Goodbye Christopher Robin is the inspirational story of how a father bonded with his young son and created the much-adored Winnie-the-Pooh books. “I loved the idea that behind the creation of this world famous children’s story was the story of a family,” says director Simon Curtis.
Domhnall Gleeson (About Time, Brooklyn) stars as Alan Alexander Milne, a successful playwright and humourist who was traumatised after serving as an officer with the British army during the First World War and carried the horrors of the battlefield into peace time but, like so many men of that generation, rarely spoke of it.
“When he came back from the war he was damaged, he was a lost soul,” says Curtis. “And then by chance he stumbled upon the joy of being a parent.”
Like many families of the time, A.A. Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) and his wife Daphne (Margot Robbie) had a live-in nanny, Olive (Kelly Macdonald) who looked after their eight year-old son, Christopher.
When the story starts, in the 1920s, it was a time, notes Domhnall, when families weren’t so openly affectionate in the way that many are today. “We’re all a lot more lovey-dovey now,” he says.
“There are far more displays of affection between parents and children now compared to when I was a kid and at that time, when Milne was a parent, it was almost unheard of.”
Margot Robbie, who plays Milne’s wife Daphne, agrees “Parenting was very different at that time,” she says. “You’d see your child for half-an-hour in the morning and that was normal. It wasn’t neglectful, that’s just how it was. Daphne was a very strong woman and she had her flaws, too.”
With Daphne away in London and Olive visiting her sick mother, Milne is left to look after his son at their idyllic home, Cotchford Farm, in the heart of the beautiful East Sussex countryside.
Gradually, the traumatised war veteran who had found it difficult to connect with his son begins to bond with Christopher: playing games together, going for long walks in the woods and creating stories involving the boy’s teddy bear, Winnie.
“Our film is also about how stories are created and the complexity of how they are created,” says Curtis (My Week with Marilyn, Woman in Gold). “And in some ways it’s about England where we are the home of some of the world’s greatest storytellers and yet we find it difficult to say ‘I love you.’”
Bonding with his son helped Milne recover from the horrors he had experienced during the war, says Gleeson.
“It was sometimes called shell shock back then, a version of post traumatic stress disorder, and one of the things that helps is nature and being around new life and being able to start communicating with people again – these are paths through trauma.
“And I believe that this is what Alan Milne found – he stopped looking sideways at things and instead concentrated on something beautiful, his love for his son.
“He began playing in the woods with Christopher and making up stories for his son. He opened his heart up to something and let himself be vulnerable and wrote something ridiculously gorgeous for this son and those stories became Winnie-the-Pooh.”
Producer Damian Jones agrees and adds: “Our story is really about fathers and sons and about parenting,” he says. “And at the same time telling you the origins of Winnie-the-Pooh.
“After the war Milne was writing these sort of Noel Coward light plays, still very successful but not feeling very fulfilled. He has a very traditional relationship with his son and the child is mostly brought up by the nanny and then sees his parents just before he goes to bed.
“They move out of London to the countryside and Daphne has to go back to London and, due to a family emergency, the nanny has to go to, leaving Milne alone with his son and suddenly he has to really be a father for the first time.
“And he really starts to connect with the boy and starts to love that bond. He starts writing about the games they play which, in turn, become the Winnie-the-Pooh stories.”
The family’s nanny was a huge part of Christopher’s childhood, spending hours with Christopher Robin each and every day. “There are photographs of her,” says Kelly Macdonald who plays Olive. “And Christopher Robin Milne wrote about her a lot in his lovely book- she comes up all the time. So there was obviously a real love there.
“It was an important relationship for him. His parents weren’t exactly absent, but they were very much of the time and at that time a nanny played a big part in raising a child.”
Today, Curtis and his cast and crew have taken over a corner of London Zoo in Regent’s Park to film a pivotal scene where Milne takes his son to see Winnie, the famous Canadian black bear and one of the zoo’s most popular attractions back in the 1920s.
“It’s a key scene,” says Curtis. “It’s a re-treading of their footsteps because this is where they came and here we are in the very same spot.”
