“It was always high in the mix when we’d be asked in interviews about the work we’re most proud of”, Key told Zavvi. “Certainly a lot higher than you’d expect for a short film (The One And Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island) you made in 2007.
“With other projects that I've had on my radar to make, there have been times when five years have gone by and that’s been the dawning realisation that I’m not going back to make it. But weirdly, this always stayed there as something we’d like to go back to.”
“Whenever we’d meet up the conversation would always turn to how much we loved the film”, Basden added. “We’d be talking about how much affection we have for the characters and that story, adamant that we should go back to it, but generally we’d leave and not think about it again for a few years.
“It took a lot of time to finally come out of us, and COVID helped to an extent too. We suddenly had the empty diary we needed to get into the headspace to make it happen!”
The short has now been expanded into The Ballad Of Wallis Island, with Basden and Key reprising their roles as Herb McGwyer and Charles, an eccentric lottery winner who has offered the musician £500,000 to come play an intimate gig on the island. After getting there, Herb realises that although the money is real, there were several catches he wasn't told about; not only is he stuck staying at his overbearing fan’s house, but the other half of his former folk duo Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) has been invited to perform with him.
Nell, who has long since retired from music and relocated to America with a new husband, is laidback about visiting her back catalogue, whilst Herb is hung up on playing songs written whilst they were in a relationship together. We learn that the duo was a moderate sensation in the late 2000s/early 2010s, appearing on the cover of the NME and selling out venues like the Roundhouse in London, and Basden knew he had to face up to the challenge of writing music which would have resonated with a cult following, penning 25 original songs for the film.
He explained: “I wanted the music to feel timeless, so my biggest inspirations were the wave of 1960s and 70s singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and Nick Drake, but I was also looking a bit towards the trend of folk music during the late 2000s. The scene McGwyer/Mortimer sprung from was the same new folk scene that bands like Noah and the Whale and Mumford and sons came from, but it was important to make sure the music sounded authentic beyond that.
“I didn’t want the songs to ever sound like I was writing parodies of a specific genre or period in music, or that I was attempting to replicate the sound of an existing band from that time. My goal was to make sure the music would always stand on its own, so you can hear the influences from that period of music, but that it can feel like its own thing beyond it.”
The other big challenge was ensuring Charles’s eccentricities never became as overbearing for the audience as they are for Herb, and that he never appeared too “weird” to be uncomfortable to be around. I brought up a scene where it’s revealed that he bought a lock of hair, thinking it belonged to Nell, as an example of a moment that feels like it should play out as creepily as it sounds when written down.
“Finding that balance was always a challenge”, Key added. “We wanted him to be eccentric and tried to push that as far as we could without him becoming too uncomfortable; with the hair scene, it was important that he never felt like a serial killer, but rather the kind of guy who can never quite grasp a situation.
“It was important that the audience comes to view him as someone who does everything from a place of love. He’s a very good-natured person who is socially an absolute liability, and he will apologise for buying hair – that's not the response of a serial killer!”
The characters are older now than when they were initially conceived, which brings an extra layer of melancholy as they look back and reminisce over past relationships, and the changing shape of what this music means to them. For director James Griffiths, this was inescapable, as they couldn’t make this film without constantly looking back over their shoulder to where they were the last time they all collaborated.
He told Zavvi: “It’s hard to not let that lived experience over the last 19 years permeate the film. There was an itch I wanted to scratch in making it, and not being able to was becoming more painful the more we talked about it as the years went by.
“There are definitely elements of that life experience that have filtered through into the film, certainly on a personal level.”
Since the film was released in America earlier this year, it’s amassed an army of high-profile fans, including Richard Curtis, who went on to dub it one of his ten favourite films of all time – and possibly even the best British film ever made.
It’s high praise coming from the writer of Notting Hill and Four Weddings, although the trio took more inspiration from more lowkey, character-driven British classics than his brand of bombastic romcoms when making the film.
For Basden, there was Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May, where the naturalism of the comedy and the lived-in characterisation was a huge influence, whilst Griffiths was looking to Scottish filmmaker Bill Forsyth, whose 80s classics Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero “created a whole world on a small scale, and still had a beautiful cinematic feel.”
As for Key, well, “Richard Curtis scratched my back, so I’ll throw in Four Weddings and a Funeral! It was just on TV the other day, and it’s the kind of film where if you stumble on it when it’s on TV, you’ll find yourself watching until the end, even if it’s already an hour in.
“It’s a work of genius that’s funny but also incredibly moving; the scene in the church at the end with his brother? It’s so brilliantly done.”
The Ballad of Wallis Island might only become a cult film in cinemas, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a similar afterlife. I don't think Richard Curtis will be the only one to have found a new favourite film.
The Ballad of Wallis Island is in UK cinemas from Friday, 30th May.
