Peter Pan

IN recent years Jason Isaacs seems to have cornered the market in evil villains. His Colonel William Tavington, opposite Mel Gibson in the American Revolution drama The Patriot, was the subject of great controversy - much of the hostility being directed towards the actor himself.

There has also been his more recent success as the hiss boo, deliciously sinister, Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets - a role that will be reprised when filming of the fourth book gets underway next year.

Now, Liverpool-born Jason has taken on the ultimate children's villain in a new live-action version of J M Barrie's classic imaginative adventure story, Peter Pan, donning the black ringlets and cumbersome prosthetic of Captain James Hook.

Director and co-writer P J Hogan, the Aussie who first achieved international acclaim with Muriel's Wedding almost a decade ago, was determined to remain true to the spirit of Barrie's original work and not blindly follow those same fanciful paths as some of the previous versions.

One way in which he did that - as in the very first stage production nearly a century ago - was to cast the same actor as both the ruthless Captain Hook and the timid Mr Darling.

"A lot of the time, if you're lucky, you aspire to two dimensions in making a Hollywood movie," joked Jason, when we chatted a few days after the film's London premiere. "And actually, I was playing six dimensions of the same man because the two characters are flipsides of the same psyche."

"There have been a lot of Captain Hooks but no one's ever done J M Barrie's Captain Hook on film. P J did this magnificent adaptation of Barrie's book - not literal, but absolutely faithful to the spirit - so I read his script and the book and suddenly I was amazed to find this incredibly rich, complex, dark, twisted, melancholic, very three-dimensional man who went to Eton and played the harpsichord, and I felt this huge relief because I didn't need to compare myself to the other versions that have been on film before; here was the way clear for me to tell the story truly for the first time."

Hang on a minute - he played what?

"The harpsichord, yes!" laughed Jason. "It's in Barrie's original text. P J made me study the harpsichord in my room for months with one hand and a hook - and then didn't shoot it! Well, not a close-up shot anyway."

Jason agreed that it was impossible not to adopt a swagger once he had donned those fine velvets and silks and jewellery. He said: "There's a fair amount of Liberace in with the Hannibal Lecter.

"Captain Hook is the character who is the most easy to identify with for all the adults in the audience, because he is this guy whose life seems to be passing him by without him ever realising his dreams and he can't quite understand it. He hates getting older and young people pay him no respect - in particular this one irritating little git who is determined to destroy his life and has got under his skin like a rash. Whatever he tries to do, he just can't get it right and he feels it all slipping away - and I don't know about you but ... " he laughed.

"On set, doing the fight scenes with Jeremy (the young actor who plays Peter), he was wizard-like with his sword and I said 'let's slow down and make it deliberate, with the moves very clear, so P J can speed it up' - which was supposedly me showing a greater technical knowledge of shooting, but actually it was me not being able to keep up with Jeremy!"

One novel idea that P J did come up with was to have Hook discover how to fly too and the final fight sequence between Hook and Pan takes place all over and above the pirate ship.

Jason recalls: "Strangely enough that's the bit that's meant to look like fantastic fun, both for Jeremy and I, and it was easily the most excruciating thing to shoot.

"The people who helped us fly, by doing all the ropes and rigs, had done The Matrix and X-Men 2 and stuff like that and at one point, when we came off after a very long day, they said 'well done, boys!' And I said 'yeah, you've seen it all before, you saw it for much longer on The Matrix' and they went 'oh no, no - on The Matrix they have a rest every forty-five minutes'. Jeremy and I went pale because we'd been up there for about four hours!"

And what did he think of his 14-year old co-star?

"I think it's incredibly rare to find someone who is as cocky and with as little self-doubt, who is also as incredibly likeable as Jeremy!

"And I don't think for a second that he ever considers that someone else might have played it before because he just assumes that he's the best of everything he does in the world.

"And he actually turns out to be pretty fantastic at everything too," he added, with more than a measure of affection, "and laughs at himself when he fails."

Captain Hook showing affection for a mere boy? What is the world coming to?

Peter Pan will open on December 26.

Updated: 08:53 Friday, December 19, 2003