Robert Kojder chats with The Ballad of Wallis Island writers/stars Tim Key and Tom Basden…
In 2007, the three-man team of director James Griffiths and screenwriters/leads Tim Key and Tom Basden made the award-winning short film The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island. Centered on a man living on a stunningly beautiful remote Welsh island who employs his favorite musician to play a private concert, that story has been fleshed into a feature-length film now with The Ballad of Wallis Island.
As I tell Tim and Tom below, this is a hilarious and heartwarming film. It also never feels like a short film that has been stretched well beyond its breaking point. Here, Carey Mulligan joins the cast as former musical and romantic partner Nell to Tom Basden’s Herb. He agrees to the gig under financial and solo career stress without being told she will be playing, making this a reunion. Nell has left that lifestyle behind and has a new significant other.
Tensions flare and conflicted feelings arise, all while Tim Key’s obsessed but wholesome fan Charlie quips and jokes in the background as part of his personality deflecting away from inner sadness, a means to diffuse some of the strife between Herb and Nell, and primarily because the character is naturally a goof. The endearingly silly humor is sampled at the beginning of this talk.
It was a pleasure to talk with Tim and Tom about writing and starring in this feature-length version of a work that holds significant artistic value to them. They are funny and insightful, demonstrating growth as individuals, writers, and actors within the past 18 years since that short film. With moving music rounding out the witty humor and terrific performances, The Ballad of Wallis Island is well worth checking out. Please enjoy the interview:
Robert Kojder: Hi, I’m Robert Kojder with Flickering Myth. I’m from the Windy City, you know, Portland.
[laughter]
Tim Key: That’s a good opener!
RK: I have to ask, who came up with that joke?
TK: Him! [Pointing to Tom Basden]
Tom Basden: No idea, was it me? I don’t know. I think some of that scene was improvised. Charles just gets everything wrong. He doesn’t know who he’s talking about.
TK: I managed to channel how much I know about America into my character.
RK: [laughs] Those jokes seemed fun to improvise or write, especially the Reese’s bit. That had me cracking up.
TK: Yeah, that stuff, it’s a fun film to be in. There’s definitely a lot of story and a lot of stuff that has to be said, but also, there is room to enjoy it. And our director is very tolerant. So all the stuff in the shop, it’s good. You have like three hours in the shop, you’ve gotta do the script, but also you’re allowed to just sort of look around the shop and say what you see slightly. It’s very enjoyable.
RK: Speaking of that, can you talk about your approach to balancing the comedy and the emotion?
TK: Yeah, that’s the difficult thing. We’ve done it for like 20 years, so we’d be disappointed with ourselves if we didn’t get the comedy on screen. It’s not a given, but you’ve got a chance of getting that in. Then, the emotion, you just gotta work hard with the script and try and give yourselves the best chance of making a story that might be engaging. Once you’ve done that, within the scenes, you can sort of listen and try to act with some truth. And hopefully, you’ll be able to uncover that emotion. Also, I think there’s a slight advantage: if the comedy works, you can make the emotion unexpected. It can reveal itself out of nowhere. As an audience member, you can be surprised that there’s a scene where you’re engaged emotionally. And then my character can clatter off, and we go back into comedy in a shop for a bit. We’re very lucky in 18 days of shooting for those two things to be enjoyable and challenging.
RK: Tom, I’ve read that you have written comedy songs before. These are obviously much different songs, but can you talk about how that experience helped or informed you in writing these songs?
TB: I’ve been writing songs of various forms for a long time, some of which, you know, performing on stage and some just for myself that I would play in my bedroom and then get very sweaty at the thought of anyone ever hearing them. But like many actors, I’m probably quite a frustrated musician, and I would quite like to have been a musician. All of the experience writing songs over the years for different things didn’t really help with this. It helped me generate the music for the film quite quickly, as well as the lead-up to it, and sort of commit to it a bit. That’s the thing with anything like this; there comes a point where you’ve just gotta say, okay, these are the songs. This is the song we’re playing in this scene. I’m now gonna press send on this email to Carey Mulligan, and they’re gonna hear this demo. That’s just what it is [laughs]
RK: How nerve-wracking is it to press send on an email to Carey Mulligan?
