“Would you like to learn the secrets of cryogenics?”

It’s hard to imagine a world without Mary Poppins. The film has become such an ingrained part of popular culture that kids know who the flying nanny is even without having seen the film, and they know that just a spoonful of sugar will help the medicine go down. Many people, however, probably don’t know that Mary was dreamt up by Helen Goff, or as she was more famously known, P.L. Travers. The magical nanny appeared in 8 books, telling her tales looking after the Banks family and their subsequent adventures.

Saving Mr. Banks is a film that focuses on the strange relationship between Travers and Mr. Walt Disney who desperately wanted to make a film out of her books. From a script that was included on the 2011 Black List (a list of the best unproduced scripts) the film sets out to examine how the famous film came to be, and more importantly how it almost didn’t happen at all. When his daughters were young, Walt Disney discovered their favorite book was about a British nanny named Mary Poppins, and he declared that he would bring her to life. He then spent 20 years trying to convince Travers to give him the rights. She of course had no desire to sell, and only gave in to his requests to meet when her royalties from the books ran out. The film picks up here, following Travers from England to Los Angeles, as well as dipping into her past as it flashes back to her childhood in Australia.

I am not sure if he looks more like Walt or John Waters.