An Interview with Creative Team Behind ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’

Martin Pope and Tom Bidwell are a pair of accomplished creatives that have brought forth some meaningful stories throughout the years. Recently, they teamed up to bring The Velveteen Rabbit to life on Apple TV+, and recently we sat down with both of them to learn more about how they brought this project to bear.
 
John Betancourt: I would love to know, first and foremost from both of you what it was that attracted you to this particular project. And we'll start Martin on this one.
 
Martin Pope: I've been running Magic Light Pictures for 20 years, and we've done a lot of animation, we've done live action as well. And what we particularly love doing is trying to bring to life stories which are to enrich the imaginations of children and families worldwide. That's what we wake up in the morning and set out to do. And there are very few stories which really resonate and continue to resonate. And so, as part of our process, at our work, we tend to read a book and then sit on it for a bit and then come back to it and come back to it. There's lots of the rest of the industry who read a book, and they're trying to option everything. And we spend a lot of time trying to sit and think about what really drives us and how to bring something to life in the best possible way. And so, we have a wonderful colleague called Bianca Rodway, who I can remark on her first day she came in and she said, “Look, I'm not really meant to be thinking about this sort of area,” because she felt it would be animation, and she's very much from live action. But she said, “You've got to, you really need to be thinking about it.” And it's a book I'd known about for some years. But we just felt the right time, we began to think about it. And she's an old friend and colleague of Tom's and so we began to think about it there and explore how you could really bring it to life, how you can make it as sad as it needs to be and as joyful as needs to be.
 
Tom Bidwell: I think from my point of view as a screenwriter, I'm always, you know, you get asked a lot, what exactly you're looking for. And the answer is always something with a huge emotional, center. Something that's very big hearted, especially for kids. And it's really big hearted. And having known the book since I was a child and loved it, because of the elements that Martin says, the hopefulness and the fact that it's challenging and difficult as well, which is always seems to hit you harder when it's sitting in children's literature. I just think it dawned on us when we were developing it, that, you know, this is a chance to really make this in a way that was not possible previously, because of how animation has moved on, by how effects have moved on. You know, to hand in a script to these guys, that is so ambitious. It's got several different types of animation style in it. And for them to say, “Okay, let's get it made”. I mean, it's an absolute, absolute, privilege for me to do because it’s not often you hand in, you usually you hand in your first draft, and they’re like “no, no.” But this was like, “Okay, that's it. That's how it needs to be done because there's no other way of doing it.” And then Magic Light and Apple absolutely nailed it. So, I'm very, very thankful.
 
Martin Pope: I have to say, now that he mentioned it, I could have said at the beginning, “No, no, no.” That wasn't, that wasn't on the agenda. But, anyway. (Laughter from everyone.)
 
John Betancourt: Hindsight is 20/20 for that one, I guess.
 
Martin Pope: It’s a beautiful script, and it's a short piece, but it just crystallizes things in such a wonderful way. And Tom brought so many different things to the project. It's just absolutely fantastic.
 
John Betancourt: I absolutely agree. Like I think it's one of the one of the better interpretations I've seen of this book over the years. And that brings me to my next few questions. Actually, you both you mentioned the fact that you know that there are stories that last a long time and resonate with us. And that obviously, you know, Tom, you'd mentioned the fact that you've read it as a child. And that's where I got my first introduction to it. Why do each of you think that this story continues to endure the way that it does? Because we are looking at roughly a century of storytelling with The Velveteen Rabbit.
 
Tom Bidwell:  I think, like I said, I think it's got, it’s joyful, it's about kind of global, universal things like love and friendship. Importantly, imagination is a huge aspect of it. This, the whole piece is about imagination, because without imagination the rabbit has no… he lives in the boy’s imagination. And that question of, is imagination real? It doesn't matter because it's real to the boy and it's as valuable as anything that's in the material world. But I think that you know, those moments of, in the book, I think what makes an enduring classic is that it has challenging and difficult moments in it. And in like I said, in children's literature, they really do. They live in the memory longer and they endure, and it’s helpful as well. So, it's not bleak, but it is challenging. And I think that's important because children's lives do have moments in it that are difficult and kids like, adults like, to see their experiences reflected back on them on TV. So, I think for all those reasons, it just lives in the memory.
 
