My Lovely Interview with Lucy Dahl and The BFG #BFG #TheBFGBluray

This post may earn affiliate income from links and/or review products to help support this site from the companies .

While in LA last month, I was able to enjoy quite an entertaining interview with Lucy Dahl, daughter to Roald Dahl. He was also the author to other stories such as James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches, and Charlies and the Great Glass Elevator. Many of his works have been turned into plays and movies.

We joined Lucy for a “Miniature” brunch to celebrate the release of The BFG to Blu-ray and DVD. She quite enjoyed telling stories from her childhood, I could listen to her tell these stories all day! She mentioned how her childhood was very much growing up with her own BFG.

Video interview about her childhood growing up

We asked her to tell us what it was like growing up with Roald Dahl as her father.

Lucy: So it was really amazing growing up with Roald Dahl as my dad because everything was a fairy tale, really, because we were sort of his lab rats so to speak, and so he would test his ideas and his characters and people on us, although we didn’t know it at the time. We just thought that we were getting great stories and he created this whole sort of kingdom of where we lived. This whole kind of Disneyland, and you could actually live there for a long time. That’s sort of what our house and our garden and our orchard beyond and then fields and the woods beyond that, that’s what our rambling old house in the countryside of Bingham was like. It wasn’t fancy at all. We did not have a lot of money.

My father worked very, very hard to get us through school. My mum was always working in America, but back to focus on The BFG, is he is real to me. He lived under our apple orchards, which was beyond our garden, and every single night, he would blow dreams into my sister and my bedroom, and dad would tell us a story about some idea he was brewing. Sometimes it was about The BFG, sometimes it was about some other thing that he was thinking about.

And though we didn’t know at the time. We just thought it was a story, and then even in the middle of winter, even if it was snowing outside or blizzarding, or whatever, we would always have to leave out little old bedroom window open a crack and our bedroom was tiny. Ophelia, Ophelia’s the name of my sister, she’s fifteen months older than me, and our bedroom was really no, smaller than this bookshelf, the width of this bookshelf and about this big [she described a space no more than about 10 x 10 feet]. Not even this big. Anyway, so after he told us a story, he would say goodnight, and we would lay there and we would wait for the BFG to come and blow dreams into our room and sure enough, within five, I have no, no idea how long it was. It wasn’t long, and this band with

Anyway, so after he told us a story, he would say goodnight, and we would lay there and we would wait for the BFG to come and blow dreams into our room and sure enough, within 5—I have no, no idea how long it was. It wasn’t long, and this band with a stick would come [Lucy mimics blowing a horn] he would always speak to Ophelia first, which annoyed me, I have to admit., Because I, Ophelia was outside and I was outside and you would hear shuffles.

And then it would go this way, and I would get my dreams and then it would retract and then that was just it for years and years and years while we were young growing up and then when we got to age where we thought that maybe, when our friends started to say there’s no such thing as The BFG, as they do, we questioned Dad, and Dad said, ‘You mustn’t, the minute you stop believing in magic, it will never happen.’ and it also must have worried him tremendously because the next morning when we woke up.

His precious lawn, his garden—he was an avid gardener—and the grass had huge brown spots, it said ‘BFG’ across the whole garden, that he had done with weed killer. And he said to us, you’ve made The BFG cross that you’re not believing in him, and he obviously wanted to tell you that he’s here, and then we realized that it wasn’t The BFG sticking a dream through our window one night when I think dad had a bit too much to drink and he fell off his ladder

One night the bamboo stick was coming back through the window and we heard this enormous crash, crash bang and we were told never to go to window to look, but we did and there was my poor old dad at the bottom of the ladder saying, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’