Magic Faraway Tree Movie Team on Potential Sequel With Andrew Garfield

Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it. 

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Before director Ben Gregor helmed Vertical’s The Magic Faraway Tree, he had never grown his own tomatoes. But during production, he found himself occasionally slipping away to the set’s greenhouse, where some of the most significant moments in the adaptation of Enid Blyton’s The Enchanted Wood unfurl. 

“It smelled so good and it was so quiet. I had so many people asking me questions all day long, but no one could find me in the tomatoes,” the director tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I didn’t know how to garden. Now every year I’m growing tomatoes. I’m harvesting them, I’m making pasta and pizza sauce. I’ve learnt that from Tim and what Andrew brought to him. We’ve all taken something away from the process of making this film that slightly changed our lives.”

In Blyton’s book, there’s no storyline involving tomatoes. Nor is there a father named Tim, as the story’s fictional parents largely operate namelessly in the background. But their three children — the eldest a boy, and two younger girls — eagerly explore a magic tree in the English countryside, taking them to faraway lands in the clouds. They’re joined in these adventures by a set of fantastical characters, who equally buoy Blyton’s original and Farnaby’s modern spin: Moonface (Nonso Anozie), Silky (Nicola Coughlan), The Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns), Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning), Mr. Watzisname (Oliver Chris), Angry Pixie (Hiran Abeysekera) and the villainous Dame Slap (Rebecca Ferguson). 

Screenwriter Simon Farnaby’s The Magic Faraway Tree follows engineer Polly (Claire Foy) and her stay-at-home husband Tim (Garfield), who move their three children to the countryside after she quits her job at a tech company using smart fridges — voiced by Dame Judi Dench —  to harvest customer data. With the move begrudgingly goes the devices (and online social lives) that dominate the attention of their kids, Beth (Billie Gadsdon), Joe (Phoenix Laroche) and Fran (Delilah Bennett-Cardy). But when Fran discovers a magic tree after wandering into the woods, the trio experience a series of life-altering adventures. 

“I didn’t want to make an anti-screen movie. I wanted to show a modern family and all the challenges that come with dealing with this invasion of our lives from big tech,” says Farnaby, while crediting his wife Claire Keelan with introducing him to Blyton’s Faraway books and the U.K. sitcom The Good Life for its influence on his script. “To say there’s room for [screens], but there’s also room for playing in the woods, with your imagination, with your friends or your siblings. What was important was to keep the vibe of the books.”

“There’s a carefree sense of adventure in Blyton. She never went back and edited anything. She just typed, and that was what got published. So there’s an effortlessness to the story that we wanted to capture, and a very English kind of modesty,” says Gregor of the author. 

The film worked to embody this, without venturing into the wax-ation about “how things were better before,” he adds. “The past can be looked on, especially in the United Kingdom, in a kind of jingoistic way. But you can find the parts of our culture that are worth loving and worth admiring. What’s beautiful is the English countryside and the values of common sense and togetherness, activity and adventure. There’s a lot there to treasure that has not been celebrated recently.”

Ultimately “all of the changes that we did brought tenderness into what is already quite a sweet story. We also had to bring risk and jeopardy. If you get stuck in the lands, you will die. If they give up, they will give up their dreams — the jeopardy of that is on the ground with the tomato story,” the filmmaker tells THR. “This family is constructing their dreams from a load of salvage with no budget and no Wi-Fi connection and I grow tomatoes now.”

The life-changing experience of those tomatoes on- and offscreen is just one way Farnaby’s script shares a spirit with Blyton’s 1939 children’s classic. Despite — and at times even because of — its plot differences, similar themes abound, including getting back in touch with nature, having a healthy appreciation for growth and change, and reconnecting with family — however you define it. “Simon wanted to have the parents as main characters to have a heartfelt story. You can’t imagine the film without Andrew Garfield and his longing to make connection, to make his family whole,” the director says. “It’s the same longing that Moonface has for connection with the kids who always forget him.” 

