OLIVIA MARNE
Tom Hanks, says Deadline, is a handshake away from agreeing to play Walt Disney in “Saving Mr Banks”, a film that chronicles the making of one of Disney’s most treasured classics, “Mary Poppins”.
Kelly Marcel’s script tells of how Disney waged a 14-year courtship to persuade Australian author P.L. Travers to sell him rights to make a film out of Mary Poppins. Disney look like producing the film, with Emma Thompson also being courted.
The heart of this script comes from how close Travers felt to her story of a nanny with magical powers. Mary Poppins was highly personal, and reflected hardships in her own life and her relationship with her father, who died when she was 7. Disney finally persuaded her to let him make the film, but she was prickly all the way to the end. While Mary Poppins was lauded immediately, she hated the animated sequences in the film so much that she refused to sell any of her other works to Disney.
