Someone special
> Ella Purnell floats above the others in Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children
ELLA PURNELL spent a lot of time up in the air while filming Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children – which opens here on Sept 29. Purnell, 20, is Emma, one of a group of children who have unique abilities – known as peculiars – who live in an orphanage on a remote island protected by the exotic Miss Peregrine (Eva Green) in Tim Burton’s eagerly-awaited blockbuster, based on the best-selling novel by Ransom Riggs.
Emma is lighter than air and will float up into the sky if she doesn’t wear heavy, lead boots. And that meant that Purnell had to do lots of stunts suspended on wires.
She says: “Emma wears these massive, heavy boots to keep her weighted on the ground but when she takes them off, she starts floating in the air. That’s hilarious!
“I spent a lot of time being held by a big rope around my waist so I spent a lot of time on wires.
“I did Maleficent, so I’d done quite a bit of flying work before. But this is different.
“With this, it’s a couple of guys yanking the wires up in the air and the first time, it was a little bit scary but honestly, I loved it.
“The stunt director Rowley (Irlam) said: ‘OK, we’re going to go quite high but don’t be scared’.
“We were about 12 metres in the air and I was having the best time of my life. It’s really good fun, and I felt completely safe because I got to know the stunt team really well and they were brilliant. The cast and crew were like a big family …. I’d come back down and say: ‘That was a bit jerky, shall we do it again?’ They were strong lads and I knew they wouldn’t drop me!”
In the film, Asa Butterfield plays Jake, an American teenager who has grown up listening to his grandfather, Abe (Terence Stamp), tell stories of a strange orphanage in a far away land that he visited as a youngster.
When Abe dies suddely, Jake decides to try to find the island and when he does, he discovers that Miss Peregrine, and the peculiar children really do exist – albeit stuck in a time loop. Miss Peregrine has the ability to reset time and they live during one day in 1940, just before German bombs fall on the orphanage and destroy it. “Miss Peregrine can also reset the day. At the end of the day, she winds up the clock and suddenly, it’s the end of the day before and the 24-hour cycle starts again,” explains Purnell. “And that’s before the planes destroy the school. The bombs are crashing down and right before they are about to hit the house, Miss Peregrine can pause time and she says: ‘This is my loop’ because any further than that, they would all be dead.” As Jake enters the world of the peculiars, he begins to fall for Emma and discovers his own special power – he can “see” the evil Hollows, who are hunting the children. “Tim is so good at creating fantastic worlds on screen,” says Purnell. “But even so, I feel like this is quite different to anything that he has done before. “I can’t think of another of his films where he’s worked with a lot of children, for instance, and there are so many action scenes.” The film also stars Dame Judi Dench as Miss Avocet, and Samuel L. Jackson as the evil Barron. – Twentieth Century Fox Film (M) Sdn Bhd.