A HOUSE ANY CHILD WOULD LOVE TO LIVE IN: CREATING THE WORLD OF "NANNY MCPHEE"
The story is set some time in late Victorian/early Edwardian England, in a small village on the edge of London.  A non-specific fairy tale period without rigorous dedication to any single era liberated Jones and production designer Michael Howells to create an imagined world for "Nanny McPhee."  "It's late Victorian, but it's a picture book Victorian," Howells describes.  "We weren't tied down to any specific dates, which is actually quite nice.  It's just a fantasy Victorian period that people will step into with this family and watch the story unfold."
Jones created an environment in which Howells, director of photography Henry Braham, costume designer Nic Ede, and hair and make-up designer Peter King could collaborate with unprecedented creative freedom.  "I think the four departments have come together incredibly successfully and often you don't find that," says director Jones.  "You can have very talented heads of department in all of those areas but sometimes they don't gel because they each see the film differently. I see it as my job to make sure they are all heading in the right direction but then just let them do their thing and try not to restrict them."
A large portion of that freedom was expressed through the use of colours in the film -- a vivid mix of blues, greens, reds, purples, and pinks.  Howells, says Jones, "has gone completely bonkers.  That's Michael's genius."
Director of photography Henry Braham, who had worked with Jones on "Waking Ned," elected to use a new film stock which would be best suited to the strong use of colours.  "We hit upon this idea very early on," says Braham.  "This is an extreme version of colour photography and design because were using very saturated colour in every area of design. It dictates the look of the film in a very strong way."
Braham also points out, "There needs to be some reality for the magic to work.  Those elements bind together to create a kind of magical, and I suppose timeless, world."
"One of the things I absolutely agree with Kirk about is that most period English movies have a palette that runs the gamut from black to brown," says Doran.  "It's as though colour wasn't invented until some time after Dickens died.  Kirk said, 'I want to make a movie with bold colours" and that's exactly what he did.  Kirk praises Braham for his efforts.  "Henry works very hard outside of his own department and made a significant contribution to the process of selecting the colours which were featured throughout the film."
The setting at the heart of the film is the Brown house, a rambling mansion that might have belonged to someone very wealthy at one time but which is now in the hands of people with neither the time nor the income to maintain it.  Jones imagined a house that any child would immediately want to live in.  "I just wanted children to look at it and think, 'What an amazing house, that looks like a really fun place to grow up in," he says.
The size of the family and the amount of action that takes place in the house dictated its size and structure.  "It started as a small brown house, and then it grew with the different ideas we came up with," says Howells.  "We used a real mishmash of architecture, pulling favourite details from all over the world - little bits of French Colonial, steamboat gothic, Victorian gothic, and arts and crafts."
Jones gave Howells a brief about the basic physical requirements, which led to a huge number of designs.  "It needed to have a character all its own," says Howells.  "Something that's attractive to an audience, something that you immediately want to go in and start exploring."
From both a financial and artistic point of view, the filmmakers decided their best option was to build the Brown house and surrounding village from scratch.  "What it means is that you can always tie the two in together," says Jones.  "I think audiences are  subconsciously aware when the geography of the set doesn't exist.  Of course you can cut from one location to another, that's film making, but if you build the sets for real, if you can pan and reveal that sets relate to each other then that can only help the audience believe the world that you have created.  It seemed absurd to travel to existing locations which we knew would be nowhere near as visually interesting as what Michael could design."
The intricacies of the sets were detailed on paper and in small scale models to allow the filmmakers to work out all the kinks prior to building.  "The configurations that were fitted together determined the shape of the house," Howells explains.  "To that, we added little flourishes and odd-drawn windows or a porch here or there, but it started from the centre of the house and we worked our way out."
After looking at two other locations, the production discovered the perfect blank canvas on which to create the world of "Nanny McPhee" on the sprawling grounds of a private estate in Penn, Buckinghamshire.  "We chose it primarily because of the quality of the trees," Howells explains.  "There are large trees that are not in perfect condition, but that only adds to the look of the house."
"It was pouring with rain and very foggy on the day we first visited the Penn estate," remembers Doran.  "Kirk and Michael and Henry and Glynis and I and a few others traipsed through ankle-high mud into the middle of nothing - just big old trees and grass and nothing else.  And I looked over at the Kirk and Henry and Michael and they were all smiling these enormous smiles.  This was the place.  And when you see the film, you have to struggle to keep this in mind - that every single thing you see, everything except the largest trees, was put there for the filming of  "Nanny McPhee.'"
