Whistle Down the Wind was originally a novel written by my mother, Mary Hayley Bell, about three children living on a farm in Sussex. The children – loosely based on my sister Juliet, my brother Jonathan and myself – discover a man in their barn. Thinking he’s Jesus, they decide to hide him and protect him from the adults because they don’t want the same thing to happen to him as before.
Dickie Attenborough thought it was a wonderful story, and convinced my parents it should be made into a film by the production company he’d set up with the actor and writer Bryan Forbes. After the original director, Guy Green, pulled out, Bryan took over at the 11th hour. He’d never directed before.
When Dickie asked if he could do it, he apparently said: “I’ve no idea. We’ll soon find out!” Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall were engaged as writers and made the brilliant decision to move the story to a remote part of Lancashire. The perfect location was found in the village of Downham, at the foot of Pendle Hill, famous for the witch hunts.
Nearly all of the children in the film were local: the only experienced child actors were Roy Holder, who played Jackie, and me. I was 14 and a head and shoulders taller than most of the other kids. The sleeves on my coat were too short and my arms stuck out like a scarecrow’s.
I’d just made two films in America for Disney. Shooting on a Lancashire farm in winter was very different: there was mud everywhere, and we often had to walk very carefully on duckboards. But I always loved filming in England.
We’d be eating dripping, jam butties and fried eggs in a bun. Bryan was great at communicating what he wanted from the children without just getting them to parrot him. In the scene where the boy slaps me in the playground, the hand in the closeup was actually Bryan’s.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
