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February 2010 

Return to Table of Contents February 2010

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Cover Story: Tim Burton Walking in a Burton Wonderland

Tim Burton + Alice in Wonderland = Endless Possibilities. The director tells us how he sifted through all the technology at his disposal, and utilized some of his favourite actors, to create his own version of a classic


By Sheila Roberts

It's hard to imagine a more fitting interpreter of Lewis Carroll’s delightfully deranged 1865 novel Alice in Wonderland than delightfully deranged filmmaker Tim Burton. The director’s vivid imagination and place at the forefront of moviemaking’s creative edge seems a perfect match for the 19th-century English author, who was also an inventor and a respected photographer in that art form’s early days.

 

Wasikowska with Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Matt Lucas)

Yet Burton admits when he first read Alice in Wonderland as a boy he felt no emotional connection whatsoever. Nor did he warm to any of the film or TV adaptations he would later watch. Burton didn’t see anything special in the little girl famous for falling down a rabbit hole until he bought a house once owned by an English illustrator named Arthur Rackham (1867 – 1939). “I live and work out of his studio,” Burton says during an interview at San Diego’s Comic-Con. “In 1905 he did some amazing versions of Alice in Wonderland, Sleepy Hollow, things that I’ve been involved with. So I felt there was a real weird connection to me, the material, and life. It always helps somehow.”

 

When Burton decided to do his own version of Alice, he wanted it to have an emotional grounding he felt was missing from earlier versions — but, of course, with a Tim Burton twist. “Every character is weird, but I tried to give them their own specific weirdness so that they’re all different,” he says. “The real attempt was to try to make Alice feel more like a story as opposed to a series of events.”

    

While Burton filled much of his cast with frequent collaborators — Johnny Depp plays the Mad Hatter (their seventh film together) and Burton’s long-time partner, Helena Bonham Carter, is the nefarious Red Queen (their sixth joint effort) — 20-year-old Australian newcomer Mia Wasikowska nabbed the pivotal title role. And this is no preteen, headband-wearing Alice. Now 19, our heroine finds herself at a lavish party receiving a very public marriage proposal from a man she does not want to marry. Distraught, she runs off and, once again, falls down a rabbit hole and finds herself in Wonderland, a place she visited years before.

 

“There are so many stories of Alice in Wonderland,” says Burton, evoking the book’s sequel, Through the Looking Glass. “The goal was to take the random elements of the books and make its own story. They don’t really follow a specific linear structure. I just wanted to try and do a version that’s like a movie.”

 

Alice in Wonderland director Tim Burton
gives his Alice (Mia Wasikowska)
some guidance

Of course, plot is only half the battle. Burton, who is well known for his stylistic eccentricities, had to decide how much of the film should be live-action and how much should be special effects. In an era when so many different techniques are available — motion-capture, animation, blue screen, 3D — he says he tries to choose the medium that works best for the project. “I went more with the pure animation and then live action,” he says of Alice, “but then tried to work the live action to fit into the world. All the techniques have been done before, but this is a new mixture of them that way.”

 

When Disney suggested doing the film in 3D, Burton had no problem. “It puts you in this world more. Just with the Alice material, growing and shrinking, the spatial, the weird spaces and places that you’re in, it just helps with the experience,” he says.

 

As 3D technology has advanced, Burton says, the gimmicky aspects have diminished and the focus is now on enhancing the experience. “Obviously, these movies have to not only work in 3D, but you’ve got to look at it in 2D and say this is still a good movie that you want to see.”

     

Beyond the visual effects, Burton was counting on Depp’s ability to bring a unique personal perspective to an unusual character. It’s something the actor has done throughout his career and in each of his partnerships with Burton, from their first film together, 1990’s Edward Scissorhands, to their last, 2007’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. “Anytime I’ve worked with him that’s what he tries to do,” says Burton. “This was no exception.”

 

Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen

Depp’s strength, according to Burton, is his ability to breathe life and humanity into eccentric, often morally ambiguous, characters. “Johnny tries to find a grounding to the character — something that you feel as opposed to just being mad,” says the director. “With a lot of versions, [the Mad Hatter] is a very one-note kind of character. His goal was to bring out more of a human side to the strangeness of the character.”

 

The film’s formidable cast also includes Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts, Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat, Christopher Lee as the Jabberwock, Michael Sheen as the White Rabbit and Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar. But it’s the virtually unknown Wasikowska on whom so much of the film’s success rests. While she’s had roles in smaller American films like Amelia and Defiance, and on the TV show In Treatment, Wasikowksa doesn’t have the experience or star power of, say, an Ellen Page or a Dakota Fanning. What made her right for such a weighty role?

     

“Most Alices are just a precocious girl wandering through things,” Burton says. “I wanted somebody with a gravity to her, an internal life, something that you could just look at and see the wheels turning. It’s just a simple kind of power to her that I really liked — not flamboyant, not very showy. That’s why I picked her.” And what about casting his lovely partner Helena Bonham Carter as the villain? “Helena? I don’t know,” he responds. “She was available and she’s got a big head that seemed to fit the Red Queen.”


Sheila Roberts lives in Los Angeles where she writes about film.

Notice a resemblance?

Alice joins the Mad Hatter for tea in one of English artist Arthur Rackham’s 1907 Alice in Wonderland illustrations. Tim Burton now lives and works out of a studio once owned by the turn-of-the-century artist and feels a connection to the story because of his home’s history.

    



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