Medieval Fantasy Epic ‘The Stolen Child’ Director on Drawing Inspiration From ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ‘Stalker,’ ‘The Fountain’ (EXCLUSIVE)

At next month’s European Film Market in Berlin, the first footage will be shown to buyers from medieval fantasy epic “The Stolen Child.” Variety spoke to the writer-director Sebastian McKinnon about the film, whose international rights are being represented by Picture Tree Intl. The film’s trailer debuts below.

The synopsis for “The Stolen Child” is as follows: “In an age where Humans and Faeries coexist, tragedy strikes the Human Realm when its King and Queen meet an untimely death. Their young son, now the sole heir, faces the daunting task of ruling a kingdom teetering on the edge of collapse. Overwhelmed by grief and fear, the child’s plight moves the Faerie Queen, who compassionately spirits him away to the Faerie State, to preserve his innocence. Yet, this well-meaning act unwittingly deepens the crisis in the Human Realm.

“As the balance between the two worlds crumbles, a unique band of heroes emerges: The Poet, The Knight, The Horse and The Fae Princess. United by a common cause, they embark on a journey to locate the lost Prince and restore him to his rightful throne, in hopes of rekindling the equilibrium between the Human and Faerie worlds.”

The seed for “The Stolen Child” was planted when Sebastian McKinnon and his brother Benjamin took a back-packing trip across Scotland in 2012. This helped stimulate their imaginations, feeding off an existing interest in Celtic folklore, and acted as a spur to create fantasy films as magical as Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

“While walking in the Scottish Highlands, these characters just popped into my head, and they felt like very archetypal characters. I realized that they appeared in old paintings I’d seen and stories I had heard about and was so fascinated by growing up. I’ve always been intrigued by Celtic myth and anything to do with the Faerie Realm,” McKinnon says.

The ideas that came from the trip were the inspiration for the brothers’ “Kin Fables” project, which was developed into a series of three short films and eventually led to the creation of a feature film, “The Stolen Child.”

However, this final stage of the journey was one that Sebastian would be forced to take alone. In the press notes for “The Stolen Child,” he writes: “In the summer of 2016, a year after the trilogy’s release, I experienced the profound loss of my brother, my best friend, to suicide. His last words to me were to continue to create magic with film. His motto, ‘Dream, Rise, Ignite,’ has become my guiding force, and the mission to complete this cinematic journey has been my dedication ever since. This film is both for me and for him, in honor of our brotherhood, and our profound love for the stories that shaped our childhood. Truly, it is my deepest wish to create the best fantasy film since ‘The Lord of the Rings.’

“’The Stolen Child’ is more than a film to me; it is a heartfelt dedication to the magic we created together, and a commitment to the realization of dreams, to the safeguarding of the inner child and the overcoming of personal demons, by telling stories that aim to awe and inspire.”

Referring to the inspiration provided by Jackson’s adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels, McKinnon tells Variety: “’The Fellowship of the Ring’ was the film that made me want to make films.” He adds: “I remember coming out of the theater and looking at Ben and being like, ‘Wow, this is what we have to do. We want to make stuff like this.’ And we did. Our summers were spent making films in the backyard, and we were ripping off ‘Lord of the Rings.’ We would wear similar costumes and reenact similar scenes. And that has stayed with me – that feeling when you’re a child, and that kind of dream.”

McKinnon composed the original soundtrack for “The Stolen Child,” alongside his collaborators under the alias CLANN. Again, Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” was an inspiration in this respect. “The music [for ‘Lord of the Rings’] is one of the best soundtracks of all time – how it marries with the image to create something really powerful,” he says. “The moments in films where you feel goosebumps are where everything comes together in a moment. It really sticks with you. This is what I reach for when I’m making this film.”

Another film that inspired him is Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction film “Stalker.” “What I really loved about ‘Stalker’ was this sense of eeriness and mystery. Like when they walk into the ‘Zone,’ and they’re being led by the Stalker, and they’re in a natural environment, and yet you feel that there’s some sort of danger around them. When I watched that film, it aligned with when I was reading about fairy tales and these old legends. This is what I wanted it to feel like when walking through the Faerie World. In our case, we’re using the natural landscapes of Canada, and British Columbia especially, to depict the Faerie World. And what I want to do is have characters wandering around this lush green, fern-ridden forest, and there’s this presence behind the scenes.”

Location plays a “super important” role in the creation of the worlds that the characters inhabit, “especially when it comes to depicting the Faerie World,” McKinnon says.

“We have to feel like there’s an intelligence or a presence at all times when you’re in the Faerie World and that’s why we went to British Columbia. I remember walking in those forests for the first time and feeling that energy there, especially when you’re there during the stormy season. You can’t help but feel there’s something here, there’s some sort of energy or presence in the forest that I really wanted to try to capture for the movie.

“We don’t have any huge set pieces. We don’t have bustling medieval towns. So that’s why the natural locations have to be so well chosen and so that it helps immerse the viewer into the story and make it believable. I could have shot the film around Montreal for much cheaper, but it wouldn’t have been the same, it would have lacked that grandiose and lush world I was trying to create.”