TB: It’s horrendous [laughs]
TK: The first time, and this is how Carey Mulligan came to be in the film, is she’d asked me to do something about five years ago, and then when we made our hit list of Nells to be in the film, Carey was at the top. So then I told Tom and Griff [director James Griffiths], I’ve got her email address; shall I email her? Both of them were like, yeah, I don’t think you have her email address. Anyway, I’m very proud of the script for the film, but my email to Carey Mulligan is absolutely next-level!
RK: You should adapt that into a movie next.
TK: Exactly. If we can dramatize my email to Carey Mulligan, we’re in business! But yeah, once you hit send two hours later, you’re checking. The next day, you’re checking, and you sort of think at some point after about 10 or 15 days, she’s not gonna reply. Luckily, she replied quite quickly, and that started the wheels in getting her into the movie.
RK: That’s amazing. Tim, your character Charlie, hides a well of pain, sadness, loneliness, and even some insecurity underneath all the jokes as if the humor is like a distractive coping mechanism. Can you tell me the challenges of putting everything together into one performance?
TK: This is right in my wheelhouse. It’d be more challenging for me to be in an action film where maybe the character doesn’t have as much going on, isn’t being funny, and is trying to make his space rocket go into the air. This is this kind of character… Me and Tom started out writing sketches, and they were quite character-driven. So this kind of staple character, a guy who talks nonsense, was, again, in our wheelhouse. Then it’s pulling the emotion in with it. But that came quite easy once you give them a bit of a backstory, and there is a bit of pain there. You can balance them off.
The scenes near the start are incredibly annoying for the recording artist. He’s invited to this island, and after about 40 minutes on it, it feels quite natural to be emotional. It never felt like a stretch. It all felt like it was coming from the same character, which is the dream, really. But it takes some hard work two years before you make the film when you’re writing it and setting everything in place to give yourself a chance to perform it on screen.
RK: I know you adapted this from a short film you all made about a decade ago. Can you tell me why now felt like the right time to turn it into a feature-length film?
TB: To be honest, we always wanted to come back to that short film, and if we had got our act together or even had someone really pushing the project like 10 years ago, we probably would’ve wanted to do it then. We definitely would’ve done it. However, the real benefit of having waited this long is that we are now finally at the right age to play these characters. We were far too young for the characters when we made the short. Now we can bring things into the film that are sort of from our own life and our own experience and speak to what it’s like to be in your mid-to-late forties, looking back on your twenties and looking back on how you felt about your early career and your first loves and what that feels like to remember kind of that and sort of long to return to it, but not be able to. That has ended up being a very big part of the film. From going to screenings, watching the movie, and seeing those themes there, I think we’ve become aware of what a big part of the emotional engine is. We certainly couldn’t have done that until now.
RK: For Herb, the lyrics and songs are entangled with his love for Nell, and for her, they’re about the music, and they can be separated from that past relationship and the current moment. I think it’s tapping into the idea that art can mean something different from artist to artist. So, years down the road, do you think this film will carry a distinct or separate meaning for either of you?
TB: Yeah, I think so. Tim and I have found ourselves getting quite emotional when we’ve been in screenings for the film or talking to people who’ve seen it because we didn’t know that we’d ever get to make it, even though we always knew we wanted to, having made the short film. There is certainly something to revisit, like a fulfillment of an early idea or a promise or potential that has been an unexpectedly moving thing for us. I’m sure we’ll feel differently about it again in, you know, 5 or 10 years’ time, maybe 20 years, when we come back to the characters for a third time and make the sequel. [laughs] Inevitably that’s what’s going on for us as performers when making this, but also for the characters. To go back to your point about how we balanced the comedy and drama, a lot of it came very organically because I think the way that we were feeling about the material was kind of the way our characters were feeling when we were in those scenes.