Howells, a gardener in his spare time, relished the opportunity to create a wild garden down to the barest details.  The team planted hundreds of smaller trees, dense shrubbery, thousands upon thousands of flowers, and built a tree house, a pigpen, a chicken coop, an arbour, and a greenhouse.  Explains Howells, "We wanted to create a child's dream garden - a perfect garden with places to hide and places to play. It's a magic place.  All the way through, we tried to capture people's imaginations."
Howells's art department beaded the grounds with silk flowers and added nasturtiums and grass seed to the furniture and scarecrows to "grow" into the place a sense of time and disrepair.  A mixture of meadow flowers was likewise sewn into the hedgerows.   "It's very clear that the Brown family doesn't have much money," comments Jones, "and I don't imagine that Mr. Brown has any time to look after the garden. So we wanted to be surrounded by brambles and nettle beds and uncut lawns.  I think that in itself adds more character than a well kempt garden."
The house itself is held up by 40 tons of steel in its body and the interiors were constructed to allow for maximum flexibility in terms of where Henry Braham put his lights.
Mr. Brown's study needed to be designed to accommodate the Rube Goldbergian tricks the children spring on Mrs. Quickly during her tea with Mr. Brown.  "I wanted to make sure it was believable that the children could be hiding and spying from behind bookshelves and windows but at the same time be dangling spiders on fishing rods and trying to get a jelly on Mrs. Quickly's head," explains Jones.  "A lot of the early conversations between Michael and me revolved around what was needed from a practical point of view and a comedy point of view."  And that encompassed a space beneath the stairs from which to catapult a gob of porridge and a staircase that would be suitable (and strong enough) for Mr. Brown to tumble down.
One of the most crucial sets was the entryway leading to the front door, where Mr. Brown first lays eyes on Nanny McPhee.  "I was very keen that the hall be quite narrow," says Jones.  "I imagined Mr. Brown going down a very narrow, very long hallway and being drawn towards the front door, towards her silhouette. It was very important to me that the design had a practical purpose."
Extraordinary attention to detail is made evident inside the Brown house in the sourcing of elaborate wallpapers, exquisite fabrics, period furniture, and authentic props, and nowhere more so than in the children's chaotic nursery.  "We found some real gems at auction," says Howells.  "Really beautiful old Victorian dolls and other toys, original pieces that would have been very expensive to recreate and look much better in any case when they're genuine and show the wear of actual toys that have been played with for generations."
Says Firth, "It's an incredible help for an actor to walk onto a set and into this magical world which has been so perfectly created.  You can't help responding to it, it helps you suspend disbelief." 
For a day on which Nanny McPhee takes the children to the seashore, Jones chose to shoot the scene against the backdrop of the cliffs at the remote and nearly inaccessible Durdle Dor, Dorset.  "I just find that a lot of locations which are accessible tend to be very flat," he explains.  "They don't tend to be as dramatic and as rocky as Durdle Dor, and when I saw the photographs and then came down for a location scout, I thought this is exactly where we should be shooting."
The beach scene, in which the children learn of the impending arrival of Mrs. Quickly, was originally written to take place in the Browns' garden.  "But we decided to move it to the seaside," says Jones, "to have some big open landscapes and seascapes." Those landscapes and seascapes came at a price, however. "I thought Kirk was crazy to choose that location," laughs Doran. "It was a long walk from our base camp to the cliffside and then 170 stone steps down a very steep cliff to the sand. The equipment was flown in and out by helicopter, but the human beings, children included, had to walk up and down those steps several times each day, including every time we wanted to use the toilet facilities. But now, when I look at that beautiful sequence, I don't think about the steps or the cold or the wind; I only admire the beauty and perfection of the location. Which is what Kirk knew form the beginning: the discomfort lasts only a couple of days, but the scene lasts forever."
The art department also built a handful of sets on soundstages at Pinewood Studios.  These included the nursery, the bedroom, the kitchen, and Nanny McPhee's room - mostly composite sets which link to one another to allow the camera to drift in and out of rooms.
Some location shooting also took place at Warren's Green, a simple rural cottage, which was transformed into Mrs. Quickly's fuchsia paradise.

EMMA THOMPSON
Emma Thompson was born in London.  Her father was theatre director Eric Thompson, also the creator of the successful children's series, The Magic Roundabout.  Her mother is actress Phyllida Law.  She read English at Cambridge and whilst there, she appeared in many Footlights performances including Cambridge's first all-women revue, Woman's Hour and The Cellar Tapes, which won the Perrier Pick of the Edinburgh Fringe and was later broadcast by the BBC.
After Cambridge, Thompson made appearances on television and in 1985 she played opposite Robert Lindsay in the original cast of the musical Me and My Girl..  That same year, her own TV special, Up For Grabs, aired on Channel 4.   Following this, she played Suzi Kettles in the John Byrne BBC TV series Tutti Frutti and then played opposite Kenneth Branagh in The Fortunes of War.  For these performances, she won her first BAFTA for Best Actress.
