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Just what is it about Billy Elliot?
By Nick Curtis 13.05.09
One of the girls: Billy Elliot — played by Trent Kowalik — struts his stuff on Broadway
Labour of love: Eric Fellner decided to produce Billy Elliot first as a film then as a musical not for commerical reasons but because the script genuinely moved him
Hit: The stage musical by Elton John has run in London for four years
It is a textbook example of a great British sleeper hit. Billy Elliot was an unfashionable £1 million film, made by unknowns in 2000, about a northern lad's passion for dance amid the miners' strike. It grossed $110 million worldwide.
The subsequent stage musical, by Elton John and the film's writer and director Lee Hall and Stephen Daldry, has been running in London for four years and Sydney for two: each production recouped its £5 million budget within a year.
Billy opened on Broadway last November, in the very teeth of the recession, but survived as countless other shows faltered.
It is currently taking $1 million a week and is up for 15 Tony Awards in June - unprecedented for a British production and a feat last achieved by The Producers in 2001. So what is it about Billy?
"Without any of us realising it, it is the American Dream," says Eric Fellner, producer of both musical and film. "Billy Elliot embodies the idea that anyone can achieve anything regardless of their socio-economic background.
"Also, it deals with very real issues and genuinely moves people. You can get swept away by a musical but real tears are rare. And when times are tough, as they are now, here is a show about optimism during tough times."
As co-chair with Tim Bevan of Working Title Films, it was Fellner who gave Billy Elliot the green light and who masterminded its transfer to the stage.
Bankrolled by Universal Studios and Studio Canal, the company exists to make commercial movies: Richard Curtis romcoms, weightier fare such as Frost/Nixon and State of Play, and Coen brothers' comedies.
There was nothing forcing them to film Billy Elliot beyond gut feeling. The setting, theme and politics were big turn-offs for the two main groups of ticket-buyers: women and teenage boys. Daldry and Hall were little-known outside the theatre world and there were no stars attached, or even star roles.
"Tim and I wanted to make the film because the script was extraordinary and spoke to the heart," continues Fellner, 49. "It is rare that you read scripts that genuinely move you and make you feel that, regardless of the commercial possibilities, you have to make the film."
Elton John had to be carried out of a screening at the Cannes Film Festival as he was crying so hard.
He recognised Billy's artistic struggle in the face of economic hardship and an uncomprehending father as his own, and proposed turning the story into a musical.
Fellner admits that "naivety" about the workings of theatre helped him and Bevan commit to the idea.
That and the fact that it seemed to cost the same as one of their lowest-budget movies, a fraction of the $30 million they spent on Richard Curtis's The Boat That Rocked or the $90 million cost of State of Play or The Interpreter.
They had no conception of the vast technical requirements of a musical, especially one that required three rotating casts of singing children, and therefore endless re-rehearsal and recasting.
"When I show you a film, I know what it's going to look like because we've worked on it and edited it and put the soundtrack on," he adds. "In theatre, every show is different: every actor, every musician, every stagehand has to be on the top of his game every night."
I remember Fellner calling me after I'd attended a charity preview of the London production, asking if I thought it worked, anxiety leaking out of his voice. "There was real fear," he concedes. "First in London, then in Sydney.
"And we really had no idea whether Broadway audiences would respond to the Englishness of the show. We tweaked it only slightly there - toned down the accents a bit but didn't touch the swearing - even though the market research we did was terrifying."
A passing Tim Bevan interjects his own theory for Billy's international success. "If you get the father-son dynamic right it's very powerful and everyone feels it - women, girls, boys," he says. "The moment where Billy's father hugs him is the emotional core of the story, more important even than the dancing.
"And of course, the issue of blue-collar job losses is there as connective tissue. In Australia and America they probably understand blue-collar union culture better than we do."
The Tony nominations, says Fellner, provoked "an immediate spike at the box office, the phones went crazy: we'd been doing 98 per cent business and it shot back up to 100, and the advance grew".
He is not yet counting his profits, though. Not least because Stephen Daldry insisted they open at the relatively intimate 1,400-seat Imperial Theater.
