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Home , Adventures in Wonderland, Alice Liddell, Dennis Potter, Dreamchild, Lewis Carroll, Rick McCallum

BAFTA HERITAGE SCREENING Sunday 24 May 2015 BAFTA 195 Piccadilly W1J 9LN Followed by a Q&A with director Gavin Millar, cinematographer Billy Williams and producer , hosted by Larushka Ivan-Zadeh

Celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of its release we are delighted to present a special screening of he magical world created by Lewis Dreamchild (1985), the double BAFTA-nominated Carroll has beguiled film-makers and writers since the publication of his collaboration between respected film and television children’s classic in (1865) director Gavin Millar and acclaimed screenwriter Tone hundred and fifty years ago. In Dreamchild Potter re-imagines key moments in the life of Carroll’s . The screening is followed by a Q&A famous muse as she travels in old age to with Gavin Millar, cinematographer Billy Williams Columbia University to receive an honorary degree. Potter skilfully fuses together past and present, and long time Potter producer, Kenith Trodd. fantasy and reality, breaking the rules of narrative so as to echo the structure of the famous book itself. The discussion will be hosted by Larushka Ivan- There are standout performances by (in her final screen role) as the irascible old Alice, Zadeh, Film Editor for Metro newspaper and a Sir as the intense Reverend Dodgson regular contributor on BBC Radio 4 and Sky News. and Amelia Shankley as the engaging young Alice. BAFTA HERITAGE SCREENING Sunday 24 May 2015 BAFTA 195 Piccadilly DREAMCHILD London W1J 9LN

With two BAFTA Television Awards “I read a paragraph somewhere – I don’t Millar wrote in the production notes nominations already under his belt, know where – which said that Alice that “I liked the idea of the fantasy and Gavin Millar approaches the challenge Liddell went to New York when she reality, and never quite knowing where of Dreamchild with relish. He draws us was in her eighties. I said, ‘ Christ’. one ended and the other began, which into the complex relationship between A couple of days later I was writing gives weight to the place of nightmare Carroll and the young Alice whilst it…” He wrote Dreamchild, he said, “in and in people’s lives.” In Alice’s giving Carroll’s hallucinatory characters four and a half days”. Maybe he recalled hallucinations, the Mad Hatter, March free range to erupt into the bittersweet Dodgson’s sad prediction – foreseeing Hare and others drawn from Walter reminiscences of the older Alice on her that, as Alice grew up, “No thought of Tenniel’s illustrations, as realised by journey to New York. me shall find a place, in thy young life Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, become Dreamchild was an important project hereafter” – and imagined her thoughts harsh, sinister beings – in Millar’s 1986 for Dennis Potter and he and Verity of him in her old life. phrase “as fierce as we felt an old lady’s Lambert served as its executive producers. The film joins the almost 80-year-old nightmares would have made them”. The film is co-produced by Potter’s Alice (majestically yet vulnerably played long-time associate and friend, the by Coral Browne), now a stiff, grand, BAFTA winner (and seven-time BAFTA very proper widow insisting on being Release year: 1985 nominee) Kenith Trodd, alongside Rick addressed only as ‘Mrs Hargreaves’, on Runtime: 94 mins McCallum, producer of three the steamship carrying her to America Director: Gavin Millar films prior to Dreamchild. for the first time, accompanied by her PRODUCERS: Billy Williams, the three times shy young companion Lucy (Nicola Kenith Trodd and Rick McCallum BAFTA-nominated cinematographer, Cowper). The occasion is the centenary Executive Producers: captures both the unworldly sequences of Dodgson’s birth, being spectacularly and Dennis Potter and the live action moments perfectly, celebrated at Columbia University with SCREENWRITER: Dennis Potter whilst Duncan Kenworthy obe, John ‘Alice’ as the guest of honour. Stephenson obe and Chris Carr were As Potter put it, he was stirred up nominated for Special Visual Effects for by “the idea of that tied-in, repressed, their work on the film’s creatures. Jenny strange, playful, tormented yet joyously Sweet or sentimental as the Shircore was nominated for Best Makeup inventive man, and an old woman conception might sound, it’s given a Artist. Editor Angus Newton, production thinking back because of the culture very tough and painful edge by its designer Roger Hall and composer shock of arriving in New York at troubled tone and by the tensions the Stanley Myers also excel. that time”. aged woman rediscovers as she thinks In an extract from an article in Sight & The film only partly occupies its back – to the pathos of Dodgson’s Sound, March 2014, writer Philip Horne 1932 present, where the script revels intense, controlled adoration of her delves deeper into the film’s rich history. in the confrontation between this young self, that impossible object of (Spoiler warning: some elements of the ultra-respectable embodiment of English desire. For the film steers a delicate film’s plot are revealed in this extract.) repressiveness and a pastiche-version course – aided by Stanley Myers’s of the snappy, cynical, golden-age- sensitive, atmospheric score and avin Millar told Simon Hollywood newspaper movie, as the Billy Williams’ lustrous yet shadowed Banner, of , that press pack besieges the confused dowager cinematography – through territory he’d been attracted by the with cheeky intrusions in the mode of thick with taboos. “weird originality” of Potter’s The Front Page. When sacked newshound Gscript about the aged Alice Liddell, Jack Dolan (Peter Gallagher) insinuates The BFI’s season of Dennis Potter’s work inspiration for ’s 1865 himself into her company, showing how continues in June. Further details can be Alice’s . “And I the publicity can be made to pay in at bit.ly/DennisPotter liked it because of its tenderness and its dollars, he also falls for Lucy in a way complex range of emotions and motives, that awakens in her employer memories its ambiguities.” Potter had written Alice, hitherto dismissed as “things best not BAFTA Heritage Screenings about the Reverend gone into”. BAFTA Heritage Screenings are a series and his fixation on the prepubescent Dodgson himself (Ian Holm, in the of quarterly film screenings and on-stage Alice Liddell, for TV in 1965 – but was film’s second great performance) is also interviews which celebrate British film stimulated by a fresh discovery, as he told vividly, ambiguously there – in the old and TV classics and the great film and Graham Fuller in 1993 for Potter on Potter: woman’s inner world, at the film’s core. TV professionals who made them.