“I spent a lot of time trying to escape my day-to-day life,” he said.  “It left me very lonely.”

A 1993 graduate of New York University’s film school, Forster received critical acclaim for his offbeat musical “Loungers,” which won the Audience Award at the 1996 Slamdance International Film Festival.  Forster’s second film, “Everything Put Together,” which deals with the ostracism a young mother faces when her baby dies from S.I.D.S., premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and earned the young filmmaker the prestigious Movado Someone to Watch/Independent Spirit Award.

But it was his third film, “Monster’s Ball,” that solidified Forster’s status as a director capable of portraying intense issues with unflinching honesty.  The story also earned Berry her first Oscar, granting her icon status as the first African-American woman to take home the golden statue.

“We’re all storytellers to a certain degree,” Forster said, with Swiss earnestness.  “We’re all actors in our own stories.  Every day we make decisions as to how our movies turn out.”

Before taking on “Finding Neverland,” Forster first had to tackle the issue of Barrie’s legacy, which had been sullied by vague allegations of misconduct between him and the Llewelyn Davies boys.  Fortunately, those accusations proved to be completely unfounded.

“I didn’t want to make a movie about a pedophile, but he wasn’t,” Forster insisted.

The script met with the approval of Nico Llewelyn Davies, the youngest of the five boys.  Although Nico is not portrayed in the film, he lived with Barrie after his mother’s death and regarded Barrie as his father, and his daughter has a cameo in the film.

Biographer Andrew Birkin, in his definitive biography of Barrie, “J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys,” noted that Nico was unequivocal about any possible misconduct between the playwright and the Llewelyn Davies boys.

“Had he had these leanings in however slight a symptom, I would have been aware,” Birkin wrote.  “He was an innocent – which is why he could write Peter Pan.”

Part of a celebrated circle of writers that included Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson, Barrie was one of the most successful and wealthiest playwrights of his generation.  His work includes more than forty plays – many of which were major stage hits, largely due to their biting satire about London’s class-driven society – as well as six novels, seven works of non-fiction and numerous collections. 

Without a doubt, however, it is “Peter Pan” that Barrie is most remembered for.  Not only did the production become an epic story, but it sparked a revolution by demonstrating that children were a viable audience for literature.  It also left a tremendous legacy that includes the “Peter Pan collar,” the girl’s name “Wendy” and the word “Neverland.”