04-04-2025
'The Ballad of Wallis Island': Tom Basden on the initial nerves around Marcus Mumford listening to his music
Something many people fantasize about is what they would do if they won the lottery, and in The Ballad of Wallis Island (now in theatres), an eccentric man who lives on a remote island has to make that choice. The lottery winner Charles, played by Tim Key, decides to use his money to book his favourite musical duo, called Mortimer-McGwyer (played by Carey Mulligan and Tom Basden), which he used to enjoy with his late wife, for a private concert.
But while Herb McGwyer and Nell Mortimer lost contact after they broke off their romantic relationship, Charles' dream seems like their nightmare. It's a brilliantly witty and charming film, directed by James Griffiths, written by Key and Basden.
While the story began as a 2007 short film the trio worked on together, called The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, a core part of extending that story to a feature was adding characters into the story. Primarily Nell, who arrives with her husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen), and a woman named Amanda (Sian Clifford), who works at the one local shop.
"I think the unlocking character was definitely Nell, ... so that gave her a past, and then it gave a lot of emotional weight compared to the short film," Key told Yahoo Canada. "And then we wanted to bring her in with a husband, so AK came in for that, who's fantastic, and then a shopkeeper, the sort of sleeper hit of the movie."
"The shop was just such a perfect little location," Basden added. "It was so brilliantly designed because ... it's a cottage that was then just reconfigured to be Amanda's shop, and also where she lives upstairs, and it's just such a fun place to spend time in, because it feels so real. All of the scenes in the shop were enormous fun."
But a core part of the story also required Basden to not only craft music that worked for the story, but it had to be music that would be believable as something Charles would be so passionate about that he would want this private show to happen.
"What was in my mind when writing a lot of the songs was thinking about the kind of music that would have meant a lot to Charles when he was younger, and particularly would have meant a lot to him and his wife," Basden explained. "But equally, what would have meant a lot to Herb."
"I wanted the music to have a sort of innocence to it, to sort of hold its own musically, but to have a kind of romanticism through it and an optimism about it. Because I think that's the thing that feels most out of reach for Herb now. When we first meet him, he's pragmatic now, he's not optimistic anymore, and so being forced to play those old songs is something that he's a little bit scared of at first, ... because he feels so distant from them, and when he starts to reconnect with them, that's the thing that kind of brings back all of those emotions and gives him a bit of positivity again."
Of course, Basden also gave himself some added pressure by sending his songs to Mulligan, whose husband is Mumford & Sons' Marcus Mumford.
"It was horrendous," Basden admitted.
"This guy had a terrible couple of months," Key added. "When you send that text message and then you're just waiting for four days."
But Basden stressed that Mumford was "so supportive" the whole time.
Another particularly impactful element of The Ballad of Wallis Island is Griffiths' use of the landscape. It was shot in just 18 days in and around Carmarthenshire, Wales.
Through his effective perspective as the director, the setting really amplifies the story, while it could have easily been a distraction from the intimacy of the narrative.
"The way I kind of approach everything, I think, with certainly my process, is to just look at it, scene by scene a little bit, and also think about the world that you're creating," Griffiths explained. "I kind of knew from the story that we needed the island to feel like a slightly timeless space that the characters could arrive there, and it would have a sort of transformative effect on them."
"You're just looking at making the landscape feel [like] somewhere that would be difficult to get to, that would be difficult to get away from, but also held its own sort of poetry or beauty in itself. ... So we've been very clever about what we showed of the island and the coastline to construct it in people's minds. We drew a kind of virtual map, like a Lord of the Rings kind of map of the island, so we could track where people would journey to and from. And then photographically, for me, just using the camera to celebrate what Tom and Tim do and what the story was doing, which means that you're kind of trying to put them in the same frame a lot of the time, so that you can really get a sense of ... the comedic timing."
The Ballad of Wallis Island is a beautiful story about love, kindness and nostalgia, with a melancholy tone that still ends with joy, and injected with the perfect amount of comedy.
