Originally published in 1865, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland changed forever the course of children’s literature. For Alice in Wonderland director Tim Burton, the prospect of putting his own fresh spin on such a timeless classic was too tantalizing to resist. “It’s so much a part of the culture,” he reflects of the time-proven tale that has inspired numerous stage, television and film adaptations. “So whether you’ve read the story or not, you’ll know certain images or have certain ideas about it. It’s such a popular story.”
With the success of Alice, Carroll (the pen name for Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics at Christchurch University in Oxford, England) became the leading children’s author of his day, and he followed it six years later with Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, which was even more popular than its predecessor. Today, both books tend to be published together under the title Alice in Wonderland, and their continued influence can be seen in everything from music videos to films, comic books to computer games, opera to art.
“One of the reasons Lewis Carroll’s characters work so well in cinema is because they’re wildly imaginative and there’s no one way to interpret them,” says Anne Hathaway, who stars as the White Queen. “Because Lewis Carroll played around with words and concepts, and because the characters appeal to the imagination, I feel there are as many interpretations as there are imaginations in the world. It depends on what your take is.”
“It somehow taps a subconscious thing,” Burton says of his source material. “That’s why all those great stories stay around because they tap into the things that people probably aren’t even aware of on a conscious level. There’s definitely something about those images. That’s why there have been so many versions of it.”
Incorporating characters, story elements and central themes from Carroll’s books, director Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland takes the stories to new heights, so to speak, featuring a grown-up Alice as she returns to the place she visited as a child.
Screenwriter Linda Woolverton pitched the idea to producers Joe Roth and Suzanne and Jennifer Todd. “Linda came up with a great idea,” says Roth. “It all hangs together, kind of a political allegory — those residents down there are not just crazy, they’re actually revolutionaries. So it just struck me right on every single level, and Disney seemed like the right place to take it. And there was only one choice of director, Tim Burton, and lo and behold, he wanted to do it.”
“They gave me a script and they said 3D,” Burton says. “And even before I read it, I thought that’s intriguing, and what I liked about Linda’s script was she made it a story, gave it a shape for a movie that’s not necessarily the book. So all those elements seemed good to me.”
“The story takes place when Alice is 19, and she’s about to enter into a marriage she’s not sure about,” Woolverton explains. “Time has passed. The Red Queen rules the whole land. It’s under her thumb. And the people of Underland need Alice. Underland,” she adds, “is the same fantastical land that Alice visited as a child. But she misheard the word ‘Underland’ and thought they said ‘Wonderland.’ Now as a girl on the cusp of adulthood, Alice goes back and there she discovers that the real name of the world is Underland.”
Part of what appealed to Burton about the script was that it centered on a 19-year-old Alice, who is substantially older than in Carroll’s books, yet feels very real and identifiable. “What I liked about this take on the story is Alice is at an age where you’re between a kid and an adult, when you’re crossing over as a person,” he says. “A lot of young people with old souls aren’t so popular in their own culture and their own time. Alice is somebody who doesn’t quite fit into that Victorian structure and society. She’s more internal.”
“In the beginning, Alice is very awkward and uncomfortable in her skin,” says Mia Wasikowska, who plays Alice. “So her experience in Underland is about reconnecting with herself and finding she has the strength to be more self-assured in figuring out what she wants.”
“I just liked her quality,” the director says of Wasikowska. “I always like it when I sense people have that old-soul quality to them. Because you’re witnessing this whole thing through her eyes, it needed somebody who can subtly portray that.”
“Mia’s incredible,” Johnny Depp says. “She’s like this wonderful little being from another planet. For me, it was great working with Mia who is beautiful, wonderful, sweet — the perfect Alice.”
Alice in Wonderland marks the seventh collaboration between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp since they first worked together on Edward Scissorhands.
“It’s amazing,” Depp says, “having worked with Tim coming up on 20 years, I’ve had the opportunity to see him grow. He’s so unique and so special and such a brilliant filmmaker. Anything Tim wants me to do is a real honor.”
The Hatter offered Depp the opportunity to create yet another unique character. “It was a real challenge to find something different, to define the Mad Hatter in terms of cinema,” he says. “One of the things Tim and I talked about early on, is the idea that he would be so pure, in the sense that you see, instantly, what he’s feeling — so much so that his clothes, his skin, his hair, everything, reflects his emotion. So when he’s beaming, you get this kind of bright effect and everything comes to life, like a flower blooming, very, very quickly. He’s like a mood ring. His emotions are very close to the surface.”
As the actor developed the character, Depp discovered that the hatters of the period often suffered from mercury poisoning. “The term ‘mad as a hatter’ actually came from real hatters when they were making these sort of beautiful beaver-pelt top hats,” he says. “The glue they used had very high mercury content. It would stain their hands; they’d go goofy from the mercury and go nuts.”
