Trivia / Saving Mr. Banks

• Ability over Appearance: Tom Hanks doesn't really look or sound like Walt Disney. But he did work hard to capture the essence of the man. Several Disney legends commended him on how well he recreated Walt's mannerisms.
• Cast the Expert: Disneyland's Cast Members (employees) were hired as extras for the scene there.
• Executive Meddling: Tom Hanks really pushed to show Walt smoking in the film, as he was a heavy smoker in real life (according to Bob Sherman, he would sometimes smoke up to two packs a day). The executives insisted that smoking was not appropriate for a family film. A compromise was reached where Pamela walks in on Walt putting out a cigarette, with dialogue explicitly justifying the absence with an in-character explanation that's somewhat true to history - which was that he wouldn't allow himself to be a bad example to children. (The real Walt was careful never to be publicly photographed smoking, for exactly this reason)
• Fake Australian:
  • English Emma Thompson playing the Australian P.L. Travers. A Justified Trope in this case, however - Travers lived most of her life in the UK and essentially identified as such, in addition to the fact that many Australians at the time (particularly in the less rural areas) really did have the English Received Pronunciation Accent at this time (it was steadily phased out over the course of the 20th Century despite initial efforts to retain it, out of elitism).
  • And there's also Irishman Colin Farrell and Englishwoman Ruth Wilson as Pamela's parents, Travers and Margaret.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The trailer included a clip of Walt asking Mrs. Travers, "Mary Poppins was a real person?", falsely suggesting that she shared her recollections of her aunt with him.
• Real-Life Relative: Jason Schwartzman's brother John Schwartzman is the movie's cinematographer.
• Reality Subtext: Emma Thompson is a gifted screenwriter herself, and has contributed to the scripts of many films she's worked on.
• Starring a Star as a Star:
  • Tom Hanks as Walt Disney.
  • Jason Schwartzman as Richard M. Sherman.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Meryl Streep was the first actress attached to the role of P.L. Travers, which she turned down due to having issues with Walt Disney. At the National Board of Review, while praising Emma Thompson's performance, she went out of her way to blast Disney.^note While Disney did keep women to menial animation tasks, it wasn't confined to just Disney Studios. Additionally, Disney was ahead of the curve in allowing women more creative involvement in the story department and in animation with artists like Mary Blair and Retta Scott emerging in the 40s and Walt recognized that women might become more important in the industry as time went on. Ironically, Streep took a role in a Walt Disney Pictures film that was released the year after on Christmas Day in North America. And later still, Mary Poppins Returns.
  • The initial screenplay was about P.L. Travers and her relationship with her son - whom she adopted from one of her friends and concealed that he was a twin for most of his life. No one was interested until they brought up the Disney angle, and it morphed into a film about the making of Mary Poppins.

---