For Alison Lester, award-winning author, illustrator and self-confessed “control freak”, handing over one of her best-loved children’s books to be made into a movie was never going to be easy.
However, in director Robert Connolly (The Dry, Paper Planes) Lester found a collaborator she trusted enough to bring Magic Beach to life on film.
“I really trusted him in that I didn’t have qualms about letting it go,” says Lester, who has published more than 25 children’s books. “I didn’t want to be one of those people hanging around going, ‘Oh no, no, it wouldn’t happen that way. It has to happen this way’. I’m not a moviemaker; it’s not my thing.”
Author Alison Lester at Kilcunda Beach near her Victorian home.Credit: Wayne Taylor
Magic Beach, published in 1990, features 10 children playing by the ocean and their rich imaginary adventures that have them fighting dragons, riding horses through the waves and spying on smugglers. Like all Lester’s children’s books, it leaves plenty of room for readers and listeners to use their own imaginations, which was the same approach she wanted in the movie adaptation.
“I think generally we tend to fill our kids’ lives up with stuff so that they don’t have any time to be bored and imagine,” she says. “And it’s such a precious thing to be able to do that, just to take the time to be outside and letting it happen instead of everything just being fed into you.”
In Connolly, Lester found a kindred spirit.
“The brief Alison gave me very early with the adaptation was to create space for a child’s imagination to fill in the blanks,” says Connolly. “For me, the danger is that you can make cinema that just feels like kids have to be entertained, have to have everything connected for them.
A detail from one of the charming illustrations in Alison Lester’s book.Credit:
“You could have adapted Magic Beach and put lots of more narrative plot in there, but that wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much fun.”
