Alice Through the Looking Glass

Alice Through the Looking Glass</em> director, James Bobin, thinks Lewis Carroll was ahead of his time…

Alice Through the Looking Glass is the sequel to the worldwide billion dollar grossing hit from 2010, Alice in Wonderland. In the sequel, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is now a sea captain. When she returns to London, Hamish (Leo Bill), is back to torment Alice some more by forcing her to choose between keeping her ship or keeping her mother’s home. Alice escapes Hamish at a party by jumping over to Underland, where she learns that the Mad Hatter (an almost unrecognizable Johnny Depp) has sunk into a deep depression wanting to be reunited with his missing family.

To find out what happened to them, Alice steals a time-travel device, the Chronosphere, from Time himself, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, in quite possibly the best performance of the movie. Through Alice’s travels, we get the back story about the Hatter’s childhood and the incident that caused the rift between the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), turning the Red Queen evil. Though Tim Burton is still a producer, he handed the directing reins to James Bobin. As someone whose previous credits include two Muppets movies, “The Ali G Show” and “Flight of the Conchords,” Bobin’s might not have been the first name to pop up in your head. He’d be the first to disagree however.

“I’m English, so you grow up with Alice as part of your life and then you read the stories to your own kids. I really thought that Alice was in this film how she’d be when she grew up. I remember reading Lewis Carroll as a kid and he really made me laugh. A lot of work I’ve done in the past is comedy and I really wanted to bring that to the story. I’ve always thought Carroll was the author of surrealist, absurdist humor which is a direct line from Monty Python, which is what I watched growing up. I really wanted to bridge that. Plus, this is an unbelievable cast so how do you not say yes to this?”

True. How do you not say yes to this? But still. “Alice in Wonderland” is not exactly an obscure novel and Tim Burton isn’t exactly a no-name director. Those are big footsteps to follow. Most of us would be hesitant to take on such a huge directing gig, but Bobin was confident.

“It’s a question of tone and tone is the result of a thousand different decisions you make over the course of a movie. Obviously Tim’s movie left me with good parameters with which to work, though it’s set in a different geographical location and time period. I was able to add my own stuff to it as well. I wanted to pay tribute to the spirit of Lewis Carroll in a way he would appreciate. Though I think time travel as a concept came later than him, he would have appreciated the idea of time travel. At the same time, having time be a person was Carroll’s idea when Alice meets Hatter for the first time.”

Besides, he grew up with the Lewis Carroll books. All of us who have read the same book over and over, you picture the world of that book in your head. How many of us as adults actually get to create a world of a book we’ve read over and over.

“In England, the books are often printed together and they were read to me as a young child. When you’re older, what you’re most struck by are the images in the books. In this film, from my perspective, ignore the people in the foreground and focus on the people in the background. That’s the encapsulation of the Carroll imagination. It’s not science fiction or “Lord of the Rings” because that hadn’t happened yet. Carroll’s imagination was more based on nursery rhymes and Victorian England and the natural world. It was a Victorian imagination which was really fascinating. For me, that is what the Alice world is and I hope I brought some of that to this film.”

Though this is a big budget summer movie, it doesn’t involve robots, superheroes, vampires or anything else with extraordinary powers. It’s simply the story of a young woman going to extraordinary measures to help a friend. Bobin had to walk the fine line of making Alice look able enough but not superhuman.

“The journey Alice undertakes to save the Hatter involves some physical work for sure. I’m always keen to keep those things in mind of the character. Alice isn’t a superhero. She’s a girl who’s brave and has intelligent thoughts. When you watch the sequences, I’m very keen to make sure we made Alice struggle to do these things. She can do these things, but it’s not easy. I didn’t want to make her seem too competent, because she wouldn’t be. She’s competent because she’s brave and strong and determined. On the ship, we were shooting at night in England in November, which I would never recommend to anybody. Mia was literally turning blue – there was ice on the deck. When you watched the dailies, she was literally smiling though.”

As I mentioned, this is a big budget summer movie where the lead role is played by a young woman. Mia Wasikowska is THE lead in the film, while her more famous co-stars are clearly in supporting roles. Most of the action and stunts involve Alice. Bobin thinks that Carroll was ahead of his time in thinking that women wouldn’t have to always defer to men.

“A lot of this comes from Lewis Carroll himself who had a daughter around the same age as mine which is eight or nine. Alice was a real girl. Particularly for girls in that time, society would make them make choices that they didn’t necessarily want to. Girls themselves haven’t changed much in that time. An eight-year-old girl is an eight-year-old girl. I feel like that’s why this story has lasted this long. I think Alice in the book was born in 1852. She was part of the generation of women who helped get the right to vote in the early 1900s. Maybe Lewis Carroll had a subconscious thought that maybe things were about to change.”

Alice Through the Looking Glass is in theaters now.