Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Time is of an essence in ‘Alice’
When a Hollywood film makes more than a billion dollars worldwide, there is an inevitable push for a sequel.
In the case of 2010’s “Alice in Wonderland,” there was obvious source material for another go-round, “Through the LookingGlass, and What Alice Found There,” Lewis Carroll’s 1871 follow-up to the classic tale.
“The problem,” says James Bobin, the director of Disney’s “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” which opens today, “is there’s really no cause and effect in the narrative, and that’s really hard to make into a film.”
Carroll, the pen name of Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, constructed the story like a chess match. He was interested in wordplay, math paradoxes and satire. “I love ‘Looking Glass,’” says Bobin. “But it’s a strange book.”
Actually, “Wonderland” didn’t have much more of a narrative flow either, but for that film Linda Woolverton wrote a script that stressed the female empowerment of Alice, making her a young adult instead of a child. The writer took the film to producer Suzanne Todd, and then Tim Burton was brought on to direct.
“When Tim came in, he added another super-interesting layer to the story,” says Todd.Its combination of live-action and animation caught the public’s fancy and set off a trend that is still exploding.
Burton, though, wasn’t interested in doing the sequel. “We didn’t really expect to make a second one, so it took us a long time of working on the script,” says Todd.
Woolverton had a first draft for “Looking Glass” and then Bobin was brought in. The plot was a time-traveling adventure involving a more mature and stronger Alice (again played by Mia Wasikowska). Though facing problems in her own world, the heroine has to return to Underland to save her friend the Hatter (Johnny Depp) — who has grown sad (not mad) — and his family.
“When I read the script, I really liked it,” says Bobin. “But there is this thing in ‘Wonderland’ where the Hatter is at the tea party and he says he was stuck there because he and Time had quarreled. So in Lewis Carroll’s mind, time was a person.”
So the British director — known for being a creator of HBO’s offbeat “Flight of the Conchords” and a writer-director for “Da Ali G Show” — suggested they create a literal character of Time, who is often our enemy.
“But we didn’t want him to be a straight-up bad guy, because we already had one in the Red Queen,” says Bobin, referring to the bigheaded character played by Helena Bonham Carter.
And Bobin — who also directed “The Muppets” and “Muppets Most Wanted” for Disney — knew exactly who he wanted for the role.
“I wanted to have this guy who was an omnipotent being that was sort of a twit, and there’s nobody better at playing the confident idiot trope than Sacha Baron Cohen,” he says, having worked with him on “Ali G.”
Cohen, notes Bobin, can play an obnoxious character and still be likable. “His Borat has the most outrageous opinions and is a terrible person, yet everybody loves him.”
Time, though, is lonely and succumbs to the Red Queen’s wiles. “I love the idea that this despot is all by himself,” says the 43-year-old director. “And Sacha is very good at bringing a sense of vulnerability to the character.”
Todd says the theme of “Looking Glass” is the “preciousness of time and how many of us in the course of our day don’t really know how we spend it.”
In the film, that idea can be literal. Time has strange mechanical helpers called Seconds, who can stack themselves to form larger entities called Minutes and then, dreadfully, Hours.
While Burton had established a dark and moody style for “Alice,” for “Looking Glass” the filmmakers wanted a lighter and comic tone, one of the reasons Bobin had been brought in. They also wanted to acknowledge more of Carroll’s surrealism and wordplay.
“I think if you go line for line there are far more exact quotes from the book in the dialogue in this one than in the first,” says Todd.
Although major parts of the book were left out because they didn’t fit the new story — no Walrus and the Carpenter — the one Bobbin most wanted to get in was the backwards room, where Alice ends up after she goes through the looking glass.
“I remember Carroll had said that he came up with the idea because whenever he was in the drawing room he would look in the mirror above his fireplace and wonder what it would look like on the other side,” the director says. “So in this film, I lit that fire on the other side with the idea that he would be pleased by that.”
Like the first film, the new one boasts tons of visual effects from Ken Ralston, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on “Alice.” “Looking Glass,” though, was shot on blue screen (rather than green) and has many more real sets, including the town of Wit’s End. They were designed by Dan Hennah, whose credits include “King Kong” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” for which he received an Oscar.
For Wasikowska, who was 18 when they shot “Wonderland,” she really appreciated the costumes from designer Colleen Atwood, who won an Oscar for the original. Sometimes the actress would go to watch them make the outfits. “The embroidery was amazing,” she says. “Seeing the detail in the young Hatter’s vest was almost comforting because it was the one tangible thing in the world,” she says, referring to all the blue-screen work.
The Australian actress, now 26, was an unknown when Burton chose her to play “Alice,” beating out a number of well-known actresses for the role at the time.
Like her character, Wasikowska has grown up and displays a sense of maturity and assuredness when you sit down with her.
“I think she has really interesting taste,” observes Todd, “and she has made her career about the directors she wants to work with and certain roles.”
Wasikowska says she has an affinity for playing Alice, who she describes in the new film as “quiet but independent and very strong.”
At the beginning of “Looking Glass,” Carroll’s creation is very much an action figure, commanding her late father’s sailing ship through treacherous seas.
“When they see her in her captain’s uniform, I’m hoping young girls will want to wear them as Halloween costumes,” says Todd.
While “Looking Glass” acknowledges Carroll’s unique world — it’s filled with puns and tons of jokes involving time — Bobbin, who studied history at Oxford University, also knew his target audience. “Mostly,” he says, “I wanted to make sure that my daughter, who is eight, understood it.”