When it comes to fictional parents, in many children’s films and even books “there’s a shorthand to try and get you to care about the kids fast” whether it be through break ups, death or terminal diagnoses, says Gregor. But they didn’t want their parents to be “almost aggressive enemies or invisible.” Adds Farnaby: “We don’t kill a parent off in the first 10 minutes, which often happens — in films I’ve done, by the way. The mum and dad actually get on quite well, but it was a bit of a challenge. How can I do something not about divorce or death or kids trying to put their parents back together, but is driven by parents wanting their kids to have a different experience?”

Bringing this to screen and expanding the parents’ presence was part of “getting a bigger story that would fit an hour and a half or thereabout,” the writer explains. “Without wanting to criticize Enid Blyton, [the books are] fairly simple. They go up [a ladder], someone loses something, or they have to get something before they go down. It’s quite quick — all in a few pages.”

There was also “dealing with the old-fashionedness and bringing it up-to-date,” Farnaby continues. “The big thing in the books was that the kids really want to go to the countryside. They go, ‘Great! There’ll be wood, and I can play in the trees and eat cakes all day long.’ I don’t know any kid that speaks like that now.”

“I wanted to just have brilliant kids. They’re not likable to start. They are abrasive and we had feedback that ‘it’s too much.’ But then they transform,” adds Gregor. “The further the starting point, the bigger the transformation. When Beth says ‘Ok, I’ll join the family project,’ it’s a very down-low moment. I had to keep going to her [Gadsdon], to give less so that when she did give, it [was] meaningful.”

Farnaby’s work on projects like Paddington 2, Wonka and Ghosts well captures these kinds of dichotomies. In The Magic Faraway Tree, it’s a balance between funny and heartfelt that Gregor brings to life within a visual framework he calls the Blytopia. “What that means is imaginative, a sort of Heath Robinson-ish ingenious because there’s a lot of ingenuity in the lands. Claire Foy’s Polly is ingenious the way she uses salvaged stuff and her design skills to make random stuff,” he tells THR. “But keep it humble and modest. There was no plastic on set. I didn’t film one item of plastic in the whole film as a shorthand for everyone. Everything looked rougher — made of wood or old metal. It was a bit more found.”

Bringing the grander “spectacle but modesty, humility but epicness” of Blyton’s magic tree, its lands and residents to the screen required both practical sets and a VFX department created just for the film. “There was no whole tree, because I wanted it to breathe. So we made our own visual effects company. We had a load of old servers, computers and electric fans and way too many of them plugged into the extension cables. It looked like some kind of dark web crypto farm above St James’s Park Tube Station in an abandoned headquarters of the subway,” he tells THR. “What it meant was the VFX are as handcrafted as all of the physical things.”

And while the director says he loves the VFX and the team of respected artists that became “like a little family,” he “built as many sets as I could” in an effort to balance Blyton’s fantastical and natural universe. Amid an assemblage of various sections equating to a three-story-high tree, sets featured fully constructed locations like Moonface’s house and Dame Washalot’s deck, alongside cushions rigged to lift the actors into the air. Filming was a highly physical experience, with the movie’s young actors having to traverse the tree with the help of climbing lessons and abseiling gear. 

“The kids had to be amazed for real. So under the tree with the flowers, when you go in there through the veil, I wanted it to be like going into a rhododendron den,” says Gregor. “The Land of Goodies was edible, and yes, there’s huge giant sweets everywhere, but they’re growing on the trees. It’s a natural place.”

This “blytopia” philosophy extended to the characters themselves. “What I did with Moonface, it got some heat when the trailer came out because people were like, ‘You changed him too much. He should be Moonface, not Moon-Hair.’ But I just had a number of things that I wanted to do as part of my Blytopia,” the director explains. “Nonso is a fantastic actor, and to put him in a big white mask or VFX and cover his face, I just thought, why? I want to see his face. I want to see him connect.”