The production saw hundreds of hopefuls from all over the UK before choosing Will Tilston to play Milne’s son as an eight year old and Goodbye Christopher Robin marks his screen debut.
“I think we started the search about four or five months before we went into production because we knew it would be a long haul,” says producer Damian Jones.
“We had enlisted the help of kids’ casting agencies, youth drama schools, schools that had drama departments, drama societies and clubs – they came in from all over. I think we saw over 500 boys.”
The last four candidates were taken to the house that the production use for Milne’s old home for a final audition where they performed a few scenes from Frank Cottrell Boyce’s screenplay. And whilst the producers and director are keen to point out that all of the boys did extremely well, Will stood out.
“I did a sort of pretend working day,” says Curtis. “They had to do four or five scenes, wear the costume and work with the cameraman. Will was amazing and we’re blessed with him.
“He’s never acted before and the last nine year old boy I cast who had never acted before was Daniel Radcliffe as David Copperfield and that led to Harry Potter. Will really is like a little professional. We have a whole two-page walk and talk (scene) and he can just do it.”
Christopher Robin would later name his teddy bear Winnie after the majestic bear he saw that day at the zoo. That toy bear would feature in the stories that his father invented for him and would become Winnie-the-Pooh.
Winnie-the-Pooh, a collection of stories about the lovable bear and his adventures in the English countryside with his friend Christopher, featuring a host of memorable characters including Piglet and Eeyore the donkey, was published in 1926, although Winnie had made an appearance earlier, in a poem published in Punch Magazine, where Milne worked deputy editor.
The stories of innocence and the wonders of childhood immediately captured the imagination of a world still traumatised by world war. A second volume, The House at Pooh Corner, again illustrated by E. H Shepard (played by Stephen Campbell Moore in the film), was published in 1928. “They were written at a time when the world was desperate to recapture the innocence that had been lost in the war,” says Curtis.
In the public’s mind Christopher Robin, the character in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and the real child he was based on were one and the same and, says Gleeson, as he grew older Christopher struggled with life in the public eye.
“I think in a way Alan Milne was trying to solve his own problems in writing Winnie-the-Pooh and trying to give a gift to his own son and to the world and it caused more bother for his son than he ever could have known,” he says.
“It’s really interesting because he tried to use this boy’s innocence to show the world a better place and in doing so took the innocence of the boy. Now everybody has their innocence taken from them, that’s part of growing up, but it was taken pretty early from Christopher. So there is a whole story behind Winnie-the-Pooh that I think is quite important and very unusual.”
Curtis points out that child celebrities were rare back then. “Fame is a very modern subject. And if you do the research Christopher Robin, along with Shirley Temple and The Queen when she was a child, were the prototype child celebrities.”
Gleeson admits that when Curtis first sent him Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s script he didn’t know much about Milne or, indeed, his most famous creation, Winnie-the-Pooh.
“I didn’t even know what Winnie-the-Pooh looked like. I knew what the Disney version looked like but not the original drawings, which are beautiful and mean far more to me now,” he says.
“I knew very little and when I came on board and was talking to Simon my point all the time was that the film would have to mean as much to people who knew nothing about Winnie-the-Pooh as it would to people who knew about him because really it’s a story of a family and the post war society.
“It’s as much that and the damage done by war and about the connections between fathers and sons and mothers and sons, it’s as much to do with those things as it is to do with Winnie-the-Pooh.
“And it’s about how something beautiful came out of a lot of tragedy and as beautiful as Winnie-the-Pooh is that’s kind of the happy ending of the film, really – that something beautiful came out of a lot of damage. And getting to read Winnie-the-Pooh was the easier part of the research because it was so much fun.”
Ms Robbie certainly did know the stories and has loved them ever since her mother used to read them to her each night at bedtime back in Australia. “I play Christopher Robin’s mum and in the movie I do the voices of the animals and act things out for him when I’m reading him the stories,” she says. “And my mother used to do the same thing for me.