TK: I think, on various levels, we are quite nostalgic, and maybe we’ll be quite sentimental about this. I like the film and so, but I feel like in 20 years’ time, maybe we’ll have made other stuff, but I feel my reaction to the film in 20 years will be partly that it’s, I like what we did, but I can’t believe that we managed to make that film at that time in our lives. It is sort of a similar feeling that I think we both have to the short film. When we look back on that, I like that short film, but I also think we have a relationship with where we were in those days. I’m glad we’ve made it; it’s nice to have something you will return to and look at. We’ll put it down in a month or two, but I can imagine us watching it at some point in 20 years together and going, that was mad that we made that feature film.
RK: James Griffiths also directed the short film. Was he always on board to direct this adaptation, or did it take some convincing?
TB: No, no!
TK: It didn’t take any convincing.
TB: I don’t wanna speak for him, but I think he had a good time making that short film with us. I think as soon as we told him that we were working on the feature script, he was really excited, and he wanted to read it and be of any help that he could, but he also gave us our space to get there and work out exactly what we wanted it to be. James is such a lovely guy to work with because he’s so talented and he’s so committed, but he is also very trusting, and he really did give us the time and space both on set and in the lead-up to figure out what it was and to figure out exactly how everything was gonna work and what it would sound and feel like. He had confidence in us. That’s a very lovely thing when you’re working with a director, and you know they’ve got your back.
TK: We were very much a team when we made the short. It was a very warm, enjoyable experience. Whenever we talked about making it again, it wasn’t the idea of making the feature; it wasn’t the idea of Tom and I thinking, well, let’s write a script, and then let’s see who would be the best person to direct with Griff being the front runner, it would always be the three of us meeting together, and we come as a three for this, which can be tricky, In the film industry, notoriously, you can’t choose exactly who you have directing your thing always, but we were pretty adamant, and lucky when the film got green-lit. Everyone was happy for the three of us to go forward together. Otherwise, it would’ve been a really difficult thing, I think, for all three of us, too, and I can’t conceive that we would’ve made it if it wasn’t the three of us making it together.
RK: I know we discussed improvisational moments before, but the island is so beautiful. Does that cause improvisational moments itself? And for each of you, what was your favorite spot on the island?
TK: Definitely. We get on with writing the script, and we’re doing other things, and Griff was there for a long time before we got there; he’s very thorough and diligent and leaving no stone unturned. So he is driving around with his mate peers, and they’re finding stuff. Once we started performing on that island, particularly in the shop and the house, we were very reactive to it and went up there maybe two weeks before we shot to see whether anything would inform the script. In terms of where my favorite place was to film, I think, weirdly, the short answer is maybe the shop. It was very low pressure in the shop.
It was just a nice moment; it was never emotional in the shop, and it was always nice to see Sian Clifford in the shop. Personally, I was either in the shop doing a nice scene with Tom and Sian or in the shop doing a nice scene with Carey and Sian. It was cramped. It wasn’t easy to film in, but it was enjoyable, a little bit cartoonish.
TB: My favorite place to shoot was probably the beach at low tide on that particular stretch of coastline in the West of Wales. When the tide goes out, you go from having, probably, a meter or two of pebbles to suddenly, when at low tide, you’ve just got this massive expanse of golden sand. It’s just incredibly beautiful. There was one scene that we shot where we were walking back from the shop, Tim and I, and that’s all low tide on the beach, and the sun was out. At times like that, you feel like it’s everything you want from a shoot, that you get to be in this incredibly beautiful place. It comes at a time in the film when they’re really opening up to each other and already getting on. The use of locations to sort of map how the characters feel in the film is brilliantly done. It’s something that I didn’t pay a lot of attention to when we were shooting, actually. It’s just when you look back at the film and go, oh my God, they’ve done so well with those locations at certain times of the film. They add so much, particularly emotionally, to what’s happening.
RK: Thank you so much for your time. This movie is hilarious and heartwarming, and I loved it. Before we go, Tim, give me some winning lottery numbers.
TK: [laughter] 4, 19, 23, 28, 40 and 41.
RK: Thank you! Have a great day.
SEE ALSO: Read our review of The Ballad of Wallis Island here
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