"It was vital that all the audience could see a small child dancing, singing and emoting on stage," says Fellner, "but the first 1,000 seats we sell each night just basically cover running costs, then you get the money to recoup the investment, then finally the profit."
For the film, profits are easier to calculate. "You do your theatrical business in the space of six months, and then you pretty much know what the algorithm is in terms of what TV and DVD and ancillary revenue you are going to get," he says.
"Theatre is a living, writhing morass of uncertainty. [After Broadway] we're looking at the big European territories - Germany and Holland - Japan and Korea and a whole host of larger territories.
"Then it will be secondary rights, when you start licensing it. You have to have a lot of patience and deep pockets - we are constantly refinancing.
"Successful musical entrepreneurs in the UK are probably looking at profits from a 20-year revenue stream. We haven't got a clue yet."
Fellner and Bevan are in early talks with Elton, Hall and Daldry about a second Billy Elliot film based on the musical. "Put it this way, we all now how well Mamma Mia did," remarks Bevan drily.
They also have future theatrical aspirations. Bevan tells me, off the record, about a show he saw in New York that he is desperately keen to bring to London.
There is also a planned but very hush-hush musical stage adaptation of another Working Title film. (No, Fellner says, it isn't going to be Four Weddings the Musical - "though that would be brilliant.")
Since entering into partnership with Universal in 1999, Working Title has green-lit between three and five films a year and this looks set to continue. Beeban Kidron's long-delayed Hippie Hippie Shake and Paul Greengrass's Iraq thriller Green Zone, starring Matt Damon, are due out later this year.
The sequel to Emma Thompson's Nanny McPhee started shooting last week, and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's Paul - about "a couple of geeks who drive through Area 51 and pick up an alien called Paul on the run from the authorities" - begins filming in June.
Joe Wright's follow-up to Atonement, the Soloist, starring Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx and based on the real-life tale of a schizophrenic, homeless, virtuoso musician, is out in the States and opens here later this year. Wright has Indian Summer, in pre-production with Working Title, and Richard Curtis "has another romantic comedy on the blocks".
Mention of Curtis - particularly the harsh reviews and disappointing profit, estimated at £8 million, for the British release of The Boat That Rocked - sees Fellner's legendary charm edge into exasperation.
"Richard's batting average is probably still, even without the release of The Boat That Rocked in the rest of the world, about $250 million a picture. With a cost of $35 million or less. Less! He is a phenomenal success in the film-making sphere.
"Spielberg's average is probably as high, Zemeckis might be but Richard is definitely in the top five of success stories in world film-making. Just because one film doesn't do what people would like it or expect it to do doesn't in any way change his profitability. We have a long-term deal with Richard, and thank God we do."
Fellner says all this passionately, although he does not look like a man who has been remotely troubled by recession.
He's sleek, immaculately smart-casual, and lives in some style in Notting Hill with model Laura Bailey and their two children Luc, four, and Lola Tiger, one (he also has three older children with his ex-wife Gaby Dellal).
Like Bevan, he got into the film business via the extravagant days of the pop video in the 1980s. But for him, and for Bevan, it's always been about more than the money.
As he says, there was nothing urging them to film Billy Elliot back in 2000 beyond emotional commitment.
They were then "not all that responsible, cavalier even" in terms of how much they spent to develop and fund each incarnation of the stage show. "Three times now, we have just tried to make the best version of the story we can," he says.
On 7 June we'll see how many Tony awards it will have to set alongside the 2005 Evening Standard Best Musical statuette on the Working Title mantelpiece.
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Reader views (1)
I think most people liked Billy Elliot because it was a growing up film that many identified with.
Take away Billy wanting to dance; and substitute that with anything opposite to his family or environment demands, and you have most of us during those growing pain years etc.
We all know it is far easier being a tame sheep than a rebel.
Those that were rebels understand Billy Elliot; and those that are sheep; envy Billy Elliot for his courage and persistence etc.
The funny thing is; Billy Elliot is real; all over the Nation; so love your kids, and let them explode into the real world being the real person they are; and not a clone of us etc.
- Mickyinlondon, london