Depp also thought the Hatter would have several distinct personalities and accents. “It seemed to me also that because he would be so hyper-sensitive, he would need to travel into another state, another personality, to be able to survive, which kicks in when he is threatened or when he’s in danger. I thought it would be like experiencing a kinder form of personality disorder in a way.”
To play Underland’s petulant ruler, the Red Queen, Burton turned to his real-life partner Helena Bonham Carter, the Oscar®-nominated British actress. “She doesn’t really rule through any kind of justice or fairness, but through terror,” says Bonham Carter. “I chop off people’s heads. That’s my solution to everything.”
While Bonham Carter’s head is digitally increased to around twice its normal size for the final film, the actress still had to endure a daily visit to the makeup chair to be transformed into the Red Queen. “It took about three hours,” she says. “But I love being Royal. The big hazard was I lost my voice pretty much every day by 10 o’clock, because she shouts a lot. ‘Off with his head! Off with her head!’ It’s quite exhausting losing your temper all the time.”
In contrast, Mirana the White Queen, younger sister of the Red Queen, is mild mannered and kind — with a hidden dark side. Anne Hathaway, tapped to play the more subdued sibling, says she had to find a way to capture the character’s layered personality. “When I was trying to work her out, I kept saying to myself, ‘she is a punk-rock, vegan pacifist.’ So I listened to a lot of Blondie, I watched a lot of Greta Garbo movies, and I looked at a lot of the artwork of Dan Flavin. Then a little bit of Norma Desmond got thrown in there, too. And she just kind of emerged.”
While Bonham Carter’s head is digitally increased to around twice its normal size for the final film, the actress still had to endure a daily visit to the makeup chair to be transformed into the Red Queen. “It took about three hours,” she says. “But I love being Royal. The big hazard was I lost my voice pretty much every day by 10 o’clock, because she shouts a lot. ‘Off with his head! Off with her head!’ It’s quite exhausting losing your temper all the time.”
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Hathaway even moved like a subdued royal figure. “I noticed the more languid I could make my arms, the more it looked like I was gliding,” she says.
“It’s like she’s on wheels,” Depp says. “She sort of glides through, and her hands begin talking before she does. Her hands have their own little personality.”
For a filmmaker famous for creating fantastical and breathtaking onscreen worlds, Lewis Carroll’s rich tapestry of characters and their magical realm afforded Burton ample opportunity to let his imagination run wild.
“Everybody’s got an image of Underland,” Burton says. “I think in people’s minds, it’s always a very bright, cartoony place. We thought if Alice had had this adventure as a little girl and now she’s going back, perhaps it’s been a little bit depressed since she’s left. It’s got a slightly haunted quality to it.”
To create his vision of Underland, filmmakers first returned to the source material — Carroll’s books. “We gathered all the artwork from all of the various artists who’d drawn ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and put it up on the wall, to get a mood, a flavor going,” recalls production designer Rob Stromberg. “Then we started talking about how we could keep it true to the book, but take it to a place that hadn’t been seen before.”
Using a mixture of visual effects techniques, including actors shot against green screen, all CGI characters, as well as 3D, Alice in Wonderland promises to showcase Burton’s vision in a unique, richly detailed way.
Ken Ralston, senior visual effects supervisor on the film, says it was a challenge deciding how to tackle the director’s vision. Ultimately, Ken says, they decided to “blend a lot of different types of techniques into something that would give us a very unique look for the movie. And it was really based on what it should be based on — what the environments needed to be to best tell the story, what the characters would look like to best tell the story.”
One of Ralston’s challenges was to enlarge Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen head to twice its size, while keeping her body intact and unchanged. Filmmakers employed a wholly unique camera system to shoot all of the film’s sequences that involved increasing an element’s size — from the Queen’s head, to the Tweedles’ bodies, to Alice herself when she measured over eight feet tall. According to Peitzman, the second camera system offered additional lines of resolution. “To blow the Red Queen’s head up larger than normal size, we needed more data. We needed more pixels to be able to make that work.”
Ralston adds that scenes shot with the sophisticated camera system had to be carefully shot and later intricately adjusted so that they matched the rest of the film. “And that’s even before the horrifyingly complicated issue of blending the Queen’s neck into her costume.”
“There isn’t a whole lot of poking sticks at the audience or throwing balls out at you, or anything just for the 3D trick,” Ralston adds. “It will happen naturally. It’s just going to be there. Like having the Cheshire Cat appear, but so he’s floating out and above the audience. But not trying to oversell this trick, not trying to be corny.”
The idea of making a film in 3D was, for Burton, one of the main reasons he was drawn to directing Alice in Wonderland in the first place.
“I thought it was intriguing,” says Burton. “It seemed like the right kind of story to do the 3D. I always try to say, ‘Is the right medium for this?’ and not just do it because it’s a gimmick or it’s fashionable now, and it did feel like it was the right kind of material. So seeing it come to life in 3D supports the material. It gives you that kind of ‘out there’ feeling that was a very crucial element to the film.”
