Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather attracted the highest-ever audience for Sky 1 when it premiered in December 2006, and following that success, we wanted to implement a strategy of developing dramas based on the work of some of the UK’s bestselling and critically acclaimed authors. We felt we could adapt these pieces into something uniquely Sky - big, bold, compelling stories with a real sense of ambition and scale. They would be pieces with high production values that would attract the best people on and off camera.
Shortly after the strategy was approved, I got a call from Nick Hirschkorn at Feel Films. Impressed with what we’d done with the Pratchett adaptations he had a family film he thought could work for us. Skellig - the story of a young boy who nurses the broken creature he finds in his dilapidated garage back to health - had been around for a while.
David Almond’s award-winning book had been optioned by director Annabel Jankel in 1999 and she had been looking to adapt the piece for the big screen, but Nick - having seen our work with Pratchett - thought it could work as a premiere on Sky 1 before being released in cinemas internationally.
Irena Brignull had written a beautiful script that we worked on to make distinctively Sky. The result was a story with universal appeal. Of course, we made some changes to it so it could work as a visual piece, but I think we have stayed true to the book.
The calibre of our cast was essential. We had to find a line-up that worked for TV and film. To have someone of the standing of Kelly Macdonald sign up was fantastic. Then we discovered Tim Roth was interested.
Tim is a massive name and a phenomenal actor, and he perfectly captured the balance of Skellig’s irascible and scary side along with his warmth. John Simm was always our first choice - he is one of the best actors of his generation and he brings an edge and depth to the character of Dave. Then there’s Bill Milner, who is a very understated and natural actor.
We basically filmed in two halves. We began with the domestic side of the story and engrossed ourselves in this tale of a family with a poorly baby. Then Tim arrived on set wearing his wings and Conor O’Sullivan’s amazing prosthetics, and the film became something else entirely.
We originally envisaged Skellig to be more bird-like than he ended up. Tim was keen for the character not to be too creature-like. He saw Skellig almost as a tramp with wings; a relatively ordinary-looking man living in a shed, albeit a more ossified man with an air of mystery.
We toyed with that interpretation for a while, but I think we made the right decision by steering towards Skellig being a man.
We’ve been on an interesting journey with this character. Yes, he’s a man in a shed, but the brilliant prosthetics keep reminding us of the other side of the story, which is intriguing, mystifying and magical.
Tim spent a lot of time in make-up and costume each day. There were three sets of wings for the different stages of Skellig’s renewal.
They start out scraggy and run down, almost skeletal, then gradually get fuller and more downy as Skellig is nourished, and made to live and have hope again. The wings were worked by puppeteers rather than CGI to give them a more natural look. It was an interesting way of working; it made for amusing rushes with lots of men in green gimp suits running around Tim.
Tough times
Filming was tough. We had to break the cardinal rule of TV: we worked with kids and animals. Plus it rained constantly. Location-wise, we couldn’t have hoped for better. Cardiff was perfect - it had the big vistas and the scale we needed, and we found the perfect house at the end of a road, surrounded by fields, exactly as scripted. But it wasn’t the wreck Dave buys at auction, so our production designer, Maurice Cane, and his team did a fantastic job of making this lovely house look neglected. We VFX’d broken tiles onto the roof and the arts department built internal walls to be pulled down during Dave’s renovations. Throughout all this, the owners of the house were still living there!
Landscapes and nature are integral to this film and our DoP Steve Lawes ensured the whole piece looked stunning. There is a lot in the detail of this story, which covers both the ordinary and extraordinary - and high definition is really going to bring that to life.
In post, editor Peter Christelis made some brave decisions. His input was invaluable, as was The Mill’s. The effects house produced some great work, thanks to a whole banks of bodies working on Skellig. Then to top it all off, we were lucky enough to get Stephen Warbeck to compose the score - he worked on Shakespeare In Love and Billy Elliott and he really responded to the piece.
