Director James Griffiths and actors/writers Tim Key and Tom Basden always meant to turn their 2007 short film “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island” — about a lottery winner who pays his favorite musician to come to his private island — into a feature film. They just didn’t anticipate that it would take 18 years.
Key, who reprises his role as the eccentric music fan Charles in “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” co-wrote the feature film with Tom Basden. “It felt like we’d missed a trick in a way, in having not done it for so long,” Basden, who once again plays musician Herb McGwyer, said while sitting in TheWrap’s Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt.