Ben Gregor: Rooted in play

Be it on a blockbuster film set or grubby pub location shoot, if there’s one thing director Ben Gregor is keen to provide, it’s structure.

Not your boring old ‘it’s my way or the highway’ style dictatorial framework, or rigid rules that make the process mechanical; the kind that allows creativity to flourish.

“The director’s job,” he explains on a call as his new film, The Magic Faraway Tree, is still delighting audiences in cinemas, “is to provide the right kind of structure to let everyone go crazy and play and have fun. It has to feel like one big, messy, fun collaboration right through to the final shot.”

It’s this combination of organisation and chaos that has led the filmmaker from scrappy, self-started short films made on instinct and ingenuity to helming large-scale productions without losing that same sense of joy. And has fuelled a passion that, for Gregor at least, was inescapable. “It’s like a horrible addiction.”

You’re just on fire as a filmmaker. You just have to do it.

Before the big screen beckoned, Gregor studied Japanese at Cambridge and started out acting. Then a run of what he politely calls “very abstract” direction pushed him into taking control himself. “Nobody was giving any kind of technical framework,” he says. “Even the basics of where to stand.” From there it snowballed: directing theatre, drifting into advertising as a planner, then quietly making films on the side until they became the main event. “I just had things I wanted to do,” he shrugs. “I don’t think I really thought about why.”

Above: A trailer for Ant Muzak, Gregor’s cult short featuring Mackenzie Crook and Nick Moran.

Pop Muzak

Leaning into a passion for pop culture, the “things I wanted to do” – shorts Ant Muzak and Blake’s Junction 7 – took cult figures and placed them in entertainingly mundane situations. Yet despite being a fledgling auteur, the shorts managed to pick up a rare pedigree of stars, with Britcom icons like Mackenzie Crook, Martin Freeman, and Johnny Vegas playing alongside reliable funnybones like Steve Oram and Raquel Cassidy.

Drafting them in, it seems, was easy. “Once you realise the worst thing anyone can say to you is no,” Gregor explains, “you can achieve anything. You go for it. You ask people nicely enough and they’ll come out and help.” And what’s in it for them? “Actors quickly realise that their passion can become a really dreary job, so that’s why those early things are exciting, because they remind everyone why they started. That kind of insane enthusiasm and playfulness is refreshing.”

That enthusiasm didn’t stop at casting. Working closely with writer Tim Plester, Gregor doubled down on the process itself, pulling projects together through a mix of favours, persistence and whatever resources Soho could offer. It was, by his own admission, “one big adventure in scamming”, blagging short ends of film stock and calling in goodwill wherever he could. “You’re just on fire as a filmmaker,” he says. “You just have to do it.” That all-in approach came with its lows; at one point, convinced he’d lost all the sound from a project, he found himself “just crying in the middle of Wardour Street”.

Once you realise the worst thing anyone can say to you is no, you can achieve anything.

Tears aside, it was this penchant for comedy that caught the attention of adland. Despite working as a planner at Duckworth Finn and Fallon, it took the growth of the shorts to pull Gregor behind the camera for commercials, his ability to nail a gag on screen giving him an edge.

“I think comedy and advertising have always gone hand in hand,” he explains. “It’s come in and out of favour, but it’s always there. They’ve got to set up and pay off quickly, they either work or they don’t. There’s a risk to doing a great commercial and a risk to doing a great joke, whether that’s on stage or on screen. That’s something I’ve always liked.”

Relishing the ability to work with Mother – “its creatives love comedy, and they’re really expert at it” – and being introduced to soon-to-be big names like The Cowards (Tom Basden and Tim Key) Gregor’s ability to pull off hilarious performances in a short space of time led to campaigns for the BBC, KFC and Tango, alongside a burgeoning career in TV directing.

And then it was time for a singalong.

Above: Gregor’s Cannes-winning Hardchorus for PUMA, in which football fans give Savage Garden an unexpectedly tender terrace twist.

Hardcore? Us?

Released around Valentine’s Day 2010, PUMA’s Hardchorus is the kind of ad that, on paper, shouldn’t work: a bunch of rough-looking football fans in a downbeat pub stare directly down the lens and deliver a rendition of Savage Garden’s Truly Madly Deeply with aggressive sincerity.

Yet it was a smash; Gregor somehow giving the toughest fellas an earnestness that cut through both comedically and authentically, the key to which was in the way he controlled the shoot.

“Originally that was set in a stadium and I wanted to do it in a pub,” he explains. “I wanted it to feel like they’d actually done it.” Working with Spurs away fans, Gregor gathered the cast in a gym and asked who would be willing to take the solo lines. When most stepped forward, he flipped the logic. “Anyone who really doesn’t want to do anything, who’s embarrassed, who strictly refuses, go to the corner,” he recalls. “There were six people there, and I said, everybody go apart from you six. You are doing all the solos.”

Sometimes you just want to think about what the human experience of your talent is.

The choice turned out to be the spot’s emotional key. One of those reluctant singers, “this forklift truck driver from Dover”, opened the song, his voice cracking as he sang the first line. “You’re just with the whole commercial at that point,” says Gregor. “If it was really boisterous, nothing-to-lose bravado, it would just be cold. But because he’s so moving, because he’s really nervous and doesn’t want to be doing it at all, that was the key to the whole thing.”

