H ow do you recapture the feeling of magic? That’s the question the makers of Mary Poppins Returns , the sequel to the 1964 Disney film, had to ask of themselves. We all have our memories of it, from tap-dancing penguins to bottomless carpet bags, but Mary Poppins has also come to exist as a kind of emotional impression. For some, it’s the feeling of faded innocence, of carefree Sunday afternoons sitting in front of the television. For me, it was the promise of a whole new world, as a child moving from the US to the UK, believing the country would be all tea parties on ceilings and kite-flying in the park.Granted, it didn’t turn out quite as I imagined, but it’s ironic how much a Hollywood musical managed to shape my relationship with where I now call home. And how, sometimes, I can still walk through London and that sudden excitement will rush into my veins. As it turns out, Rob Marshall, the director of Mary Poppins Returns , shares my sentiment. He also finds the city occasionally touched by an indescribable Poppins-tinged magic, since it was the first film he ever saw, aged four. “I see London through those eyes,” he says. “When I come here, I feel that.”In Mary Poppins Returns , the magical nanny revisits the now-grown Banks children, Jane and Michael, in the 1930s, to once again mend their troubles. It’s a project that not only demanded respect for the first film’s status as a Disney classic, but for the character’s position as a British icon. As much as her Hollywood manifestation has vastly overshadowed her literary origins, the film drawing from the book series by British writer PL Travers, she remains a source of national pride for Britain. It was, after all, a squadron of Poppinses that descended from the heavens to battle Harry Potter ’s Lord Voldemort during the Opening Ceremony of London’s 2012 Olympic Games. “I think there’s an intersection in the first film, and in this film, between Britain and Hollywood that is rather delicious,” says Emily Mortimer, who stars in the sequel as Jane Banks. Ben Whishaw, who plays Michael, adds: “I think the marriage of the two is actually very beautiful.”For readWith subscriptionWithout the adsTo be caretaker of such a character is a lot of pressure for any director to handle, but Marshall’s own relationship with the original film made the prospect just as compelling as it was daunting. His first move was to return directly to the source material, Travers’s books, with Mary Poppins Returns taking its greatest inspiration from the second in the series, Mary Poppins Comes Back . As Marshall explains: “We were able to cherry pick the adventures that I thought could be musicalised and turned into set pieces. The books themselves are episodic, so there’s no narrative to them.” He shaped the story with producer John DeLuca and screenwriter David Magee, before composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman then entered the process to commence writing the film’s songs.“It was a labour of love for me, literally right from my heart,” says Marshall, adding that his goal was to “protect the spirit of the first film and usher in this new, original story”. Both of these aims are beautifully achieved in the casting of Emily Blunt as Mary Poppins. Julie Andrews’s performance has always been key to the 1964 film’s enduring popularity. In the warmth of her laughter, and in the knowingness of her looks, Andrews created a character that could comfort and beguile us in equal measure.Blunt’s performance is entirely different in its notes – a little more haughty, and drier in her humour – but with exactly the same effect. It’s a performance so perfectly pitched that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. Marshall agrees. The director had only recently wrapped work on his 2014 musical, Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods , starring Blunt, when Mary Poppins Returns dropped in his lap. “There wasn’t even half a second of considering anybody else,” he says. “There’s no one else, because the demands of the part are so huge. You know you have to be a great actress to play all those layers of Mary Poppins – there’s the facade of the stern, proper nanny, but underneath there needs to be a beating heart. And she needs to be able to sing and dance. And Emily’s British, so she had everything.”