An interview with Elijah Wood and Bookworm director Ant Timpson

Elijah Wood has come a long way since his days as a child star. After leading one of the most successful franchises of all time, Lord of the Rings, Wood has taken an unconventional route when it comes to his career.

From wholesome to gruesome, in the past decade or so, he’s gravitated towards projects that are anything but kid-friendly. Among those collaborations was a starring role in New Zealand producer-turned-director Ant Timpson’s debut Come to Daddy. In that film, Wood plays a man who receives a letter from his estranged father that takes him on a brutal, violent, funny and bloody journey through grief. 

Five years later, Timpson and Wood have reunited for a different kind of film. In some ways, Bookworm feels like a return to the wholesome vibes of Wood’s early career. Timpson, who spoke with us at the Fantasia Film Festival in July, alongside Elijah Wood, said that both the team and the approach weren’t all that different from those of Come to Daddy.

“Obviously, it’s a family film, it’s PG and everything, but I don’t think that approach was at the forefront. It was more like, this is the situation, these are the characters. We’re making a movie with the same type of humour and it feels like it’s from the same DNA because it’s the same creative team behind it, but it’s mining our younger selves as opposed to Come to Daddy, which was more our older selves.”

Bookworm is about Mildred (Nell Fisher), whose life is turned upside down when her mother ends up in hospital and she’s put under the care of her estranged, magician father from America, Strawn Wise (Elijah Wood). In this odd-couple family film, the bookish preteen and her insecure father must face the brutal New Zealand wilderness in search of a mythological beast. In Timpson’s words, the film is “a tribute to ’70s types of family cinema that I love, which were generally films that didn’t pander to kids. They weren’t preachy, there was never a message that you had to come away with. I didn’t want to learn lessons, I wanted to have fun and escape.”

More than just a coming-of-age story for Mildred, the film also forces Strawn to grow up and take responsibility. Elijah Wood explains how he approached the character, “At the core of the film is this idea that as a parent, when you find that you’re at a moment where your ineptitude is actually putting your child in danger, or you see that you’re afraid, there’s a vulnerability there that could lead to something dangerous.” In many ways, Strawn is someone afraid of being vulnerable, afraid of disappointing those around him. Wood explains that Strawn’s fears are rooted in a desperation to impress his daughter: 

“My journey with Strawn was very much coming into a situation as almost a peacock, to show his daughter that he’s this accomplished, wonderful person. The hidden vulnerability is that he’s not accomplished. A lot of my experiences and what I was going through making the film was just this dichotomy of who he wants to be and who he wants to present as holding onto these ideas in front of someone he’s desperate to impress.”

Timpson builds on this idea, “For Strawn, he has to step up and be a dad but it’s her coming of age as well. As Elijah mentioned, it’s coming from a place of pure fear of not stepping up in a time of crisis as a parent and shitting the bed. As a dad, there’s a lot of pressure. I grew up with very stoic, country folk. My family’s very Southern, so you never show fear, you never show vulnerability. That’s part of our bedrock of the Kiwi male, the rugby fighter type. We wanted to play with the comedic aspects of someone dropped into those elements that we as Kiwis are so used to and floundering, which is sort of what happened to me in a family situation in front of my kids where something fun turned into a moment of pure terror. Analyzing that first moment where your kids see that you aren’t in control is a really pivotal moment in your life.”

The film also draws inspiration from literature. Roald Dahl is discussed but Timpson also points to the Willard Price books, a series about kids going on adventures without parental control. He says, “I experienced that as a kid. It’s hard to think about life without oversight from your parents, but back in the 1970s, we were just free to roam like wild animals. I tried to capture a little bit of that magic in the intention of the film, and also play up the comedy and tension of what can go wrong. You add two people who are complete oddballs who are forced together, they’re like magnets and you need to write them with polarity throughout the film.”

In Come to Daddy, Elijah Wood starred with Canadian actor Stephen McHattie, who embodies a kind of stoic, distant masculinity of a previous era. In this film, he plays with Nell Fisher, who portrays the precocious Mildred. Wood describes working with Fisher: “She’s precocious, super bright and a bookworm. She would regale us every day with a new word of the day, which was something obscure with too many letters to remember.” Timpson adds, “She’s not a wallflower!”

The production posed its challenges, with a lot of outdoor scenes and varying conditions. They had rehearsal time and were also able to work a lot on location. Wood explains that she has a lot of resilience: “She was game for everything. It was never always that easy.” 

Timpson also explains how she was a perfectionist. “On set, Nell was even giving me script notes, it was incredible. They were always on the money, too,” he says, “whether it was grammatical or otherwise, she would just pick up on it. She was so into making sure everything was right, perfect. She was a perfectionist across the board. The confidence in someone that young to be able to question things — not in an annoying way, to be clear — was so welcomed. She wanted to know everything.”

Bookworm stands out as a rare family film that strikes a perfect balance between the personal and universal. It’s fun and human, without ever feeling condescending. The movie is colourful and features whip-smart dialogue. Mostly, though, the film is a pleasure to watch for the performances. Nell Fisher’s Mildred is easy to love, but so is Strawn Wise’s fragile pageantry. As Ant Timpson jokes, Wood nailed the role because he was in “the Strawn vibe.” ■

Bookworm is now available on VOD.

This article was originally published in the Nov. 2024 issue of Cult MTL.

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