Kelly Marcel

Kelly gave up being an actress in her mid-20s because she "hated it". She had left school at 15, had never been to college and ended up working in a UK video shop when she began to write. Her success in writing for TV and films came very quickly.

When it [Saving Mr. Banks (2013) script] sold to Disney, they opened up all of their archives to me. They were amazing. They let me read all of Walt's correspondence. All his letters. Anything I wanted to look at was available for me to look at and they also introduced me to Dick Sherman, who was completely invaluable and they gave me the tapes while we were in the room. So the draft that they bought is not the draft that we filmed, because once I had access to all of that stuff I did another big rewrite from it with a lot of help from Richard M. Sherman and the script changed quite a bit. The LA part of the script changed quite a bit. Having had access to the real thing didn't change the arc of the story or the time of it or anything like that, it just became historically accurate where it hadn't necessarily been before.