“Dust Bunny” director Bryan Fuller has a bone to pick with one cinema classic.
“My gripe with ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is that it’s all a dream at the end,” Fuller told TheWrap’s executive awards editor Steve Pond at our 2025 Toronto International Film Festival Studio, recalling his frustrated reaction to the 1939 film’s suggestion that Dorothy Gale’s trip over the rainbow might not have happened. “I was like, ‘No, she went to Oz! It happened. Don’t take that away from us!’”
In “Dust Bunny,” Fuller wants you to want the fantasy to be real. The “Hannibal” and “Pushing Daisies” creator’s new dark fantasy film follows a young girl (Sophie Sloan) who asks her neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) to help kill the monster under her bed that has eaten her family. The film, which premieres at TIFF on Tuesday and is slated to hit theaters in December, drops viewers right into a fantasy world that star Sigourney Weaver found “enchanting.”
“I fell in love with the script,” she revealed. “I said yes right after meeting Bryan, but I had no idea I was going to get to enter a world that was so wildly beautiful and exotic and so funny, and I think that’s what the surprise is. Yes, it’s a sort of classic fairy tale, but so original and so there’s just so many bursts of energy in it.”
For Fuller, the film began as a failed pitch for Apple TV+’s revival of Steven Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories.” When its TV incarnation never came to be, Fuller realized that it was both a “great” idea for a movie and that making it would give him a chance to sit in a director’s chair for the first time.
“In TV, I never got the chance to direct because my first responsibility as a showrunner is to make sure the scripts are in order and the production is running smoothly. If you direct, you take yourself out of that, and it always felt irresponsible,” Fuller explained. Eventually, he just decided, “OK, I need to do this. I need to evolve from being a screenwriter and be a filmmaker.”
Weaver was disheartened to learn that “Dust Bunny” had earned an R rating from the MPAA over a “non-lethal toothbrush injury” in the film. According to both her and Fuller, they always intended for it to be something the whole family could see together.
“I would want any child to see this, because I think it’s so filled with hope,” Weaver remarked. “I’m disappointed, frankly, that it’s not whatever we want it to be [rated], because I think it’s really a children’s instant classic.”
“My hope is that it’s the first R-rated movie parents take their children to see, because it is made as a family movie,” Fuller added. “Our message would be: Parents go see it on Thursday and Friday, and then take your kids to a matinee on the weekend once you see that it’s actually appropriate.”
While the film’s story is one of a difficult childhood, Fuller believes that only makes “Dust Bunny” more relatable for viewers, regardless their age. “We all have complicated childhoods,” he said. “I think there’s something [to] giving people hope that, if you’re in the middle of a complicated childhood, you are your way out.”
Weaver does not believe the film’s sometimes dark turns get in the way of its entertainment value or whole-family appeal, either. “When you watch the movie, as complicated as [the protagonist’s] childhood has been, she is not scarred and undermined by it,” Weaver observed. “It has clarified to her what she needs to do to improve things.”
“She’s already changing the world to fit her needs,” the actress concluded, before adding with a laugh, “I find it very exciting and healing — even for an older, traumatized person.”
Catch up on all of TheWrap’s TIFF coverage here.
