Structurally, the short film, “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island,” is remarkably similar to the feature version. It’s only 20 minutes long, but many of the story beats and even jokes and lines of dialogue are exactly the same, so it’s a fascinating thing to watch the story be expanded and see a new character (Carey Mulligan’s Nell) added to the narrative.
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I recently sat down over Zoom with Tim Key and Tom Basden, who wrote and star in both versions of this story, and asked them about the journey of bringing this project to life all these years after the short. Tom Basden explained how the story expanded in the intervening years:
“When we made the short, the script was probably only about 10 or 12 pages, and then the short itself came out more like half an hour. I remember Tim and I sort of looking at each other and going, ‘Huh, if we just did that a couple more times, we’d probably have a feature film’ […] It sowed the seeds for us, that like, ‘OK, we really got something from those characters and really got quite a special dynamic there with that short, so we should definitely come back to that.’ And then, quite cleverly [sarcastically], we didn’t come back to it for the best part of about 15 years.
Then in 2020, during lockdown — but I think we were sort of talking about it anyway — we revisited the notes that we’d made when we finished the short and were thinking about it as a feature, and we started writing the script and hit upon this idea of Herb having a former bandmate that he was in a relationship with that Charles also invites to try to reunite, to try to do something that’s just a bit more manipulative than just organize a gig. Suddenly, the film opened up for us, I think. We suddenly realized it was an opportunity not just to tell a story of an artist and a fan who don’t really get on, but of lost love and nostalgia and longing for things from the past and moving on. I think once we uncovered all of that, we were really excited by the scale that we felt the film could suddenly have.”
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The result is beautiful and funny and charming and sweet and melancholy, all swirling together to make up one of my favorite movies of 2025 so far. You can listen to my full interview with Basden and Key on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast:
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“The Ballad of Wallis Island” is currently in select theaters and opens wide on April 18, 2025.
