Wonder what it would be like to live with a famous storyteller? Lucy Dahl and her BFG weren’t just any story, and it was her father’s story and one that she lived.
Sitting down with the daughter of Roald Dahl was such a memorable experience. Her stories of her time growing up were, for lack of any other word, special. One that brought fantasy and reality together making The BFG personal to Lucy and her sister. As you go through the interview, you will quickly become fascinated with the life she had in her childhood.
Lucy Dahl and Her BFG
We are fascinated to know what it was like to have Roald Dahl as your dad.
It was amazing growing up with Roald Dahl as my dad because everything was a fairy tale. We were sort of his lab rats, so to speak. He would test his ideas, his characters and people on us, although we didn’t know it at the time. We just thought that we were getting great stories and he created this whole sort of kingdom of where we lived.
In Disney’s fantasy adventure THE BFG, directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Roald Dahl’s beloved classic, a precocious 10-year old named Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) befriends the BFG (Oscar (TM) winner Mark Rylance), a Big Friendly Giant from Giant Country.
What is your connection to The BFG?
He is real to me. He lived under our apple orchards which was beyond our garden and every single night; he would blow dreams into my sister and my bedroom. Even in the middle of winter, even if it were snowing outside, we would always have to leave our little old bedroom window open a crack. After he told us a story, he would say goodnight, and we would lay there and wait for the BFG to come and blow dreams into our room. Sure enough, within five minutes this bamboo stick would come through the window.
That would go on for years and years while we were young growing up. Then when we got to age when our friends started to say there’s no such thing as the BFG, we questioned Dad. And Dad said, ‘you mustn’t…the minute you stop believing in magic, it will never happen.’ It must have worried him tremendously because the next morning when we woke up, BFG in big letters was written across the whole garden.
He was an avid gardener, and the grass had huge brown BFG letters across the whole garden that he had done with weed killer. And he said to us, ‘you’ve made the BFG cross that you’re not believing in him, and he obviously wanted to tell you that he’s here.’
Then we realized that it wasn’t the BFG sticking a dream through our window one night when I think dad had a bit too much to drink and he fell off his ladder. One night the bamboo stick was coming back through the window, and we heard this enormous crash, crash bang, and we were told never to go to the window to look, but we did, and there was my poor old dad at the bottom of the ladder saying I’m fine, I’m fine.
Would he use his stories to sorta have you behave?
He never wanted us to behave. Actually, he would help us plot and plan naughty things to do because he said that well-behaved children were boring. The trick was never to get caught. That’s actually one thing about my father that I haven’t used in my own mothering because it’s fine when you’re four, five, six, seven, eight and then you get to be a teenager, and you have that programming just to don’t get caught it’s not so good.
Roald Dahl with Willy Wonka and Matilda. Image c. Michael Dyer, with illustrations by Quentin Blake. Taken from Fantastic Mr Dahl. roalddahl.com
He would do our homework for us, and I will do that for my children. If it didn’t matter. You know, stuff that they give you that just doesn’t matter. It’s just a waste of time, and an adult can do it in five minutes and a child, it would steal like an hour and half of their evening where we could be running in the woods or doing something, and he would say, ‘Give it to me. I’ll do it.’
The BFG Movie vs Book
What parts of the book are not in the film that you would have liked to see included?
It’s kind of the other way around. There was no Giant Land in BFG’s story, so when it became a book, and the BFG didn’t live under our orchard, he lived in Giant land, I didn’t like that. ‘No, no, that’s not the way that goes.’ But I was actually a little offended when he put our childhood story into a book because he was my BFG and nobody else’s and you don’t really want to share.
Director Steven Spielberg on the set of Disney’s THE BFG, based on the best-selling book by Roald Dahl.
What was it like to be on the set with Stephen Spielberg telling your father’s story?
So I sort of never really embraced the book that much because I was seventeen when it came out. But then when the film was made, and I was invited to the set, I couldn’t wait to go. It was really incredible, and I loved being on the set. Steven Spielberg treated me, honestly, like a queen which I didn’t expect. I thought he’d just be like, hey, nice to meet you and get on with his work.
He literally took me with him all day everywhere he went and showed me everything and it was really the most incredible experience ever. Everything was so true to how it was in my imagination and in my mind that it was just incredible. I felt like my father was walking around with me on the set as delighted as I was.
Was it like you imagined it would be?
It was exactly how I had imagined it, and I think that’s probably why I love it so much. But also, the BFG. Steven took a great deal of trouble in getting the BFG right. For example, the shoes the BFG wears in the movie are a copy of a pair of my father’s sandals that he used to wear every summer. The BFG’s clothes are copies of my father’s clothes from his cupboard that we still have.
Disney’s THE BFG is the imaginative story of a young girl named Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) and the Big Friendly Giant (Oscar (R) winner Mark Rylance) who introduces her to the wonders and perils of Giant Country. Directed by Steven Spielberg based on Roald Dahl’s beloved classic, the film opens in theaters nationwide on July 1.
My father had based him a little bit on himself and a little bit on our great family friend, Wally Saunders, who worked for my grandmother. Wally was a countryman, and he worked, in our garden helping dad and he would help dad drive us to and from school. He had the big ears, and the accent that BFG has in the film was taken from Wally’s accent from video clips that we have of Wally.
What part of the book were you excited to see come alive in the film?
Dream Land. When Sophie goes up into Dream Land, that three or four seconds is just extraordinary, that’s my favorite. I could watch that again and again and again and again and again.
Do you have a favorite adaptation of any of your father’s other works?
Well, I do love BFG. I really do love BFG. I love it. I think Mark Rylance was amazing. I think the team was amazing. I don’t think it’s any secret that it didn’t kill at the box office and we’ve talked about that. Honestly, as a family, it doesn’t matter to us. We would so much rather have a beautiful film than a box office hit and my feeling about that is that it’s perfect.
Children are so used to bang, whiz, colors. Even my little nephew who’s nine, my sister won’t let him watch the new Scooby Doos because they over stimulate him and he won’t go to sleep. But he watches the old Scooby Doos that we all grew up with and it doesn’t have the same effect on him, which is interesting. So BFG is slow enough to speak to your heart.
With this coming out over Christmas where it’s more of a quiet time, I’m really hoping that children will slow down a little bit and realize that it’s about love because it’s really a love story. They’re two lonely hearts that find one another.
The importance of this story is that how one heart will find another heart, whatever the world, wherever they live. If they have the same heart, and BFG and Sophie have the same heart, and that’s how they found each other, and they danced to a tune that no one else could hear.
THE BFG on Bluray
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*I was invited by Disney to attend #TheBFGEvent to share my experience with my readers. All opinions are my own.
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