The BFG (2016) is Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s novel about Sophie, an orphaned girl who is taken from her London orphanage by the Big Friendly Giant. Unlike the other giants, the BFG does not eat children, but collects dreams and delivers them to sleeping humans. The film stars Ruby Barnhill as Sophie, with Mark Rylance providing the performance-capture role of the BFG, and combines live action, digital effects and a storybook fantasy tone. The film was written by Melissa Mathison, making it her final screenplay, and brings Dahl’s mixture of danger, nonsense language and warmth into a large-scale fantasy adventure.
The BFG was mainly produced in and around Vancouver, where much of the film’s controlled studio and set work was created, while several real locations in the United Kingdom were used for exterior scenes and landscape material. London provides the story’s human-world setting, while Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, stands in for Buckingham Palace in the sequence where the BFG and Sophie meet the Queen in the palace garden. The film also uses Bamburgh Beach in Northumberland for the giant footprints on the sand, and the A1 near Haddington in Scotland for the moment where the BFG leaps across the motorway. The wild, remote look of Giant Country was built through a combination of visual effects and landscape material from Scotland, including the Isle of Skye, with additional dramatic coastal scenery associated with places such as the Shiant Isles and Orkney. These real landscapes were expanded digitally to create the film’s exaggerated world of giants, dreams and vast open spaces.
Bamburgh Castle
Bamburgh Castle has appeared in Becket, Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth, Macbeth, The BFG, Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
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