For the scenes that take place in the Human World, the crew is going to shoot in a desolate part of Iceland. “With depicting the Human World, it’s so important that there can’t be any vegetation at all – to really drive that point home that the humans have destroyed their natural environment, and that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing left. So, it’s all about creating the contrast, immersing the viewer as much as possible. And that’s why the locations were very, very important and it took a long time to find the perfect forest for this particular scene, but we found it eventually, and it resulted in just an amazing feeling. This world has lived in my head since 2012 and it’s a very rewarding and special feeling when you come to a place, a location, and you’re like, ‘This is it. This is aligning exactly with what I saw in my mind.’”

After Iceland, the crew will head to Mont Saint-Michel in France, which will double for the castle where the young human prince lives at the start of the film. Mont Saint-Michel juts into the sea but at low-tide it’s surrounded by sand. “Again, it aligns with the vision, aligns with the feeling of humanity on this sort of island, and when the tide goes out, depending on the angles of where you’re shooting and time of day, it really feels like you’re in a desert,” he says.

McKinnon avoided using CGI in the film, although there will be some. “I didn’t want anything generated by a computer. For example, we have ravens in the film, or we have characters who shape shift – I didn’t want to use 3D models and 3D animation to show that. So everything is shot for real in camera, and then the only sort of computer work we’re doing is compositing. And the reason why I didn’t want to do that is simply because, personally, for me, it always takes me out of the film, especially a fantasy film.

“It pushes you to find other creative solutions. One of my favorite films is ‘The Fountain’ by Darren Aronofsky. There’s a scene where they’re in a spaceship going through space, and watching the behind the scenes [footage] I was so blown away by the stars and the nebulas, and all this was not CGI, it was all filmed chemical reactions in a Petri dish that they shot. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is exactly what I want to do.’ So, anything that will be used to bring that fantastic element, I’d want to shoot it for real and simply stick it on to your plates and your footage and just find a way to blend it and make it work. For me, it just feels better. It feels, I don’t know, more authentic or something. It preserves the soul of the film.”

The dialogue in the film is closer to poetry than natural speech. The use of poetry is another thing that McKinnon appreciated in “Stalker.”

“I remember when my brother passed, during the grieving process, going to buy a bunch of books to continue with the vision [of the film]. One of the last things he said to me was to go forward with everything. I just dived into W.B. Yeats’ poetry and being totally in love with everything he was writing.”

At the time, the film was called “The Sad Prince,” but the director then adopted “The Stolen Child,” the title of a poem by Yeats, as the film’s title.

“Some lines in the film are directly lifted from his poetry, and I want to preserve that in the dialogue itself. The film doesn’t have that much dialogue, but when characters speak, I wanted it to preserve that poetic nature, and coupled with the music that really helps create that feeling that I’m going for in the movie.

“I’m trying to do something different here. It’s going to be a bit left field when it’s put together, through poetry, through music, and through the very strong visuals. With my background as a painter, I’m trying to make every frame feel like a painting. I’m hoping it’s all going to come together in this very, very poetic film.”

In the production notes he cites the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as being one influence on the look of the film, whose director of photography is Kristof Brandl, with production design by Riccardo Tenani.

While making the film, memories of his brother Ben continue to inspire McKinnon. “This film has been the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. They say for your first feature: Don’t work with children. Don’t work with animals. I really came out of the gate trying to do it all and looking back, I think I was naïve. And I remember with our very first week, coming very close to quitting because it was very chaotic. We were in very difficult locations to shoot. We had multiple costumes. It’s a very art heavy film, and I didn’t expect it to be so challenging. And it’s memories of my brother that helped me overcome that, and I won’t be ashamed to say that I spoke to him a lot throughout the making of the film.

“We were very lucky. When you’re in the thick of it, it feels like so much stuff is going wrong but then looking back, you look at all the moments that strangely aligned and I feel like that was him helping me.

“On one of our very first days, we had this scene where we built this vessel out of foam, and it’s the scene where the Poet is pushing it out to sea. And usually at that time of year in British Columbia, it is storm season. It is raging. And we had the most gorgeous, calm day to allow for that scene to happen. And I had this very magical moment with our First Nations liaison there, and she said, ‘There’s someone looking over you, because we don’t usually see this.’

“So, he’s been with me throughout the whole project, in spirit, and really helped me overcome moments of great difficulty throughout the film. And I have to say, also, it’s been so fun. I had some of my brothers there with me. And that’s just very special. To be able to do this in memory of him as well. It feels like I’m closing something, or rather it feels like I still have something to do until this film is done and then once it’s done, the chapter will close and I’ll get some sort of peace.”

“The Stolen Child” is produced by Catherine Boily of Metafilms and Tara Cowell-Plain of Cowpi Media. The executive producers include Sylvain Corbeil of Metafilms, Lee Broda of LB Entertainment, Carl Francesco Giacomo, Rachelle Cuierrier and Joel Martinez, as well as Yuan Sui and Andreas Rothbauer of Picture Tree Intl. The project was presented to buyers at Frontières Intl. Co-Production Market in July 2024, where it won the Outpost MTL Postproduction Award.