She went on to write and record her own series, Thompson, for the BBC.
She followed this with her first feature film, The Tall Guy, directed by Mel Smith, co-starring Jeff Goldblum and Rowan Atkinson for Working Title and then returned to the BBC to film The Winslow Boy, directed by Michael Darlow.
In 1988, she filmed Henry V, directed by and co-starring Kenneth Branagh and the next year filmed Impromptu directed by James Lapine.
Thompson then joined the Renaissance Theatre Company and toured the world playing play Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Fool in King Lear. 
In 1990 Thompson filmed Dead Again, directed by and co-starring Kenneth Branagh.  Roles followed in Peter's Friends and Much Ado About Nothing, both directed by Branagh.  She played opposite Anthony Hopkins in the Merchant-Ivory film The Remains of the Day for which she was nominated for an Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.  She then filmed Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father with Daniel Day-Lewis for which she was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Thompson won the 1993 Academy Award® for Best Actress, as well as the Golden Globe Award; the New York, Los Angeles and National Film Critics Awards; and the BAFTA Award, all for her role in the Merchant-Ivory production of Howard's End. 
In 1994, she appeared in The Blue Boy, an independent feature shot on location in Scotland for America's PBS, and Junior. A year later she starred in the title role in Carrington, Christopher Hampton's story of the strange love affair between artist Dora Carrington  and Lytton Strachey. She also starred in and wrote the screenplay adaptation (based on Jane Austen's novel) of Sense and Sensibility for director Ang Lee.  For her writing accomplishments on that film, she received an Academy Award® for Best Screenplay Based on Material Previously Published, as well as a Golden Globe Award, the USC Scripter Award and Best Screenplay awards from the Writers Guild, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Broadcast Film Critics, the Chicago Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics and the New York Film Critics.  She also received a nomination from the British Academy of Film and Television.  For her performance in Sense and Sensibility, she received her third BAFTA and National Board of Review awards for Best Actress, along with an Academy Award® nomination, a Golden Globe nomination and a Screen Actors Guild nomination.
Thompson followed that with starring roles in a succession of films including The Winter Guest, shot on location in Scotland and co-starring her mother Phyllida Law for director Alan Rickman ; Primary Colors, with John Travolta, Billy Bob Thornton and Kathy Bates for director Mike Nichols; and the independent feature Judas Kiss with Alan Rickman, this time as co-star.
More recently Thompson starred in the HBO telefilm Wit, for which she received a Screen Actors Guild, Golden Globe and Emmy Award nomination, and (as the film's co-screenwriter) the Humanitas Award, director Mike Nichols' screen adaptation of Angels in America, co-starring Meryl Streep and Al Pacino, for which she received an Emmy Award nomination, and opposite Antonio Banderas, in writer/director Christopher Hampton's film adaptation of Imagining Argentina. 
Most recently, Thompson starred in Richard Curtis' directing debut Love Actually, for which she received the BAFTA award for Best Peformance by an Actress in a Supporting Role, the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actress, and the Empire Award for Best British Actress. 
She has completed filming Stranger Than Fiction, co-starring Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Queen Latifah, to be released in 2006. Stranger than Fiction was directed by Marc Forster and produced by Lindsay Doran, marking Thompson's fourth collaboration with producer Doran.

DIRECTOR KIRK JONES
Kirk Jones graduated from Newport Film School in 1987 after winning a National student film competition. He started to work for London based production company BFCS as an assistant film editor but continued to write and direct his own films in his spare time.
He collected a Silver at the Creative Circle awards for his Mercedes test commercial in 1990 and was invited to join Xenium productions as a director. After winning an award for his Absolut Vodka commercial, which he wrote and directed, he started to direct commercials full time in Europe and in the U.S.
In 1991 Kirk joined producer Glynis Murray at the newly formed Tomboy Films and continued to direct commercials for clients including Coca Cola, Reebok, The National Lottery and MacDonalds.
He won awards at the Creative Circle, British Television Awards, NABS and in 1996 was awarded the Silver Lion at Cannes. 
Kirk wrote and directed his first feature film Waking Ned in 1998 with a budget of $3m. The film went on to gross almost $90m worldwide with awards in the US and Europe including New York Comedy Film Festival (Best Feature) Comedy D'alp, France (Grand Jury Prize and Critics Prize), Guild of German Cinema (Gold Award Best Feature) Paris Film Festival (Audience award) Golden Satellite Awards (Best Motion Picture nomination) and BAFTA (Most Promising Newcomer nomination).
After Waking Ned he returned to writing and developing his own film projects and continued to direct commercials.