The beautiful denouement of Paddington 2 isn’t one we’re going to spoil in this news piece, just that it seemed such a natural, warm and lovely place to end the movie. So much so that it just felt natural.
In fact, the whole film did, but that belies an awful lot of wrestling from writers Simon Farnaby and Paul King to get their screenplay into shape. Sanjeev Bhaskar, who takes on a supporting role in the movie, was guest host on the Kermode & Mayo Film Review programme on Radio Five Alive last week, and he revealed that in fact, three different endings for Paddington 2 were put together.
“It changed throughout”, he recalled warmly of working on the film. “There were three different endings for Paddington [2]”.
“We shot two of them. They went with not quite either of those. The ending they’ve gone with is brilliant… but that process of finessing the film and the script was something that went on throughout. It happened on set, and it was happening afterwards as well, in post-production as well”.
If you sit through the end credits for the film, in fact, there are some names in the thanks section that might offer clues as to who helped with elements of the screenplay. Jon Foster and James Lamont are specifically called out for that, but Larry Rickard and Ben Willbond – Simon Farnaby collaborators on Horrible Histories, Bill and Yonderland – are also listed. It might just be they had a little input too.
The conversation kicks off around 17 minutes into the latest programme, that you can find here. Quite what the other endings were, however, isn’t revealed…