Hayley Mills, Diane Poole Recall Making Whistle Down the Wind — SkimNews
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- Hayley Mills recalls that the film was adapted from a novel by her mother Mary Hayley Bell, with Richard Attenborough and Bryan Forbes producing through their company after original director Guy Green pulled out, and the story relocated from Sussex to Lancashire.
- Bryan Forbes took over directing despite having never directed before, telling Attenborough 'I've no idea. We'll soon find out!' — and the village of Downham at the foot of Pendle Hill was chosen as the remote Lancashire location.
- Malcolm Arnold arranged 'We Three Kings' for the hilltop scene of children leaping 'like hares on the brow of the hill,' while Attenborough himself — 'Dickie' — whistled the main theme, Mills confirms.
- Alan Barnes, cast at age seven, delivered what became the film's most quoted line — 'It isn't Jesus. It's just a fella.' — and the props department built him a tiny director's chair after he pointed at Alan Bates's chair and said they'd spelled his name wrong.
- Diane Poole, then a 10-year-old local non-actor cast from her school, kept two unscripted mistakes in the finished film — misspelling 'Bible' and mispronouncing 'Christmas' — because Forbes believed they made the children feel more real.
- The actual back door from the real Downham farmhouse was borrowed for Pinewood's interior set, transported by a driver from Poole's father's haulage firm — a detail Mills and Poole both single out as emblematic of the production.
Why it matters: For a film that became a touchstone of 1960s British cinema, the production's defining choices emerged from improvisation: Forbes stepped in with no directing experience, the Sussex-set story was relocated to Lancashire mid-prep, and nearly all the child cast were local non-actors. The pieces Mills and Poole recount — Attenborough's theme whistle, a borrowed farmhouse door, Barnes's seven-year-old star turn — happened on set rather than in the script.
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