One of the best 2025 films is an adaptation of a 2007 short film

Structurally, the short film, “The Only Herb McGwyer plays Wallis Island,” is remarkably similar to the characteristics version. It only lasts 20 minutes, but many of the rhythms and even jokes and dialogue lines are exactly the same, so it is something fascinating to see that the story expands and see a new character (Nell of Carey Mulligan) added to the narrative.

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Recently I sat on Zoom with Tim Key and Tom Basden, who wrote and starring both versions of this story, and asked them about the trip to give life to this project all these years after the short. Tom Basden explained how history expanded in the intermediate years:

“When we cut each other, the script was probably only about 10 or 12 pages, and then the short in itself came more like half an hour. I remember that we and looked at me and looked at me, ‘Huh, if we simply did a couple more, we probably have a feature film’ (…) We sow the seeds for us, that, ‘ok, we really have some of those characters and there will really be a special feature. (sarcastically), we did not return to him during the best part of approximately 15 years.

Then, in 2020, during the blockade, but I think we were talking about that anyway, we reviewed the notes we had made when we finished the short and we were thinking about it as a characteristic, and we began to write the script and we encountered this idea that Herb has a former bandmate who was in a relationship that Charles also invites you to try to meet, to try to do something that is a little more manipulative than simply an organization. Suddenly, the movie opened for us, I think. Suddenly we realized that it was an opportunity not only to tell a story of an artist and a fan that really does not get along, but of lost love and nostalgia and yearning for things from the past and move on. I think that once we discovered all that, we were really excited about the scale that we felt that the movie could suddenly have. “

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The result is beautiful, fun, lovely, sweet and melancholic, all turning together to invent one of my favorite films of 2025 so far. You can listen to my full interview with Basden and Key in today’s episode of Podcast /Film Daily:

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“The Ballad of Wallis Island” is currently in selected theaters and opens from April 18, 2025.