Film was saved by the Mel!

You won't find his name on the credits, but it's an open secret that the solitary returning soldier glimpsed at the end of Fairytale - A True Story, is the biggest star in the whole film.

Mel Gibson's somewhat larger role in the production has been less well appreciated - but history will record that it was he who prevented the entire enterprise from vanishing into the great out-take bin in the sky.

It's easy for the director Charles Sturridge to laugh about it now - which he does, self-deprecatingly, in the lounge of Bradford's Victoria Hotel on the eve of the British premiere - but two years ago, he was out of a job.

His crew, he recalls, were just a few weeks away from principal shooting when suddenly, one of the financial backers withdrew.

"Basically, Mel Gibson's company rescued us," Sturridge says. "Our finances depended on two elements, and one of them fell to bits. So we were all fired."

Sitting as we are, surrounded by publicists, unit managers and the other expensive accoutrements of film-making, it is easy to forget just how fragile the financial structure of a movie can be. Even a relatively well-budgeted film like Fairytale is subject to the whims and mood swings of accountants and executives to whom story and character nuances are just a row of numbers on a spreadsheet.

"I remember," says Sturridge, "we were sitting in a room at Pinewood and someone came in and told us to leave the office.

"We were right in the middle of pre-production at the time, half way through casting and with 40 people already on the team.

"We said, 'We're not going - we'll get some more money.' And we kept on working. The whole crew worked for two weeks without being paid.

"Then Mel's company, Icon Productions, agreed to come in and become our other partner."

Even Hollywood stars are not immune to insecurity, however, and the first question Gibson's associates had for Sturridge was whether he could give Mel a part.

"I said I couldn't really see him as a Yorkshire father," says Sturridge. "But I told them that if they were really serious, there was a tiny part which would be ideal for him.

"And we had a bit of luck in that he was travelling back from Italy at just the right time, so he agreed. He was immensely gracious and very charming."

Gibson appears as the father of Frances Griffiths, one of the girls who took the fairy pictures at the centre of the story. His casting was rather less problematic than that of Frances herself, and of her young friend Elsie Wright.

"We saw nearly 1,000 children, just for these two roles," says Sturridge. "We did two sessions at the Queens Hotel, Leeds, and we went to schools in Leeds, Bradford and York."

Eventually, though, the young actresses Florence Hoath and Elizabeth Earl were found in the place least expected. London.

Florence in particular, whose character Elsie was born and raised in Cottingley, had to come to terms with our Yorkshire way of speaking.

"I had to go to a voice coach," says the 13 year-old actress. "I was made to practice saying 'bath' and 'town' and 'around'. And I didn't realise that people speak backwards up here. I thought it was a mistake in the script."

She's referring to phrases like "You're daft, you," which is what Sturridge now writes on a piece of paper and Sellotapes to her head.

"She stuck something on my back a long time ago and she's never let me forget it," he explains, limply.

Elizabeth and Florence do not share their characters' passion for fairies, it emerges. Florence prefers the Spice Girls, and Elizabeth, who's 11, confesses to a fondness for the Back Street Boys. "When I was younger I believed in the tooth fairy," she volunteers.

Film stardom is good for young girls, they agree. Their status afforded them a trip to America for the film's world premiere last autumn, where, says Elizabeth, "they treated us like movie stars. We were driven around in limos. At one of the premieres little kids started staring at us."

His Sellotaped note now in the waste paper basket and his ears ringing from Elizabeth's chastisement, Sturridge returns to raking over the production problems which beset Fairytale in its early stages.

Chief among these, he says, was the challenge of creating Edwardian Bradford in 1990s Yorkshire.

"Finding locations was hard," he says. "We started in Cottingley, obviously, but although we did shoot some small scenes there, the actual house was too hemmed in, so we went to Ramsgill in North Yorkshire instead.

"We asked if there was a beck nearby and a man said, 'Yes - we dynamited it. People kept coming to see it, so we blew it up.' I was flabbergasted at the thought that someone would destroy a natural beauty spot just because it was popular."

Sturridge's brand of gentlemanly outrage manifested itself again in the creation of his film's "baddie" - a fictitious reporter from the Bradford Daily Argus called John Ferret, who, although unscrupulous, is principally a figure of fun.

"Charles and I agreed that he was probably the first paparazzo," says Tim McInnerny, who plays Ferret.

"He has no compulsion about interfering with people's private lives, and he's pretty unpleasant to the children. At one point he shakes one of them to the ground. I'm sure that's something you do only rarely these days."

McInnerny remembers the Yorkshire shoot for two reasons. "It was great fun," he says, "and it also coincided with Euro '96. No chance of over-running the shooting schedule when there was a match to be watched."

Perhaps best known as the idiot commander in the later Blackadder series, McInnerny has made a speciality of playing bull-in-a-china-shop buffoons. His latest role is as a manager of Barings Bank in Rogue Trader, a forthcoming film about the Nick Leeson scandal.

"I'm one of the bosses who sends Leeson to the Far East in the first place and is then easily persuadable that everything's all right," he says. "Typical accountant, in other words."

There is, says McInnerny, a sixth sense possessed by those on the set of a movie which tells them whether or not the project on which they're working will be a success.

He's guarded about Rogue Trader, but in the case of Fairytale, he never had any doubt. "We knew," he says, "we just knew."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.