You’ve got to have what happens in the present, but you’ve got to go back and see where it all started.’ I think Scarlett got paid a dollar because Universal said she had to be paid something.” The team knew, then, what they’d have to do with Streep.
Ol Parker, director and screenwriter: I inherited this movie without Meryl in it, so it was my idea to kill her off. I was like, “You got to kill her and just give her a song as a ghost.” The producers were obviously skeptical about that because that’s not quite the mood of the piece. Judy Craymer, producer: Oh God, it was terrible. Lily James, Young Donna: I think I’d actively forgotten that she’d actually died.
Parker: There were various versions of the script where she was stranded in the Philippines and unable to make it back for Colin’s gay wedding. But if she’s not going to be in it, then you’ve gotta own that. Richard Curtis, story co-writer: We thought death was better than a long trip to Hawaii.Ĭraymer: It wasn’t like a soap-opera death. It’s got an element of Greek tragedy about it. With Streep’s fate sealed, Parker and Curtis went off to spend a week together in a “little shepherd’s hut” in Curtis’s garden with no internet, ordering the film’s songs and sequences on a pack of Post-it notes that Parker used to write the actual script.
