When Lucy Dahl was little, her father would take her and her sister Ophelia for a nighttime walk in the woods. Then they’d wait by the beech trees, beside a big hole.
“That’s where Mr. and Mrs. Fox live,” Roald Dahl would say. Or, at another hole: “Let’s wait for Badger to get up to Foxy’s for a slap-up supper!”
“Our childhood was filled with things like that,” says Lucy Dahl, now 44 and the youngest of the writer’s five children. “I believed they were all true.”
Now she believes in something else: “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”
Opening this weekend, the stop-motion flick — about a wily fox (George Clooney) and family, who outwit a trio of greedy farmers — is the latest movie made from Dahl’s children’s books.
And while “James and the Giant Peach” and “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” have their charms, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is the one that made Lucy Dahl feel right at home.
Maybe that’s because director Wes Anderson, who co-wrote the screenplay, visited the family home in the English countryside.
“There are so many sweet little touches no one would notice except me and my family,” she says. “The chair that Mr. Fox sits in, in his office, is an exact replica of the one my father used to write in.” And the card tacked up beside his desk — with “Happy birthday” spelled out in flower petals — is a copy of the one she made her dad.
Growing up Dahl was fun, says Lucy, whose mother is actress Patricia Neal.
Not only did her father tell wonderful bedtime stories, but he made “witches’ potions” — canned peaches or pears, blended with a spoonful of ice cream and food coloring — and had his own vocabulary.
“He spoke in a way no one else spoke,” says Lucy, now a screenwriter in Los Angeles. “Before we sat down to eat a meal, he’d say, ‘Nosebags on, everyone — this is a scrumdiddlyumptious meal we’re going to have!’ ”
Her own children — she has two, plus five stepkids — grew up on those books. And no, she says, regretfully, she’s not in any of them.
“I’d like to say I’m Matilda, but I’m not,” she says of Dahl’s child genius. But if you look at the pictures in “BFG,” you might recognize her niece, model Sophie Dahl. She was illustrator Quentin Blake’s model for the book.
“BFG,” about a Big Friendly Giant, is her favorite book.
“Ophelia and I used to get ‘BFG’ stories before it was written,” she says. “The Big Friendly Giant lived in our orchard. We had to leave empty wine bottles for him to store his dreams in.”
And every night, she recalls, “my father would open a window a crack, even if it was blizzarding, so the BFG could float his dreams into us.”