When Jon Favreau was a child, he could see the future from his bedroom window. He grew up with his parents, Madeleine and Charles, in a 12th-floor flat that overlooked Flushing Meadows in Queens, where the New York World’s Fair — a clean-lined celebration of all-American ingenuity and hope — had been held in 1964.
He was born in October 1966, almost a year to the day that the fair wound down, and remembers staring down from a pigeon’s-eye view of this already-fading vision of progress.
Its most famous landmarks -- the flying-saucer observation towers of the New York State Pavilion, the 120ft-high, stainless-steel Unisphere globe -- clearly made an impression.
“Huge wonderlands” is how the 49-year-old director describes them. “I drive past it whenever I come in from the airport,” he says. (The site is now a public park, with towers and Unisphere intact.) “I’ll be doing it in a couple of days. And it’ll be bittersweet. The area’s improving, and there are nicer places to bring my family. But to see a place like that through the eyes of a child - well, it feels like the whole world is unfolding in front of you.”
Switch Queens for Mumbai, and Favreau’s thoughts aren’t far from the ones that prompted Rudyard Kipling to write The Jungle Book -- selected stories from which, along with a generous dollop of Disney’s 1967 animated version, provided the source material for Favreau’s adaptation.
Until Kipling was whisked off to boarding school in England aged five, he grew up in what was then Bombay — and would later write that his first memories were of “daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder”. A quarter of a century later, those images still shone so brightly in his brain, Kipling was able to turn them into what would become his best-known work.
This, says Favreau, is what he wanted his film version of The Jungle Book to capture: not just the well-known characters and jazz-drenched languor of the Disney cartoon, but the way in which childhood, through a child’s eyes, can take on a mythic vibrancy and scale.
As such, in Favreau’s Jungle Book, the leaves are a little bigger and the trees a little taller than they should be - and the wildlife a little wilder.
“If you look at panthers in the real world, they’re actually quite small,” he says. But Favreau’s Bagheera, voiced by Ben Kingsley, feels tiger-sized - and his tiger, Shere Khan, played by Idris Elba, has a minivan-like bulk.
This tinkering was possible because The Jungle Book exists in a strange limbo-world between live action and animation. Favreau, who has directed seven other films, including Elf and Iron Man, admits he has no idea in which category the film belongs.
“I think it’s considered live action because people feel like they’re watching a live-action film,” is as much as he is ready to say.
That gut feeling makes sense, but it’s misleading. Apart from Mowgli himself, who is played by the 12-year-old Indian-American child actor Neel Sethi, almost nothing on screen is real.
For the handful of scenes that couldn’t be cracked with computer graphics alone - these all involved rivers - Favreau moved the crew outside to a temporary swimming pool in the car park and shot them there. These are some of the most transporting sequences in the finished film: Mowgli bobbing lazily down a creek on Baloo’s belly, and scrambling past water buffalo stampeding through a flash flood. Daily Telegraph