‘Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children’ is rich with fantastical and immersive imagery, memorable characters, epic battles, and unique time travel manipulations - all brought to life by visionary storymaker Tim Burton, in the grand style of his films ‘Edward Scissorhands’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’, amongst others. Most significantly, it is about embracing the original and peculiar in us all.
Stay peculiar. It is this theme of not only accepting our differences, but taking pride in them that resonated most with the filmmakers. What makes the young Peculiars different is also what makes them able, strong and special. Miss Peregrine’s Home provides a safe haven from the outside world, which cannot comprehend or deal with the Peculiars’ special abilities. It’s also a refuge from their powerful enemies.
Each child has a unique peculiarity, including levitation, fire-manipulation and super-strength. The Peculiars’ capabilities are not limitless, and these young people are bound by most of the things we non-Peculiars aren’t.
Eva Green portrays Miss Peregrine, whom the actress calls “a kind of dark Mary Poppins-like figure who is rather eccentric and fearless, and who wields a deadly crossbow to protect her Peculiars.”
Burton, who sometimes referred to the character as “Scary Poppins”, is a fan of Miss Peregrine - and of the actress depicting her. “We all could have only wished to have a headmistress at school like Eva or Miss Peregrine - someone who’s very strong, funny, mysterious and protective.”
In today’s social media-obsessed world, “staying peculiar” is particularly challenging. says Ella Purnell, who portrays Emma, a young woman who can control air: “We’re all surrounded by Twitter and Instagram and other kinds of social media, which make it so easy to compare yourself with others, and to think you’re not good enough or that you don’t belong. But what we should be celebrating is what makes you, you.”
The film’s social media outreach embraced this idea. Since the launch of the campaign, a movement around the hashtag #StayPeculiar continues to gain momentum.
‘Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children’ is based on the debut novel - and first in a trilogy - by Ransom Riggs, published in 2011. It topped ‘The New York Times’ best-seller list, where it remained for years, and has sold more than 3.1 million copies.
Riggs’s journey to Miss Peregrine’s special home began with his hobby of collecting vintage photographs at swap meets and flea markets - the more unusual the photo, the better. One day he sent some of his photos to the Quirk team, where he used to write freelance, thinking the images could make a haunting picture book. Instead, Quirk came up with the idea of using the photos to create a narrative for a novel.
“I’ve always had a fascination with old photos,” says Riggs. “I had an idea for a story and the photographs became a kind of touchstone for the characters. For example, I’d have a really interesting photo of a boy covered in bees. So, I wondered, who is that boy? What’s his story?”
The rights to ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ were snapped up by the Twentieth Century Fox-based production company Chernin Entertainment, whose president is the film’s producer, Jenno Topping. Peter Chernin produced the film alongside Topping.
Their dream choice to helm the film was, to Topping, an obvious one. “The second we saw the manuscript we knew Tim Burton would the perfect director. It’s as if it were written for him,” she explains.
“I really connected with the book,” says Burton. “I like the fact that Ransom made a story out of finding these photographs. The material was very compelling - dreamlike, powerful and mysterious.”
Burton and the producers turned to screenwriter Jane Goldman to adapt Riggs’s novel for the screen. Goldman’s mandate, says executive producer Derek Frey, was to stay true to the spirit of the novel, while offering audiences a big movie-going experience.
“The book and the movie are not the same, and it took me a little while to make friends with that idea,” Riggs admits. “But when I visited the location, met Tim, and saw the sets he created and the people he had cast, the scenes really came to life for me. I started to get it. In fact, I watched scenes being filmed, written by Jane Goldman and directed by Tim, and said to myself, ‘I wish I had thought of that!’”
“As someone who grew up loving Tim’s movies, it was so exciting to me that he was interested in my book,” concludes Riggs.
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