“And when I was going to sleep I’d have my Winnie-the-Pooh bear with me and a Tigger as well. And Mum would act out the stories, do the voices for the characters, and I found it hilarious. It was my favourite thing ever.
“So when the script came to me I was like ‘yes!’ I really wanted to do it immediately because it’s so reminiscent of my own childhood. I called my mother and said ‘you won’t believe what I’ve just read.’ And I told her about how Daphne reads to her son and said ‘it’s exactly what you used to do for me.”
Cottrell-Boyce’s screenplay has a ‘magical quality,” she says. “It’s so well written and it evoked a lot of emotion in me. It felt really, really magical – that’s the only way I can describe it.
“In our story you get to see the impact that fame has on Christopher and his family and you also see the impact of war on all of them. Alan Milne quite possibly had some form of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), which wasn’t really labelled back them and we see how that can affect a family.”
The film spans almost two decades and starts in the 1920s when Milne, a successful playwright and humourist with Punch Magazine, has returned from the First World War, clearly traumatised but reluctant, as were many men who fought in France, to talk about what he had witnessed.
Gleeson loved the script but knew, too, that making Goodbye Christopher Robin would be a challenge. “It was a difficult one but made much easier by the quality of the people involved,” he says. “The material is not necessarily what you think it might be when you think of anything to do with Winnie-the-Pooh.
“And given Milne’s history there was a fair amount of research to do before we started and there were a lot of difficult moments that he went through in his life, particularly having fought in the war, and that stuff was challenging to take on and different to what I’d done before. So it was a difficult job but I was very happy that I was working with such amazing people because that makes it all a lot easier.”
That challenge was, he admits, part of the appeal. “Certainly, yes. There was enough about this that was meaningful and different to things that I’d done before to really make me want to get involved. It was incredibly interesting and it got more interesting as different people came on board.”
The production filmed in London and at several key locations in the Sussex countryside where the Milnes lived including Ashdown Forest where Alan and his son invented the game ‘pooh sticks’ that features in some of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories.
Father and son would each throw a stick into the stream that runs into the River Medway from one side of a bridge – now known as ‘Pooh Bridge’ – and then race to see which stick emerged first from the other side.
“We used the real locations as much as we could,” says Jones. “And we had to shoot at Pooh Bridge and in Ashdown Forest and that was really special.
“We couldn’t use the Milne’s home, Cotchford, although we intended to, because the interior was so different. But we found a house that looks exactly the same and it was untouched inside.”
Being in the real places where the Winnie-the-Pooh stories were born was special, says Ms Robbie. “It’s tangible and it just makes your job so much easier. You are not imagining where you are because you are in that place. I’ve been so grateful that we have been on all these wonderful locations as opposed to being in a studio. It’s been perfect.”
Two young actors play Christopher Robin; Will, making his screen debut, plays him as an eight year old and Alex Lawther (The Imitation Game) as a teenager.
“Will was 10 years old when we were making it and he’s a brilliant kid, he’s a brilliant person. I loved being around him and I really enjoyed his company. He made me laugh, he committed and he worked really, really hard and he was excellent,” says Gleeson.
“We really got to do proper scenes together and there were no excuses made for the fact that he is 10 years old but I feel quite protective towards him. I have a feeling that he is going to be fine. He has a great family and he is such a cool guy.
“It feels like he knows himself and that’s a wonderful thing. He was a joy to work with and is amazing in the film. Alex plays Christopher when he is older, when he’s maybe 18, and he was great too, a fantastic young actor.”
Ms Robbie too, was entranced by Will although she admits she had to resist the temptation to give him too much affection – at least during filming.
“The point of Daphne’s relationship with Christopher is that it’s disconnected,” she says. “I’m meant to be a bit of a stranger to him so I’ve actually made a conscious effort not to spend too much time with him and that’s been hard.
“I was tempted to run up and give him a hug and a kiss because he’s so cute but I’ve had to resist putting a hand on his shoulder or show too much affection because Daphne wouldn’t do that. But I’ll be giving him a big hug when we wrap, that’s for sure.”
