— When
Bonham Carter
“He was so polite about it, and there were so many hesitations,”
Carter
perhaps — but only if you want to — um, anyway, would you play the Red
Queen?'”
children with Burton, giggled as she recounted the moment when she was
invited to take on the royal role in “Alice in Wonderland,” the highly
anticipated
opening Friday.
“It was like a proposal of marriage,” said the
43-year-old actress.
“I was doing ‘Terminator Salvation’ at the time, and
when he asked me, I was really flattered. It was a complete surprise! I
know people think it’s disingenuous when I say that, but it’s true. They
won’t understand this, but each time (he has a film), I truly don’t
expect Tim to ever want to work with me again.”
It will be 25 years ago this December that
Carter
Honeychurch
an eclectic list of credits since, many of them with Burton — “Alice” is
the sixth since 2001, and in that span she has been a talking simian
(“Planet of the Apes”), a moldering, undead woman (“Corpse Bride”) and,
now, in “Wonderland,” a shrill queen with an abnormally swollen skull.
“I personally find it especially flattering that he
tends to deform me in every movie,”
“But my mother and everyone ask me, ‘What is it with you and him?’ But
that’s the point of acting isn’t it? It’s all dress-up.”
This time, the dress-up adventure is a surreal jaunt
through Wonderland, in which
Hatter, newcomer Mia Wasikowska handles the title role, and a deep
roster of British actors (among them
Sheen
unsettling animal kingdom on the other side of the rabbit hole.
No one has more memorable scenes, though, than
Carter
camera and digital wizardry were used to magnify the star’s head, and
the effect is a bit jolting to watch. In the plot, the queen’s monstrous
noggin makes her a freak even by Wonderland’s standards.
For the record, Burton didn’t mention the
major-league melon when he made his sweet proposal. “I learned that when
I read it in the script,”
distress. “Oh, a huge head? I see, lovely.”
The film is a mix of live-action performance,
green-screen motion-capture work and pure animation, which made for a
dizzying amount of computation, crisis control and collaboration from
Burton’s team. On the set, for instance, someone had to keep track of
where the Red Queen’s mega-cranium would be in relation to doorways,
furniture and other actors.
“The queen’s head was something we had to be careful
to account for all the time,” visual-effects supervisor
Ralston
in their scenes to give her head enough room.”
Burton said the key to the Red Queen was to make sure
that she wasn’t entirely evil or predictable and that her rivalry with
her normal-headed sister, the White Queen (played by
Hathaway
the Red Queen grew up with a tumor in her head, which, in Wonderland’s
version of physiology, made her head vast. “Linda told me it also made
the queen emotionally volatile and arrested in her development,”
Carter
2-year-old daughter, Nell. There are some similarities.”
learn that this new film is more like a sequel to
Carroll’s
1951
“It’s all very invented, very new with this film and
with good reason. The original Carroll stories are in fact very episodic
— there isn’t a lot of huge narrative or dramatic drive. The story that
from both (books by Carroll) but given a real context and a story and a
purpose for the whole dream to occur.”
—
(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
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