Here is the introduction to an interview of Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson by Pamela Lyndon of the NPR staff. They co-star in Saving Mr. Banks. To read highlights from the interview and check out other NPR resources, please click here.

Photo Credit: Francois Duhamel/Walt Disney Pictures

* * *

Before the movie Mary Poppins, there were the beloved books about the nanny who swept in on an east wind to care for the Banks children at No. 17 Cherry Tree Lane, London.

As dreamed up by author P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins arrived with the umbrella, carpetbag and starched white apron familiar to many more millions from the Disney film that would come later — but she was not the bright, cheery Julie Andrews of the movie. And therein lies the story behind Saving Mr. Banks, in which Emma Thompson portrays Travers and Tom Hanks takes on the role of Walt Disney.

So desperately did Disney want to make Mary Poppins that he pursued Travers for years in the effort to secure the film rights. But P.L. — or Pamela Lyndon — Travers feared the Disneyfication of her character.

Still, in 1961 she traveled from London to Los Angeles, where she spent two weeks meticulously going over every detail of the Mary Poppins script.

What motivated Travers was a heartfelt desire to protect her version of Mary Poppins. She had emerged from a youth that was both magical and troubled; she had a father she adored but a girlhood that could have benefited from a nanny just like the one she’d later create.

“She had a very difficult upbringing, in the sense that her father was an alcoholic and her mother tried to commit suicide,” Thompson says. “So her childhood was full of earthquakes and tremors, uprootings both physical and emotional.”

Thompson and Hanks sat down with NPR’s Renee Montagne to talk about the film in an old bungalow at the very same studios in Burbank where Travers and Disney first met.

* * *

Here’s a direct link to the interview.

To learn more about Tom Hanks, please click here.

To learn more about Emma Thompson, please click here.

To learn more about Walt Disney, please click here.

To learn m0re about P.L. Travers, please click here.