A Monster Calls

Fantasy with heart…

Director J.A. Bayona Starring Lewis MacDougall, Felicity Jones, Liam Neeson, Sigourney Weaver

ETA 21 October

It takes the idea of a fairytale and, well, you feel safe in a fairytale, and then it makes it less safe. But also hopefully truer.” That’s how author Patrick Ness describes the concept of his book, A Monster Calls, published to great acclaim in 2011. Now, it’s being adapted for the screen by director J.A. Bayona, and centres on 13-year-old Conor (newcomer Lewis MacDougall), whose mother (Felicity Jones) is dying of cancer when he’s visited by a monster (mo-capped by Liam Neeson) who tells him three fairytales.

“It’s trying to get to the truth of what it would actually be like for a 13-year-old, rather than an easy-to-swallow TV movie version,” Ness explains to Total Film. “I wanted it to feel true at heart and rough and really emotional.”

Ness is no stranger to affecting stories about teenagers, having penned a number of award-winning young adult novels, and when he sold the movie rights to A Monster Calls, he felt so protective of the story that he elected to write the script himself. “I really believe in a writer trying different muscles,” he explains. “You’ve only got one life, and you’ve only got one writing life, so why not learn new things and try new things? I wanted to start the conversation and find someone who would finish it in the right way.”

That person ended up being Spanish filmmaker Bayona. “He talked about it in terms of both The Orphanage and The Impossible, which is, in a way, about the relationship between a mother and a child,” Ness reveals. “He’s made something just terrific.” Meanwhile, that A-list casting roll also includes Sigourney Weaver as Conor’s no-nonsense grandmother, and Ness has nothing but praise for the actors bringing his story to life. “Liam Neeson is a terribly nice man – everybody’s very nice, but Liam is terrific,” he says. “And Sigourney Weaver’s performance is especially great.”

At the centre of it all, of course, is young MacDougall, whose only previous screen credit is playing lost boy Nibs in last year’s Pan. “His auditions were so strong, so amazing, the way that he can be genuinely emotional in a scene; he can cry when the scene calls for it,” Ness says. “He’s just right.” Take hankies along to this one...