When 13-year-old Kaitlyn McKay (Brooklyn Prince) sees her world crumbling around her, she vows to do whatever it takes to keep some stability in her young life. Her savior ends up taking the very unexpected form of a pigeon.
Little Wing is a coming-of-age story based on a 2006 New Yorker article by Susan Orlean. It’s about a girl whose parents are in the process of divorcing and, faced with an unmanageable financial burden, her mother is forced to consider selling their home, uprooting Kaitlyn and her brother. Desperate to stay where she is, Kaitlyn discovers the surprisingly lucrative world of pigeon racing and, making a number of questionable decisions along the way, soon finds herself in over her head, but on a path to figuring out who she is. Also starring Brian Cox as veteran pigeon racer Jaan Vari, the film is certainly a unique and creative take on the genre.
The project was an exercise in patience for screenwriter John Gatins, who first started writing the script in 2007. Other work came along – films like Real Steel, and 2012’s Flight, which saw him nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
What was your first encounter with Susan Orlean’s article? What stood out that made you want to make a film about pigeon racing?
It’s an interesting story… I’d been working with Dreamworks for a few years and had written and directed a movie called Dreamer, with Dakota Fanning and Kurt Russell (2005). Steven Spielberg saw Susan’s article in The New Yorker, and he bought it. And then he asked me to come in and chat with him about it. We had the initial conversation and he told me he wanted me to write the script. So I went off and tried to figure out a bigger, crazier story to wrap around this really amazing piece that Susan had written.
John Gatins. Photo by Randy Shropshire/ Getty Images for Paramount+)
I didn’t know anything about pigeon racing, so I had to do a lot of research on it. I also went to Boston and met the young girl who the story was inspired by. I met her mom and the two inspired the mother-daughter relationship you see in the movie.
It all just unfolded from there. I also pulled from a lot of things in my personal life. Jaan Vari, for instance, was based on my high school health teacher, who was also a Vietnam vet. So, I borrowed from some of those things in my life to find ways to fill out the quilt that became the movie.
Tell me about your research into pigeon racing. Was there anything you learned that surprised you?
Yes, I didn’t know the history. People have been using carrier pigeons and racing pigeons for hundreds of years for all kinds of things. Like communication – they’ve been used in war.
I think one of the biggest things that struck me was that pigeons can be incredibly valuable, and that was what sparked the idea of creating this mythic character (the Granger) for the movie. The bird was worth so much money and that is what inspires Kaitlyn to go find it.
Did you know about Dean Israelite’s family history with pigeon racing when you first pitched him?
No, I didn’t! Dean and I had worked on a movie (Power Rangers) for something like a year and a half, so we spent a tremendous amount of time together. I had written this script initially in 2007, and this was now ten years later in 2017. I said, “Dean, I have this quirky little script that I want to show you.” He said OK and read it.
He called me and said, “Did you know that my father and my grandfather were these really big pigeon racers in South Africa?” I said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” He was dead serious. And so he really took to it because he had this crazy family history with it.
What do you enjoy about the coming-of-age genre and how do you keep it “fresh” for new generations with perhaps different issues to deal with?
I really like writing teenage characters because I think that teenagers are always surprising; they always do things we don’t expect them to do. I always say that teenagers have been sneaking out of their windows at night since the dawn of time. And they get to find each other and make all kinds of bad decisions. They get into all kinds of craziness, so I love them as characters. I like to find a younger point of view to have them take us on some crazy journey.
Tell me about Kaitlyn’s character and her unexpected relationship with Jaan Vari.
When I first met the young girl who inspired the story and her mom, what I knew from both the article and from talking to Susan, was that there had been a divorce and there were money issues. And that there was the potential of them having to move.
I felt that as a young character, those are really traumatic things. Friend groups are so important as a teen. And I thought that if she felt like all of that was at jeopardy, she would really do whatever she could to try to maintain some kind of safety and security and balance in her home. That became a great driving force for a lead character in a movie; to say, “I’m going to take agency and try to save my universe, save my house somehow.” She didn’t want things to change. That was a really important through line.
Kaitlynn (Brooklynn Prince) Photo by Alysson Riggs/ Paramount+.
Jaan is kind of an amalgam of a few things. When Susan was doing research for the original article, she met a man who was really deep into the pigeon racing culture. His story was a very interesting one, and a deep pool to draw from. My high school health teacher and I became close because I worked for him over the summers as a lifeguard, and he would talk to me a little bit about his experience in Vietnam. It always struck me that he had had that experience as a young man because he was in his early 20s when he went through it…and he was now relaying it to me many years later when I was in high school and not that much younger than he was when he was in Vietnam. So I felt it would be really interesting to take those elements from both men and make one character… and then have that character and our lead character kind of bang into each other through the world of pigeon racing.
Can you discuss some of the themes you touch on in the film?
My wife and I have three kids, and their ages are 22, 20 and 17. When I was writing the movie, we didn’t even have our 17-year-old daughter yet. But we’ve watched kids go from the ages of 12 to 15, and, from our experience, those are a thousand tough days. Kids go on this wild ride.
I think that every kid, as they try to find themselves and individuate from us and discover who they are…they go through so many dark periods. I really wanted to push the movie and push Kaitlyn’s character to really go to the hinterlands of her emotional stability. That was important and I think it’s so surprising – and kind of a soulful part of the movie – that we get to watch her go through this internally. That’s also why using a voiceover was important – we get to hear what she is thinking about herself and the choices she is making and how she relates to her friends and her parents. That was something that I very much wanted to explore and I’m really happy that it comes through the way it does in the film.
You’ve had a variety of roles through the course of your career, both in front of and behind the camera – whether that’s acting, directing, writing or even rewriting. What have you learned along the way, specifically in regards to writing?
I think you said the key thing – rewriting. Good writing is rewriting. In thirty years of trying to do this, I have yet to have the experience of finishing a script the first time. Of writing a first draft and saying, “Well, that’s it. We’re done. That’s it. It’s perfect.” It’s just not my experience, and continuing to work on the script is really where the writing comes in. That can be really daunting, because you think, “Well, I’m not going to get it right the first time.” But you have to put that aside and push through it, knowing that you’ll rewrite. And then when you start to get feedback, that changes things too. So it’s important to have good collaborators, people who can read and give you that feedback. Rewriting is everything and the script is never done. That’s the good news and the bad news.
