The Ballad of Wallis Island: Preview Club Wrap-Up

As a part of the JBFC Preview Club, subscribers get an exclusive first look at the most interesting new indies and foreign films on our “New Releases” horizon. Every month, JBFC programmers Monica Castillo and Ian LoCascio present a special “secret” screening of an anticipated new film release before it is available to the public. After the screening, our programmers open the floor for a robust audience discussion and send Club members a wrap-up note with behind-the-scenes details and fun facts about the film they just watched.

As a special treat, we have decided to make these notes public. Beware, there may be spoilers!

Preview Club Wrap-up for The Ballad of Wallis Island, presented by JBFC Programming Coordinator Ian LoCascio on March 4, 2025

Hi all,

Thank you again for a wonderful Preview Club screening of The Ballad of Wallis Island—which will be opening at the JBFC, courtesy of Focus Features, on April 4th.

The Ballad of Wallis Island had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and was directed by James Griffith—a filmmaker whose previous work as a director was primarily for episodic television series such as Black-ish, Stumptown, and A Million Little Things.

The film was co-written by its two leading actors—Tim Key, who plays Charles, and Tom Basden, who plays Herb McGwyer—and is based on a short film they co-wrote (and which James Griffith directed) back in 2008 called The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island. The original film was nominated for a BAFTA award for Best Short Film and it tells a very similar albeit streamlined version of the story from the film you saw on Tuesday.

I’m including links to watch the short film—and I say “links” instead of “link” because the short film is broken up into two parts on YouTube. Part one can be found here and part two can be found here.

As I mentioned, the original short film is from 2008, so the creative team made it when they were in their 20s—and I do think it’s worth noting that a key difference between The Ballad of Wallis Island and the short film it’s based on comes, quite inevitably, from the very passage of those 17 years.

In the film you saw on Tuesday, so much of each character’s emotional journey involves coming to terms with the past and, as actor and co-writer Tim Key said in an interview: “It makes more sense for (Charles) to have a past if we find him when he’s a little older—so that his relationship and his previous life with this band could have been 15 years ago.” I think the film benefits from its central characters having those additional years of lived experience, as it allows them to look back on the past in a way that the 20-something year old versions of the characters in the short film wouldn’t authentically be able to.

Actor and co-writer Tom Basden has described The Ballad of Wallis Island as being an example of “art imitating life,” noting that it’s a film about characters in their 40s looking back on the art they made in their 20s, just as the film’s creators are adapting a short film they made while in their 20s.

Beyond the two “Wallis Island” films, Tom Basden and Tim Key have decades of history working together, beginning when they were students performing in the Cambridge Footlights comedy troupe at Cambridge University. From there, they formed a sketch comedy group called “Cowards.” Together, the group has performed multiple times at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, had a well-received radio show on BBC 4 called The Milk Run, and had a self-titled television show on BBC 4 called Cowards.

Another key difference between The Ballad of Wallis Island and the original short film is the introduction of the character Nell Mortimer, Herb’s ex-flame and former bandmate, played by the always wonderful Carey Mulligan. Mulligan has said that, upon first reading the script, she was struck by how fully realized the story and its characters felt on the page – saying that it’s “unbelievably rare” to read writing as good as the script for this film was.

In a different vein, Mulligan has also spoken about how one of the great pleasures of working on this film was being able to observe and enjoy the improvisational riffing both on and off-screen between longtime collaborators Tom Basden and Tim Key.

I’ve spoken a good deal about improvisation on screen across this past year of Preview Club screenings—with last August’s Preview Club film Between the Temples and this past January’s film Hard Truths each making notable, albeit different uses of improvisation. In the case of Between the Temples, the film was guided by a general plot scenario but the dialogue for each scene was largely improvised in front of the camera; whereas in the case of Hard Truths, there was no on-screen improvisation but the film’s shoot was preceded by a period of improvisational rehearsal which helped breathe life into the characters and led to a final shooting script.

With The Ballad of Wallis Island, you have a method of improvisation which falls somewhere between the two films—where, unlike Between the Temples, you do have a fully written script, but, unlike Hard Truths, the actors also have the liberty to improvise on screen. As I mentioned, the lead actors of this film, Tom Basden and Tim Key, were also the ones who wrote the screenplay in the first place—so the initial script and the improvisational additions to that script both come from the same authorial voices.

Basden and Key have spoken about how one of the greatest challenges of the improvisations, and of the film at large, was maintaining a proper balance in just how annoying the character of Charles can be without inadvertently alienating the audience. Charles spends the bulk of the film very actively grating on the nerves of Tom Basden’s character Herb McGwyer, and much of the film’s humor comes from that dynamic, but if the audience tires of Charles and stops finding his lack of social grace endearing—the filmmakers were concerned that the film would just become unbearable. I think it’s a testament to Tim Key’s wonderful performance as Charles that, at least for me, that never happened.

For as much as the characters in The Ballad of Wallis Island spend the film reckoning with the past—I think that it’s ultimately a film about people learning, or re-learning, how to connect with each other and look toward a brighter future. I also think it’s a great film about finding solace in art, and I enjoyed the communal experience of re-watching it with all of you on Tuesday. It’s a very optimistic film, and I think it offers a welcome respite from this tense and divided world we find ourselves in today.

I hope you enjoyed The Ballad of Wallis Island, and I look forward to seeing you soon!

Best,
Ian