual intensity comes from the dynamic between the two.
FandomWire: As you mentioned, one of the things that really stands out about Bookworm is that it feels more low-key, and dare I say grounded, than some family films. The characters aren’t saving the world, they’re not looking for some mythical treasure, they’re trying to save their family and find a rare animal. Why did you want to take this approach?
Timpson: I guess Toby and I… we’re just not the type of people to create a Goonies. That just wasn’t the direction we were going for — and I love The Goonies. But we just wanted a kind of odd and daring buddy road movie set in the wilderness, where you get to know two people, and actually, for a kid’s film, just to hear people talk to each other.
And it’s been interesting to talk to young audiences that have been watching it. I thought I didn’t know if they would connect on that because they’re so used to whiz-bang. We think that all they need now is this kind of hyper-kinetic storytelling, and they don’t. If you give them a smart kid that they actually connect with on some level, they’ll go with the ride. And then you can actually take them to do whatever you want them to do.
So that’s been really rewarding to see. Because originally, the deepest fear was that it was aimed at eight-year-olds, but also parents.
Wood: Is it too cerebral? Are they going to connect with their connection or lack of connection and the journey that they’re going on? Because it’s really interpersonal, it’s not necessarily about all the things around them.
Timpson: We just kind of flip the story on the usual quest movie because it’s not the focus.
FandomWire: I also want to talk about your character, Mr. Wood. What were some of the inspirations for the flamboyant personality of your character?
Wood: I mean, there were outside inspirations in the writing of the character, certainly Criss Angel — semi-rock-and-roll illusionists that might have been figures in Vegas or wouldn’t be out of context in Las Vegas. That sort of vibe.
But then, it’s a collaborative process. So, these were all the inspiration elements, and then a lot of it was honestly finding the wardrobe, figuring out what this person looked like, to sort of establish his identity. Because when you meet him the first moment with that giant hat, that’s the purest of him from Vegas that you’ll get. And then he gets stripped away and becomes more himself and sort of vulnerable throughout the course of the thing.
It’s also just about finding the balance between the sort of flamboyant guy who’s trying desperately to prove himself to his daughter, that he has no relationship to, and he doesn’t know how to be a father, so the only way that he knows how is to sort of bluster and do tricks, and it doesn’t really work.
The writing is so good. You know, Toby is such a wonderful writer, and the dialogue is wonderful and rich. So it makes my job as an actor a lot easier. I can have a lot of fun to play with, and then so much of what that character is, if you strip away these elements, he’s just this vulnerable guy that isn’t actually successful, doesn’t have a relationship with his daughter, and sort of yearns to be these things that he’s not. And it’s this kind of journey that she throws him on that allows him the opportunity to rise to the occasion.
Bookworm played at the 2024 edition of Fantastic Fest, which ran September 19-26.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
