THE SORT-OF 40'S
"This is a fantasy film and we didn't want to be restricted to any particular time period or even any particular place," says Doran.  "We chose not to adhere to what was accurate for the World War II period in order to make the film more delightful to look at and to make the war a metaphor for all wars.  This is a classic story of a family with one parent away at war.  The Green family's problems should be recognizable to the people of any country whose armed forces are engaged in a conflict away from home.  The family members left behind are worried, they are saddled with responsibilities they wouldn't ordinarily have, there are financial consequences, and parenting is much harder."
In keeping with the idea that the film is set in the "sort-of 40s," the design team was encouraged to venture into flights of fantasy.  Emma Thompson explains, "When I'm writing, I work with words and character and story.  And whilst I did see things in my head, Production Designer Simon Elliott came along and created something so perfect and beautiful and original that it blasted away everything I had envisaged.  That's the glory of writing a screenplay -  that other people come along and add something that you could never have thought of."
Susanna White decided on Elliott to be the designer when she first read the script:  "Simon and I are very much in tune," she explains.  "He takes design influences from around the world - the drawers in the shop are based on a village shop in France, and the haystacks are from a shape we had both liked in Romania, but he can take all those disparate things and make them very English.  We used Norman Parkinson photographs as references and the British decorative tradition of the Bloomsbury group.  We both love the tradition of the English surreal - Stanley Spencer was on our mood boards - hence things like the strange topiary in the village."
The exterior of the farmhouse and several of the fields used for the piglet chase were shot at Tilsey Farm, near Guildford.  The Tilsey location was perfect, a valley between England's green and rolling hills, with little evidence of twenty-first century progress.  However, although the farmhouse nestled into the side of a hill looks like it had been built hundreds of years ago, nothing could be farther from the truth.  Explains Elliott: "Apart from the barn, we've constructed everything that you'll find here, the house, the outbuildings, the garden and the ponds.  We had to move an enormous amount of earth to set the house into the side of the hill, make terraces, excavate a couple of ponds, plus for crew access we had to build a road into the site as well.  It was all done in eleven weeks and everybody worked phenomenally hard."
One element that was already in the screenplay was an abundance of mud, and director White instructed the art department to create a special mud-like substance that looked particularly gooey and chocolate-y on film.  As a result, Eros Vlahos discovered a new form of muscle training: "The mud slows everything down, so it feels like it's all in slow motion.  The crew has to lug the equipment through the mud in their wellies, so everything takes a lot longer.  Wearing wellies has been a new kind of exercise for everybody because they're not that easy to walk in through mud.  But it's kind of fun at the same time."
Whilst the exterior of the farmhouse was shot at Tilsey, several interiors were also required.  Says Simon Elliott: "The script dictated that we needed to show five rooms in the farmhouse - a kitchen, a best parlour, the children's bedroom, Mrs Green's bedroom and the bathroom," and these were built at Shepperton Studios.  He continues: "For the period feel, we went for a kind of nostalgic English countryside from the 20s, 30s and 40s.  We've sourced the furniture and all the bits and pieces that you see around the house from all around the country and had great fun going to car boot sales, flea markets and even eBay.  The house is supposed to feel very creative.  Mrs Green makes her own clothes and makes things for the children, so it's supposed to have a feel of handicraft to it."  The child actors in the film helped to decorate the set, as during education and the rehearsal period they were given crayons and asked to draw what they thought their characters would draw.  The artworks around the kitchen set are theirs.
Another set built at Shepperton was Mrs Docherty's shop.  Although the story is set in a time of wartime deprivation, we encounter the shop on the day when a month's stock of deliveries has just arrived, so it's chock full of wonderful colorful things.  Says White: "I knew Simon could create a really imaginative and magical space that had the spirit of old English villages about it."  A wall of drawers was built to accommodate the scene in which Mrs Green hears voices telling her that the person she needs in Nanny McPhee, and other parts of the set were specially prepared to accommodate assorted "talking" objects as well as the volcano of flour that Mrs Docherty creates behind the counter.
Perhaps one of the most idyllic locations in the film was the barley field, which was sown with an old-fashioned long stem crop that would allow a 1930s harvester to harvest it.  Set in the Oxfordshire countryside, the field was planted on the crest of a hill, with a beautiful view over the valley below.
It was essential that this thirty-acre field of barley was perfect, for as Thompson explains: "The harvest is a sort of central character in the film.  The barley was sown by the production team the year before, then grown and looked after for eight months, and I've never worked in a more beautiful environment, ever.  Because barley moves, it moves all the time, and it moves with the wind and you would never get the effects that we got if we had been using CGI.  CGI is brilliant and it can be extraordinary, but a barley field is something else because every blade moves differently and it speaks to you and it makes noises in the wind.  It was a living, breathing thing and you could understand why farming is this passion, that you have this relationship with your fields because we really did."