The choice was also partly inspired by Gregor’s experience on the BBC series Black Ops, which allowed him to “witness the power of Black hair and how amazingly expressive it all is. So I thought, what about a big crescent afro?” he tells THR. “[Nonso’s] face is darker, and there’s a dark side of the moon. His coat is dark on one side and light on the other. It’s all about the phases of the moon.”

In the script, Farnaby leaned into Blyton’s datedness as “kids find those old-fashioned traits quite funny. I liked that and definitely wanted to use the quaintness,” he tells THR. “For me, it was keeping the vibe of Enid Blyton in the tree and all those fun characters, but having it come colliding with the modern world. The tree people hadn’t had any modern kids for a while because Moonface said, ‘Let’s not have humans anymore,’ so they were all a bit old-fashioned.”

With a character like Silky, “she likes tea and cakes, and hasn’t heard of feminism, so that Beth can teach her something.” Farnaby understood The Saucepan Man as “a bit of a bad joke — that he can’t hear very well — you wouldn’t necessarily come up with now.” But his daughter found him funny the film, “it’s not that he’s deaf. He wears saucepans as an eccentric life choice, even though it means he can’t hear people, which I love.”

The children also provided the opportunity to shift away from certain depictions in Blyton’s writing. It’s why Beth, and not her brother Joe, is the oldest sibling in the film. “There’s a bit of casual sexism in her books — ‘You’re nearly as good as a boy’ — so the boy in [the film], he’s lovable, but he’s not ‘Come along, everyone. Keep up, girls.’ It just felt too 1950s.”

Since the film’s release overseas, some Blyton fans have appreciated the changes more than others. “On IMDb we don’t have a huge rating and I asked, ‘Why is that?’ I looked at it the other day, and it’s people who go, ‘Why isn’t it exactly like the books? Like exactly? Like why don’t they just film the books?’” Farnaby tells THR. “No disrespect to those people, but that is not going to be a good movie because you’ll have 20 very short stories with no connection, and it will all be sort of same-y.”

“I have a lot of respect for how loved a book is,” says Gregor. “It’s never the same as in your head, so I don’t expect to be as good as what’s in people’s minds. But I think everybody can see how full-hearted we were. And if you do something with love, even if it is different, people can acknowledge that’s not how it was in my head, but it was fine.”

Ahead of the film’s U.S. theatrical release, Farnaby is unsure whether Blyton’s work will garner the same reactions among Americans. They may have less familiarity with the beloved books than the U.K., where the film has become the top-grossing indie film in the first half of 2026, and is the latest in a line of book adaptations, alongside Project Hail Mary, Wuthering Heights and Hamnet, to bolster the regional box office. But after successful theatrical runs in places like Britain, Australia and Poland for Vertical, he is sure the movie’s Friday opening could cement future sequels. According to Gregor, there’s already a foundation of an idea for at least one immediate sequel. “When you grow up, you lose the idea of magic and that’s a central tenet of film — and certainly the main thing we want to explore in this sequel, which we will hopefully get to do,” he tells THR. 

Farnaby says he’s up for at least two more films, though he notes the amount of book material available to them could produce more. “In terms of the story, for me, I was always sure that we could do sequels because there’s so many stories, so many lands to go to. And there’s like three or four books,” he tells THR. “So there’s plenty in there. And looking at it again, I was like, you could do like five sequels and there’s enough for Andrew and Claire to do. We’ve got lots of ideas about that, so it’s exciting.”

With the film’s international success the largest obstacle then may be, as with many family films featuring children or A-list actors, time. “Yeah, they’re going to age a little bit. I think the plan with the interest in two sequels was to maybe try and shoot them at the same time, and then the kids will be the same age,” Farnaby explains. “I know they suddenly change, but if we can do that, I think that’ll help us. The thing will be schedules, but Claire and Andrew are up for it, and the kids really want to do it. Everyone does, so fingers crossed.”

The Magic Faraway Tree releases on Aug. 21.