This interview with Alice Through the Looking Glass director was an all expenses paid trip, but all fan girling is my own.
One of my favorite parts of our Alice press trip is getting to interview the Alice Through the Looking Glass director James Bobin. Sure, it’s fun to interview celebrities, but what I really love is hearing the passion and vision that went into making the movie. James Bobin is the director of the latest installment of the Alice series, and had a lot to share with us about what Alice meant to him as a child growing up in England, bringing his vision to life on the big screen, and what it was like to see it all come together.
Alice Through the Looking Glass Director James Bobin
Q: How did you get attached to the project?
James : I was working for Disney already. I made some Muppets movies for them back in the day. I remember being on set with my executive Kristen Burr.She mentioned the word Alice to me, and of course I jumped at that because I grew up in England. Alice is like part of your life. She’s just someone who you know really wel
When I found out we were doing it I was really excited because. When you know something you think you have a clear idea of who she’s gonna be in the film. It felt like a very natural thing to do. Tim’s world was very beautiful foundation to start from. But I thought if I came on that I could kind of bring some of that British comedy back a bit, which is hopefully what you guys saw when you watched the movie.
Q: Was Sacha Baron Cohen your immediate first choice for the character of Time?
James : When you work with someone as brilliant as Sacha you always try to think of ways of getting him back involved in things you’re doing. He and I worked t[together] years ago on Borat and Ali G and Bruno. To do that job you have to create characters that live in the real world. I knew that if you’re going to create a new character for this world particularly whereby you have iconic characters like the Mad Hatter and Alice and the Red Queen we needed to create a character, which is Time.
Time, of course, is Lewis Carroll’s idea. It’s not my idea. I only borrowed it from him. Lewis Carroll talks about time as a person in the book Alice in Wonderland. I thought that is a brilliant idea for a character. In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll thinks time is not just an idea but a man, a person.[We thought] that would be a very useful character to have in this film. It felt very right for the movie to have a new character and that it would be Lewis Carroll’s idea.
I thought that we have a really lovely kind of bad guy in the Red Queen. [We didn’t] want to do that again, or else it gets confusing. What [Time] was gonna be is more of a kind of obstacle, like a powerful obstacle to Alice’s situation. Plus I thought that if you’;re gonna do a time travel movie it’d be nice and very British to have to ask permission to time travel. You have to go to somebody then, please, may I borrow your chronosphere? Therefore when you have a powerful character what’s quite fun is if you undermine them immediately by making it pretty obvious that he’s a fool. Sacha’s very good at playing the sort of over confident idiot. And that was a very good character choice for him. He has great!
Q: What was the most challenging aspect for you?
James : Ffor me, the story is challenging because it’s not the story of the book, which I knew it would never be because I loved the book very dearly. Even as a kid I realized that it’s quite unusual because Lewis Carroll wasn’t that concerned with narrative. He liked imagery, ideas. And the book kind of falls in on itself deliberately. Things happen. And then other things happen. And they seem very consequential. It’s only cause and effect. I knew that for a film would make an interesting avante guarde movie. But I’m not sure I could do that in this situation. I knew the story would be a new story. I knew Linda had an idea about the time travel movie based on the characters from before, butt at the same time I wanted to pay tribute to the book. The book’s incredibly important.
I wanted to take elements of the book like the backwards room and obviously the looking glass and the characters and the spirit of Lewis Carroll, the idea of something which is fairly complex but not so complex that my eight year old daughter wouldn’t understand it. It’s important you understand the story. But also I remember as a kid, I liked working stuff out in a movie. I didn’t want to be given it all straight away. I wanted to be ahead. I wanted to feel like I was ahead of the characters in the movie. This is kind of a puzzle plot in a way.
That was a challenge to try and make a story, which is complex and interesting but not overly so in a way which would be distracting for children.
From the start Alice Through the Looking Glass Director seemed to have a distinct vision of the world he wanted for the second Alice installment. He wanted to pay homage to his hero Lewis Carroll while making a world that builds off of Tim Burton’s Wonderland from the first film. Through his love of Alice, and his love of movie making, James Bobin brought together a film that this chick loved. It has just enough humor, just enough quirk, and just enough adventure to mold into a film that’s great for the whole family!
Make sure to check out all of my other Alice Through the Looking Glass posts, and get your Alice Through the Looking Glass tickets here (pssttt…it’s in theaters now!)
- Like ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/
DisneyAlice - Follow ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS on Instagram: https://instagram.
com/DisneyAlice - Follow Walt Disney Studios on Twitter: https://twitter.
com/disneystudios - Visit the official ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS site here: http://movies.disney.
com/alice-through-the-looking- glass
ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS opens in theaters everywhere on May 27th!
Leave a Reply