Q&A: James Bobin on adapting Lewis Carroll for ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’

TORONTO – For director James Bobin, taking on the film “Alice Through The Looking Glass” was as strange and foreign as the world the legendary protagonist faces — which is precisely why he wanted to do it.

The English filmmaker, writer and producer says after working on projects including “Da Ali G Show,” “Flight of the Conchords” and “The Muppets” films, he was hungry for the challenge of taking over from Tim Burton, who directed 2010’s “Alice in Wonderland.”

It also didn’t hurt that the film had an established all-star cast from the previous 2010 film, including Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway.

The Canadian Press recently spoke with Bobin by phone while he was in Vancouver to screen the film for the Canadian special effects crew who worked on it.

CP: How was it for you working on a project that seems so different from what you’ve done in the past?

Bobin: It’s kind of why I did it…. The whole point of “The Muppets” was to do it with puppets and people puppeteering and then we kind of made it into very much the anti-CG movie whereby we never made a (computer generated) Kermit or Constantine or Piggy, we always used puppetry.

What appealed to me about this movie and this world was the fact that I could actually explore the CG and the idea of CG, both by environment design but also character design.

At the same time, it’s Alice. I’m English and so growing up in England, Alice is a part of your life. Your parents have it, your grandparents have it. You read it from the moment you can read and it’s a thing I’ve always known. So to be allowed to work in the brainspace of Lewis Carroll was an unbelievable honour.

CP: You did deviate from the original source material. How was that for you?

Bobin: It was hard … I love Lewis Carroll and the book is a beautiful piece of work, but … it’s quite dream-like, deliberately so, and also it’s quite obtuse. So it’s quite an unusual narrative.

I wanted to try and use the characters that Tim had created from his movie in 2010 and try to tell a new story which would have elements of the book in it…. It’s a bit about the passage of time and this sense of regret and so in this film, I was really keen to at least have that theme in it.

CP: Was it nice for you to also be able to take on a project where a female leads the story?

Bobin: For sure, and that’s massively important to me. Lewis Carroll basically wrote about a girl that he knew…. Very intelligent, strong, brave, clever — I feel that that’s what he imbued Alice with in a time when people didn’t really think of girls like that. Girls were supposed to be kind of seen and not heard and never allowed to express an opinion.

So he let her be herself, which is an amazing idea and I think in this film it’s very important…. I hope that theme comes through very strongly, the idea that Alice is very much seen, to a degree, as a feminist.

CP: Johnny Depp obviously is completely transformed in the role of the Mad Hatter — how was it watching that process?

Bobin: I loved the way he put the character in the first film as a kind of vulnerable, almost broken Hatter, and that’s what I wanted to do with this one, whereby you feel like he’s broken and he needs fixing.

And he’s very good at playing vulnerability, Johnny. He’s done such amazing work with his eyes, he conveys so much with them and it’s very special.

I can’t speak highly enough of his work, because he’s just the best and I would love to work with him any other time, because he’s so good.

CP: You’ve worked many times with Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays Time in this movie. Tell me about your history and why you enjoy working together?

Bobin: I’ve known Sacha for nearly 20 years, probably longer. He and I started together doing … ‘The 11 O’Clock Show’ and that was … 1998, a long, long time ago. So we kind of grew up together making comedy…. We created Ali G and Borat and Bruno together with other people.

With this character, Time, I felt that he would be perfect … I knew he’d be able to deliver the performance required to make it with the same level as everybody else.

— This interview has been edited and condensed.

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