New 'Pan' Trailer Explores a Darker Neverland

The new trailer for Hugh Jackman’s Pan has taken flight.

Directed by Joe Wright (Atonement, Hanna), the film is a semi-reimagining of the original Peter Pan adventures, which began with Scottish author J.M. Barrie’s 1911 book Peter and Wendy. In the new Pan trailer, which you can watch above, we learn that the film takes place about 40 years later than it did in Barrie’s book, and that the movie will reveal how young orphan Peter (played by newcomer Levi Miller) finds his way to Neverland — and explain his close friendship with one James Hook.

Yes, that Hook.

Pan introduces Captain Hook (played by Garrett Hedlund) before he loses his hand and turns to the dark side; here, he's a young, brave, and very witty underling to the evil Blackbeard, the villain played by a marvelously over-the-top Hugh Jackman.

“It’s really a kind of fantasia based upon the original book,” Wright told Yahoo Movies on Monday. “If the book were a real event, this would be the dream that happens afterwards. It’s a riff-upon — an imagining. The book has this strange kind of surreal, sometimes dark, sometimes difficult, often wondrous, witty atmosphere, so that was something I certainly felt was vital within the movie.”

Wright’s film plays with other traditional characters, as well. Peter’s friend Tiger Lilly, for example, is a proto-punk island native, dressed in Doc Martens and DIY armor. She’s played by The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo star Rooney Mara, and though the director caught criticism for casting her in what was originally a part for a Native American, Wright has said that in Pan, the Neverland natives are from all over the world — a sensible explanation given that it is a magical fantasyland located somewhere in the sky.

And while Wright broke the news to Yahoo that Tinkerbell will make a cameo in the movie, don’t expect Pan to be quite as (relatively) lighthearted as the big-screen Neverland tales that have come before it. There’s always been an underlying darkness to Barrie’s story — after all, it’s about a wartime orphan who gets kidnapped by pirates and brought to a netherworld — and Wright upped the ante even more by forcing young Peter to be a slave in Blackbeard’s pixie dust mines.

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But with a young audience in mind, he made several adjustments to keep the film more whimsical than scary. For example, no one bleeds in this Neverland; instead, when shot or stabbed, they explode into colorful pixie dust, an innovation Wright says was inspired by the celebration of the Indian holiday Holi, which he embraced after marrying sitarist Anoushka Shankar, the daughter of famed musician Ravi Shankar.

“You throw paintballs at each other, and [they] explode in wonderful visions of color,” he explained. “I was looking at pictures of that festival, and thinking of how I didn’t want any kind of blood in the movie and how to avoid anything too gruesome, and it felt like their spirits would be leaving them in a bolt of color. It was an interesting and fantastic way to go.”

He also conducted “a lot of test screenings” with young children to see how much they could tolerate. He remembered loving the scary moments in the book as a child, and for the most part, found that kids enjoyed most of them in his film. One exception: The 16-foot crocodiles he’d included in an early cut.

“They were pretty scary, so I had to pull back on that a bit,” Wright said. But otherwise, Wright didn’t scale back the spectacle on Pan: The entire film was made on an epic scale, including a massive island that hosts much of the swashbuckling action. Although Wright wanted a dreamy feel to his movie, Wright also wanted as an authentic location as possible, so he and Warner Bros. built the biggest interior film set of all time, based near the Leavesden studio where the company made all eight Harry Potter films.

“We built an enormous forest set… where we then built a village,” he said. “That was pretty extraordinary, I’d never been in anything like it. You could literally get lost. We had artists and agents wandering through, completely lost. I felt like the actors, especially the younger cast, would have a more sense of reality about the environment and that might infuse their performances.”

Wright hopes fans feel the same sense of wonder and total immersion when Pan hits theaters on October 9th.