Finding Neverland

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Finding Neverland
Finding Neverland film poster
Directed by	Marc Forster
Produced by	Richard N. Gladstein Nellie Bellflower
Written by	David Magee
Starring	Johnny Depp Kate Winslet Julie Christie Dustin Hoffman Radha Mitchell Freddie Highmore
Music by	Jan A. P. Kaczmarek
Cinematography	Roberto Schaefer
Editing by	Matt Cheese
Distributed by	Miramax Films
Release date(s)	November 12, 2004
Running time	101 min.
Language	English
Budget	$25,000,000
IMDb profile

Finding Neverland is a Academy Award-winning film that released in 2004, starring Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. It is a semi-fictional account of the experiences of Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie that led him to write the children's classic. In the movie, he befriends a young widow—and more importantly, her four sons—and their experiences together give him the ideas for a story about boys and girls who do not want to grow up.

1 Cast and crew
2 Box office
3 Trivia
4 Differences with the true story
5 Awards and nominations
6 External links

The film is directed by Marc Forster, who previously was responsible for Monster's Ball; the screenplay was adapted by David Magee from the play The Man Who Was Peter Pan by Allan Knee. It features a song written by Elton John. Dustin Hoffman, Julie Christie and Radha Mitchell also appear in the movie.

Finding Neverland was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture,Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor for Johnny Depp. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Score by Jan A. P. Kaczmarek. It was also nominated for several other awards, including a Screen Actors Guild Award for Freddie Highmore for playing the part of "Peter".

US Gross Domestic Takings: US$ 51,680,613

+ Other International Takings: $64,970,000

= Gross Worldwide Takings: $116,650,613

Finding Neverland was originally scheduled to be released in the fall of 2003, but Columbia Pictures, which had the rights to Barrie's play for their film Peter Pan, refused to allow Miramax to use certain scenes from the play in Finding Neverland if it were to be released at the same time. Miramax thus agreed to delay the release of Finding Neverland by one year in exchange for the rights to use Barrie's words.

The film was at one point (before release) titled J.M. Barrie's Neverland.

Freddie Highmore and Johnny Depp are also in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory together with Highmore playing Charlie and Depp playing Willy Wonka. This came about because Depp was extremely impressed with young Freddie's performance in this movie and requested him for the role of Charlie to Tim Burton. He also was impressed with Jordan Fry's performance.

Dustin Hoffman, who appears in the movie, has also appeared in another famous work adapting the Peter Pan mythos: Hook, as the title character Captain James Hook. There was originally a scene in which Dustin Hoffman's character was to put on the Hook costume and read some of his lines to point out how silly he found it, but Hoffman didn't want to do it so the scene was changed to him reading off character names from the play.

Also in the film are

-Mackenzie Crook, as the usher, with whom Depp stars in the Pirates of the Caribbean cycle (He plays Ragetti, the pirate with the wooden eye),

-Angus Barnett, as Nana the dog/Mr. Reilly, who appeared as Mulroy in Pirates of the Caribbean

-Paul Whitehouse of The Fast Show fame, of which Depp is famously a fan, and on which he once appeared alongside Whitehouse.

Mary tells James that, although he stayed at home most of the time, he constantly seemed lost in himself. A similar accusation is made against another of Johnny Depp's characters in Secret Window.

German Power Metal band Blind Guardian's single "Fly" is loosely based on Finding Neverland.

In reality:

There were five boys instead of four. (Nico, the youngest, was omitted.)
Arthur Llewelyn Davies was still alive when Barrie met Sylvia and her sons.
Sylvia died in 1910, six years after the play's premiere (1904).
The lives of the Llewelyn Davies family were rife with tragedy following the film's "happy ending": George died during World War I, Michael drowned with a friend at Oxford in 1921, and Peter grew to resent others' identification of him as "the real Peter Pan" and Barrie's gift of the Peter Pan copyright to Great Ormond Street Hospital instead of to the family, eventually committing suicide.