Inside the making of ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’

On a remote Polynesian island, an eccentric lottery winner uses his earnings to bring his favorite musicians back together—and they’re also former lovers. What could go wrong? 

The Ballad of Wallis Island is a new film that tackles this zany scenario; it premiered at Sundance to critical acclaim and will hit movie theaters March 28. This past weekend at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW, editor-in-chief Brendan Vaughan sat down with the film’s cast, writers and director to talk about how they found the right note for their musical rom-com.

Panelists included four executive producers who all had additional roles behind and in front of the camera: James Griffiths, the director; Tim Key, a writer and actor; Carey Mulligan, an actress; and Tom Basden, a writer and actor who also wrote the original music for the film. 

Humble Beginnings

The Ballad of Wallis Island is adapted from a BAFTA-winning short film produced in 2008, written by Key and Basden and directed by Griffiths. Basden returned to it over a decade later because he felt it was “unfinished business.”

“It was quite a short script, but we played around with it. It was all very loose and we just loved the characters and loved making it,” Basden said. 

To lengthen the film from a short under 30 minutes to a feature-length film, the team made a few changes—including the addition of Carey Mulligan’s character as a former love interest and bandmate of Basden’s original character. 

“In the first one, I live on an island, I invite this guy to an island, we don’t really get on. And then . . . we start to get on and it ends. And then in the feature we sort of built on that, that felt like quite a winning formula. So in the feature he arrives, we don’t get on, he has a fantastic actress with him, and there’s two other people in it as well who are also fantastic,” Key said. “So basically everything in the first film developed and then added more dimensions and color to it.”

Preaching to the Choir

The film has a strong musical component, with original music by Basden. 

Basden spoke about the writing process for the music: “There was a long process of compiling the songs, but it’s not ever something I’ve done for a living. Writing. I’ve written comedy songs, but not songs like this. So I‘ve never really gone out of my way to spend time writing songs apart from when we were making the short, so I had to plug back into that and try to generate songs I was happy with.” 

He added that he sent every song back to actress Carey Mulligan knowing that her husband, musician Marcus Mumford, would have an opinion on them. And Mulligan had only sung at a school choir level before and had sung alongside a few other actors in the film Inside Llewyn Davis.

“I’d done it a bit in films enough to sort of think that I could probably get away with it,” Mulligan said. “But with the caveat that I said to Tom: I don’t want to ever sing on my own. And we did shoot a scene that didn’t end up in the film where I sing on my own, and it was the closest I’ve been to tears filming anything.”

Creativity Under Budget

The film’s team had to navigate what director Griffiths called a “tight budget.” He spoke about how the team tried to be as creative and ambitious as possible with limited resources.

“That’s where a lot of the fun is—in the parameters of what you can afford, what you want to do, your ambition for the film. Our ambition was always high for the film, to make the best thing we could with the resources we had,” said Griffith. “But ultimately, you’re only judged by the product that you create. That’s the only thing you can control, how good it is.”

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