‘Just a fella’ … Hayley Mills and Alan Bates in the 1961 film Whistle Down the Wind. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy View image in fullscreen ‘Just a fella’ … Hayley Mills and Alan Bates in the 1961 film Whistle Down the Wind. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy How we made Film ‘The whistling on the theme tune? That’s Dickie Attenborough!’ Hayley Mills on Whistle Down the Wind ‘I’d just made two films in America. Shooting on a Lancashire farm was very different. There was mud everywhere – and we’d be eating dripping, jam butties and fried eggs in buns’
Prefer the Guardian on Google Hayley Mills , played Kathy Bostock Whistle Down the Wind was originally a novel written by my mother, Mary Hayley Bell, about three children living on a farm in Sussex. The children – loosely based on my sister Juliet, my brother Jonathan and myself – discover a man in their barn. Thinking he’s Jesus, they decide to hide him and protect him from the adults because they don’t want the same thing to happen to him as before.
Dickie Attenborough thought it was a wonderful story, and convinced my parents it should be made into a film by the production company he’d set up with the actor and writer Bryan Forbes . After the original director, Guy Green , pulled out, Bryan took over at the 11th hour. He’d never directed before. When Dickie asked if he could do it, he apparently said: “I’ve no idea. We’ll soon find out!”
Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall were engaged as writers and made the brilliant decision to move the story to a remote part of Lancashire. The perfect location was found in the village of Downham, at the foot of Pendle Hill, famous for the witch hunts. Nearly all of the children in the film were local: the only experienced child actors were Roy Holder, who played Jackie, and me. I was 14 and a head and shoulders taller than most of the other kids. The sleeves on my coat were too short and my arms stuck out like a scarecrow’s.
Bryan really whacked me! It wasn’t until cameras stopped rolling that I cried I’d just made two films in America for Disney. Shooting on a Lancashire farm in winter was very different: there was mud everywhere, and we often had to walk very carefully on duckboards. But I always loved filming in England. We’d be eating dripping, jam butties and fried eggs in a bun. Bryan was great at communicating what he wanted from the children without just getting them to parrot him. In the scene where the boy slaps me in the playground, the hand in the closeup was actually Bryan’s. He really whacked me! Kathy isn’t supposed to show that she’s been affected, so it wasn’t until cameras stopped rolling that I cried.
Watch a trailer for Whistle Down the Wind Arthur Ibbetson’s black and white cinematography wonderfully captured the stark, leafless trees and the mist blowing across the hills. It had a sort of film noir quality, and as a child I loved the night shoots. This was all beautifully complemented by Malcolm Arnold ’s poignant, nostalgic music. His arrangement of We Three Kings was a perfect fit for the kids’ tiny figures leaping like hares on the brow of the hill – and that’s Dickie himself whistling on the main theme.
I’ve always said Alan Barnes stole the show as my little brother, Charles. He was only seven. The first morning on location, there was a row of director’s chairs with the names of adult cast and crew members on them. He pointed at Alan Bates’s chair and said, “Ey up, they’ve spelled me name wrong.” By the…