The unlikely adventures of Paul King
Endearing, unassuming and in ‘perpetual crisis’, he spun Paddington into the UK’s biggest grossing film but shares a lot with the little bear who made his name,
HE is currently the hottest property in British film but, at first glance, you wouldn’t peg Paul King, director of Paddington 2, as a powerbroker. For one thing, his body language is pure humility — rounded shoulders, hands wedged meekly between his knees. He’s wearing an outfit you might describe as adorably off-beat — navy cords, a school-uniform-grey cardigan, and a pink shirt printed with teeny tiny cartoon mushrooms. He has a long, dishwater-brown forelock of hair that falls in front of his clear blue eyes and a softness in his face that would melt a mother’s heart.
Hugh Bonneville, whom he has directed in both Paddington movies he has helmed, said of him, “he is Paddington Bear, basically.” And it has to be said there is a certain cuddliness about King. “I do feel pretty close to him,” he says of the bear who has made his name.
I meet him in a suite on the 36th floor of London’s Shard. We sit side by side on a sofa facing a wall-sized window, rendered speechless for a moment by the jaw-dropping view of the city below.
Despite his unassuming bearing, there must be a quiet audacity lurking somewhere in Paul King’s soul. How else to explain how he managed to engineer his leap from being a largely untested director with only one art-house flop, Bunny and the Bull, to his name, to the man behind the biggest grossing non-Hollywood film of all time in one deft move. Though warmly received by critics, King’s debut feature was not a commercial success. “It lost every penny it cost to make,” he says. “I’m very glad that Paddington 1 didn’t match Bunny’s box office, or I would definitely not be sitting here today.”
The Paddington movie was in development when he read about it on the BBC website, “and I really wanted to go for it”, he says. “For some reason I just immediately felt, ‘I could do that’, and I don’t really know why. I think more than anything I was just worried that somebody else would mess it up and make it awful. And that he would be, you know, break-dancing and just awful and it would be Hollywood-ised and just dreadful.”
Certainly his possession of a certain cosy, rumpled quintessential Britishness meant he already had a feel for the tone. And though he was born in Winchester and grew up in a village in Scotland, he has a deep love for London, which is as much a star of the film as the bear. “I came back to London after university,” he says. “And strangely felt I’d come home.”
“We wanted to see the London that you dream of,” he says of the world of the film. “And obviously London house prices are famously comedic and nobody is really living in these enormous houses... but it’s the London that exists in your heart from Mary Poppins or Peter Pan.”
Though he was instantly confident he had what it takes to transfer Paddington from the cherished children’s books by Michael Bond to the big screen, his hiring was a bit of a wild-card choice. Besides Bunny and the Bull, he was perhaps better known in television circles, for his work directing the absurdist comedy series The Mighty Boosh, for which he won his first Bafta nomination. “I’d done the Boosh and I’d done some talking animals and I’d done some comedy and I really had this sense of how it should be,” he says.
It was on that basis that he managed to swing a meeting with producer David Heyman, the man who shepherded the legend that is Harry Potter from book to screen, and who, he says “is an extraordinary producer with a track record of taking a punt on people who haven’t proved themselves on that scale before”.
Eventually, he won Heyman’s trust. “After about 25 interviews and a year-long process”, admittedly. “But I eventually convinced him that I would be able to handle it.”
King grew up with the marmalade-loving bear. “I had a Paddington, which I still have,” he says, “who is dressed in clothes I wore at that age. Given he’s only about 2ft tall, I must have been very, very small when I liked Paddington. I read the books and I hugely enjoyed them.”
But it was only when he came back to the stories as an adult that he really appreciated their richness — their profound and universal human themes. “I think one of the things that is so lovely about him — that he’s the little bear trying to make it in the big world and to hold on to his sense of self. And I think one
‘The visual metaphor of the small cub in the big city is very clear’
of the things that is universal about Paddington is this feeling that he’s making his way, the visual metaphor of the small cub in the big city is very clear, but I think we’re all like that, from the first day at school or playgroup to the first day in a new job, or coming up The Shard for the first time,” he says, gesturing at the whole of London, laid out below our feet. “And just sort of hoping to navigate things, and making lots of mistakes along the way and hoping the world will greet you with enough kindness to put you back on your feet, and I think one of the reassuring things about Paddington is that it generally does. Which is rather lovely.”
It is a description which mirrors quite neatly his adventures in bigbudget cinema. He was pretty much green coming to the first Paddington film and, as if that wasn’t adventure enough, shooting was fraught with problems, all followed closely by the press, and a defensive British public anxious about this new imagining of a national icon. Halfway through filming, it was announced that Colin Firth, the big-name star who had been cast to voice the bear, was leaving the project. “We got the voice wrong to begin with,” King says. “What Colin was doing was great, but it didn’t quite match the bear. And we had this animation and there were some very tricky corners to negotiate, where you sort of go, ‘I think I may be screwing this up, and it doesn’t work’.” (Firth was replaced by the much younger Ben Whishaw.)
Luckily for him, on set he was among friends. “Having somebody like David (Heyman) who can go, well maybe we can do this, maybe we can do that, and to see paths through, is brilliant. That said, I think the whiff of the world, the sensibility of what Paddington’s London should be like, and the sort of performances and the sort of style of the film, was pretty clear in my head from very early on, that I wanted to do a sort of Chaplin-esque mixture of slapstick and heart, in a kind of Genet-inspired London. And some of those very early references you sort of cling to, because you go, well what would Chaplin do? Is this too mawkish and sentimental? No, because he would do that. And is