Throughout this whole process, everyone from the actors to the crew have responded to this story. There’s something in Skellig that speaks to everyone. We were totally enamoured with it and I can only hope Sky 1 viewers will be too. It’s magical, it looks beautiful and it has a truly amazing cast. It’s a story that stays with you forever.
WHO IS SKELLIG AND HOW WAS HE BROUGHT TO LIFE?
“He’s all kinds of things, but in the end he’s mysterious,” says author David Almond of Skellig’s title character. The man/creature found living in the shed at the bottom of Michael’s garden has a pair of wings, but he isn’t a bird.
“Nobody knows what Skellig is,” explains director Annabel Jankel. “It’s ambiguous. I can’t answer that question, and neither can David Almond.”
Portraying the mystical character, Tim Roth has adopted his own theory: “I just think of him as a tramp, a rotting man in a shed. He has a hidden aspect to him, but I don’t think of him as an angel. I thought he was an atheist, actually. He’s a grumpy old sod and I don’t think he buys into any of that religious stuff.”
John Simm describes Skellig as “grim”. “It could be anybody,” he says. “It could even be in Michael’s imagination.”
Actor Kelly Macdonald, meanwhile, found herself feeling hostile towards this mystical creature: “I found it quite sinister that there’s this vagrant living in the shed and having a relationship with a young boy.”
The appeal of Skellig
Who or what the creature is might be debatable, but what isn’t is the success of Almond’s novel - 1998 Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year and now part of the National Curriculum.
“It just has this thing about it,” says Almond. “Somehow it seems to reach out and touch thousands of people.”
Creating Skellig
Conor O’Sullivan was the man in charge of prosthetics for Skellig. Most recently, he created the scars for Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. His team spent four weeks working on a series of silicon masks for Roth, creating skin with a texture like a plucked chicken - wrinkly and haggard. Roth spent two to three hours each day having the silicon masks glued to his face.
Costume designer Phoebe De Gaye found the right clothes for Skellig. Using photos of cadavers dressed in early 19th century clothes as inspiration, she designed a certain look for this ambiguous character who has been living in a shed for an unknown length of time.
With Skellig’s look and costumes sorted, the challenge of giving him wings fell to special effects supervisor Richard Van Den Bergh. Three sets of wings were made to mirror Skellig’s progressive stages of renewal as they grow from being dusty and unused into a pair of full, flocking wings.
Van Den Bergh was responsible for creating a pair of meticulously crafted, anatomically correct wings, double-hinged and covered in feathers.
They were built on an aluminium framework, which was then covered in polyurethane fast-cast resin to look like bones. Thousands of feathers were individually glued onto these by hand, with each bespoke pair of handcrafted wings costing around £40,000.
Roth wore a corset to which the wings, which are light but strong, were attached. The wings were controlled by puppeteers, who dressed from head to toe in green lycra, and were shot against a green screen, with the puppeteers subsequently removed in post.
“You have to get the mechanism working,” explains Van Den Bergh. “It’s the R&D, finding the feathers and dyeing them. But it’s worth it.
“When Tim put the wings on for the first time and started to work with them, all of a sudden, it came to life.”
CREDITS
Broadcaster Sky 1 and Sky 1 HD
Producer Feel Films
Starts 12 April, 7pm
Length 100 minutes
Commissioning editor Sarah Conroy
Adapted from David Almond’s Skellig
Writer Irena Brignull
Director Annabel Jankel (AJ Jankel)
Producer Nick Hirschkorn
Executive producers Sarah Conroy, Elaine Pyke, Linda James, Michael Henry
Director of photography Steve Lawes
Production designer Maurice Cain
Make-up and hair designer Pam Haddock
Prosthetic make-up Conor O’Sullivan
Costume designer Phoebe De Gaye
Composer Stephen Warbeck
EditorTX Peter Christelis
Principal cast Tim Roth, Kelly Macdonald, Bill Milner and John Simm
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