In stark contrast with this countryside idyll, Norman and Cyril race to London with Nanny McPhee in an attempt to trace Mr Green with the help of Cyril's father Lord Gray.  Explains White: "We saved the colour red for London.  We had a restricted colour palette for the countryside, and then in London the reds ping out at you, from the buses, pillar boxes and phone boxes to the guardsmen's outfits and the red nails and red lipsticks on the supporting artists. We wanted London to feel very alien compared to the soft lines of the countryside.  We limited the aesthetic to buildings with strong expressionist lines such as Battersea Power Station and the War Office, and, other than the bright reds, we limited the city's colour palette to blacks and greys.  It was important to me that it should feel like 'a war' rather than specifically the Second World War, and that the red should stand out like poppies."
After a whistle-stop tour of famous London landmarks such as Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square, some of the filming took place over several weekends in Park Crescent, adjacent to Regents Park, and at Senate House, off Russell Square. 
Another crucial design aspect of the film was the costumes.  Jacqueline Durran, the costumer of films as varied as Atonement and Happy-Go-Lucky, was chosen to design them.  Says White, "I wanted the costumes to feel timeless and classic, and Jacqueline embraced that idea in a brilliant way.  It was vital to me that an audience should feel they could run into Mrs Green on the streets of Notting Hill now, in her tea dress and plimsolls, and that she would fit right in.  Jacqueline drew on classic British designs - Liberty prints, Fair Isle sweaters - and gave the Greens' clothes a handmade feel because Mrs Green not only embroiders her own clothes but also those of the children.  When she patches Megsie's dungarees she does so in a fun and colourful way.  The Greens' clothes reflect the same design aesthetic that we see in the way that Mrs Green has decorated the walls of their house. It is all part of one world, a world very different from the world represented by Celia's frilly, expensive frock and Cyril's Saville Row suit."

"THAT WHICH IS LOVED IS ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL"
A central feature of the Nurse Matilda books on which the Nanny McPhee series is based is the fact that the title character's looks change as the children's behaviour improves.  These changes are never explained, but the filmmakers cite a Norwegian proverb -  "That which is loved is always beautiful" - as the closest thing to an explanation they've been able to find.  Everyone reacts to Nanny McPhee's hideous looks when they first see her - Mrs Green stops dead in her tracks, little Vincent makes an undisguised noise of disgust, Uncle Phil screams out loud, and Cyril describes her features as "a face that could win the war hands down."  But as the children grow to love their unusual nanny, and as they themselves become more caring and generous, her hideous features melt away.  Whether this transformation actually happens, or happens only in the imagination of the family, is never addressed.  In the original Nanny McPhee, Mr Brown and his children notice that her face is changing, but in the new film only the animals notice - Mr Edelweiss squawks, a piglet winks.  The changes happen so imperceptibly that even the audience has a hard time knowing exactly what's different from scene to scene.
Hair and Make-Up Designer Peter King remembers his first thoughts when creating the look for the Nanny McPhee character in the first film. "It had to be scary, but not too scary," says King, who won an Oscar for creating wizards, trolls and hobbits for "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy.  "It had to be funny, but not too funny or it would detract from the more profound themes in the story."  In the Nurse Matilda books, Christianna Brand never shies away from describing the initial hideousness of her central character when she first arrives at the family's door - two hairy warts, a single eyebrow, a protruding "tombstone tooth," and "a nose like two potatoes."  Coordinating his efforts with those of the costume department, King and his team recreated that initial look as well as the various stages the character goes through over the course of the story.
"It's a very complicated process," explains Doran.  "Nanny McPhee's looks sometimes change in the middle of a scene, and everyone has to know exactly where it happens.  There were five stages for the costume and seven stages for the make-up and hair, and there had to be absolute clarity as to what the character looked like at each moment in her scenes.  To achieve that clarity, we created a chart was distributed to the hair, make-up and costume crew as well as to the assistant directors so everyone knew when we had to stop and make a change."
In spite of the complications of the costume, hair and make-up transformations, Thompson was happy to tackle the role of the magical nanny once again:  "Nanny McPhee isn't normal.  In some ways she is not human and I always think of her as a collection of projections.  Whilst she is certainly a moralist, her system is more like that of the Zen mistress than any other.  It's a tremendously interesting part to play."
Eric Fellner concludes, "I love Nanny McPhee because she creates a world that children love to inhabit.  Her authority actually makes children slightly nervous but also really excited.  They're excited because they love seeing what she can do and they're slightly nervous because they think that she might tell them off as well.  It's wonderful to be able to make a film that extols some kind of classic family values."

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