Wild Child

Nick Moore’s first film as a director. He had been an editor: BAFTA nominated for The Full Monty, and the editor of Notting Hill, About a Boy, Love Actually and Nanny McPhee. The screenplay is by Lucy Dahl, a daughter of Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal. She built it from two sources: her own schooldays at Abbot’s Hill boarding school in Hertfordshire, and what her daughters went through growing up in Los Angeles. Both ends of the film come from her own life. The school interiors were shot at Cobham Hall in Kent and the facade at Balls Park; the crew also went to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth and to Robin Hood’s Bay. It opened in Britain on 15 August 2008 in fifth place, with 2,196,366 dollars from 359 cinemas. Box Office Mojo shows the domestic column empty: all 21,972,336 dollars came from outside the United States and Canada. It was the last Natasha Richardson film released in her lifetime; she died seven months later. A good fit if you want a structure where Poppy’s rudeness is first rewarded and then punished, filtered through the screenwriter’s own boarding school memories. Not for anyone wanting real sharpness, who would side with The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw in finding it tame next to Clueless and Freaky Friday.