Martin Pope: It’s enriching. It's It has emotional truth, you know, really great stories have emotional truth, which we recognize. And it's very hard to pin down what it means, you know, you can't summarize it, if you could summarize it, they wouldn't have written the book, you know that the book works because it's, it's captured something, which about all of us when we're children. And also, probably, even when we're grown up, thinking that actually things which are important to us are alive, that they come alive, and they have meaning. And so, for children, that the notion that your toys coming alive, it's always been there, you know, the book has a subtitle, which is “How Toys Become Real.” And, you know, it's just, that's what children think about. So yeah, it's gonna last and it does have some very great lines in it. And themes in it, which Tom has brought out brilliantly. So yeah, those speak to people that I know that then in, you know, that's why Chandler and Friends and you know, other people have used the book and the story in many different ways in in people's lives.
 
John Betancourt: It’s come up a little bit too, in the respect of, there's a certain timeliness to this, not sure how, but now seems like the time to do this, and I've seen a lot of children's entertainment now, and family entertainment that's starting to have that deeper meaning presented to it. So why do you think now is the right time to offer a much more visceral story about The Velveteen Rabbit.
 
Martin Pope: So, I'm older than you both. And I, I'm gonna just say that actually, I don't think it changes. I think it's always there. I think that The Jungle Book has moments of, the original Jungle Book, which I watched as a child, that has moments of sadness, I think that the ones which last… have that. And actually, at Magic Light Pictures, we have been making work, which we think is always got difficult things in it. You know, we made Revolting Rhymes, for Roald Dahl, the difficult things are important to embrace and acknowledge and deal with, and also treat in such a way that at the end of the film, people feel better about the world, because the world is a wonderful, rich place. And if we look at it with imagination, and you know, real love in our hearts, then actually we can do quite amazing things.
 
Tom Bidwell:  I think there's a lot of high-volume kid shows out there, you know, there are a lot of high volume, adult shows, but more so than there ever have been. Certainly, when I was younger, it was what was on TV, you watch it, or you don't watch it. And that's it. But now there is access to so many shows, and they have 200-300 episodes of each one. And in that you start to lose the beauty of what you can achieve in TV, I think, so these specials are really important to actually, you know, get a kid to sit down and watch something that looks brilliant, that's well executed, that has a deep story in it. And they don't have to watch that every day. But it's important to have that as part of the kind of the spectrum of stories that you're telling them, I suppose. And so yeah, we wanted to make something that was beautiful.
 
Martin Pope: I think when you make it well. And when you have a great script like this, then people will watch again and again. So, I think that’s our experience with our specials is that people watch again and again and again. And that's interesting.
 
John Betancourt: The last question that I have for you, gentlemen, today, is… what are you each most proud of when it comes to this iteration of The Velveteen Rabbit?
 
Tom Bidwell: I think when I set out to adapt it out, you really with any adaptation, you want to disappear as a screenwriter. You want the parts that you do add, to feel like they were part of the original experience of the book. I think there's certain moments in that where I feel like I have disappeared completely. And it just feels like something that you would remember from the books. I think, in that sense, there's moments where, you know, the boy isn't really a huge part of the book, it’s really just the rabbit’s story. And I think hopefully when people watch it, I'm quite proud of the fact that it does feel like he's always been there. And he's kind of off the page in the book. But he's, he's part of it. And I've managed to kind of shine the light on him. And I think those bits have been successful. So, I'm most proud of that really.
 
Martin Pope: I'm delighted that… this is not the most proud of… but I'm delighted to have given Phoenix Laroche, who plays William, a really meaty role because I think that he is tremendous. I think he's gonna go places. I think he's fantastic. And I'm very proud that when Bianca and Tom, and I sat in, in a restaurant in Preston, which is an area of Lancaster, Lancashire, five or six years ago, we defined what we were hoping for, which is that at the end of the film, watching the film, people would have tears of joy and feel that they've been moved. But also, this is wonderful. It's wonderful that the boy is going through to make friends. It's wonderful. The rabbit is doing a binky, as it's called jumping up in the air like that and running off with his friends. And, you know, a couple of people have said that's been achieved for them. And that makes me very delighted.
 
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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