For Gregor, the lesson was less about selling a gag than finding the humanity inside it. “Sometimes you just want to think about what the human experience of your talent is,” he says. “If I have somebody who really hates doing it, it’s going to be a really good commercial, because I’m going to want them to succeed. I’m going to know that they’re out of their comfort zone and they’re showing emotion and love in the only way they know.”

Above: Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield on set for The Magic Faraway Tree.

Far and away

The years that followed saw Gregor move through television, features and more commercial work, but the principle stayed the same: find the humanity and build the right framework. If Hardchorus proved Gregor could discover softness in a room full of burly footy fans, The Magic Faraway Tree demanded the same trick on a much larger scale: building a world big enough to dazzle children, but human enough to hold the grown-ups too.

Based on the classic children’s book series from Enid Blyton, The Magic Faraway Tree wasn’t the director’s first foray into features, but is easily his most ambitious project to date. Starring Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy and Rebecca Ferguson, with Nicola Coughlan, Jennifer Saunders and 2000s short-film pal Mark Heap in comedic supporting turns, the film was in development for years before Gregor got involved.

“It’s been going 14 years,” he says of the project’s long gestation. “It was going eight years before I joined.” The rights had shifted, Simon Farnaby had come aboard to write, and Neal Street’s Pippa Harris had, in Gregor’s words, “shepherded it through the whole way”. Having previously worked with Neal Street on Britannia, Jez Butterworth’s bloodier and distinctly less U-rated tale of druids and madness, Gregor first encountered the script in suitably chaotic circumstances.

“I was shooting with an eagle in Cornwall [for Britannia],” he remembers. “It was really stressful because I had to shoot this eagle, otherwise it would roost in a tree and not come down. We’d have to pay by the hour for it to sleep in a tree all night.” While the first AD and producers worried about the bird, Gregor found himself unable to look up from the script. “Nick and Pippa had sent me The Faraway Tree on my phone, and I was completely ignoring the eagle. I was just being sucked into the world.”

I wanted the kids to be amazed.

Getting sucked in was one thing, getting the film made was another. “Then it was another four years of doing treatments, trying to get money together, then trying to cast it,” he says. “Casting and money are very symbiotic in film; you don’t have one without the other.” Andrew Garfield was the first major piece to fall into place. “Once the script got to a point where Andrew said yes, everything happened really fast.”

Yet, despite the budget jump and A-list casting, the principles remained the same: give performers something real, create enough structure for play, and hide the machinery well enough that the audience only feels the magic.

“I wanted the kids to be amazed,” he notes, speaking of both the viewers and the young cast. “We always gave them an initial physical thing to do, or touch, or throw, or eat. In the ‘Land of Goodies’, all the sweets were edible. All the set was edible. They were eating giant bananas and cherries on the set. They don’t mind a bit of blue screen at that point.

“There was no volume stage, nothing like that. I wanted to give it an old-school feel.”

Above: The trailer for The Magic Faraway Tree, Gregor’s family feature based on Enid Blyton’s classic children’s book series.

But, for all the tactile joy of edible sets, climbable trunks and practical slide entrances, Gregor is keen not to draw a false line between the “real” and the digitally created. If anything, the film’s handmade feeling was the result of a huge amount of invisible digital graft. “There is a lot of CG, and we did a lot of it ourselves,” he says. “We made our own company because we couldn’t have afforded to go to a big post house.”

That meant building a VFX operation that sounded only marginally more polished than his Soho short-film days. “Above a Tube station we had loads of racks of servers and shonky fans blowing on them, and the artists were living amongst us in cables,” he says. “The artists were talking to me the whole time. We really did make this ourselves.” External companies, including Milk VFX and Entropy Group, came in to help, but the aim throughout was seamlessness. “We had 800 shots that we were doing, and big ones. I wanted it to feel so crafted, and we had such good artists and such good VFX designers that it felt very seamless where our set ended and the CG began.”

The clearest example is also the most obvious. “There was no tree,” he says. “There was basically a shower curtain on a big frame in Windsor Great Park.” So when audiences praised the film for feeling in-camera, Gregor takes it as praise for the VFX artists as much as anything else. “If done with love, VFX and CG is just as beautiful as filming,” he says. “When people compliment the fact that it feels like there’s so much in-camera, what they’re really complimenting is the VFX, because it’s so crafted that you don’t notice it.”

There is a lot of CG, and we did a lot of it ourselves.

An emphasis on audience also led Gregor to experiment in the edit, using tech alongside old-school test screening to make the film truly family friendly. “We did biometric testing for cuts of Far Away Tree, with kids hooked up to pulse meters and glasses that tracked their eyeballs,” he says. “It felt ridiculous, but it was unbelievably useful.”

Conducted with a company called Dragonfly, the testing gave Gregor something unusually precise: a read on how different ages were actually experiencing the story. “You could see that the kids were getting really excited and then just flatlining as plot got resolved,” he says. “Adults would stay with it, but the kids checked out, so, we took out a lot of plot resolution from the end.”

The results were clearly accurate. Released in the UK on 27 March 2026, the film was still running weeks later and, at the time of writing, sits at a not-too-shabby 91 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, from 35 reviews. With two sequels now reportedly in the works, the franchise seems to have taken root.