Mia Wasikowska Talks ‘ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS’

While Tim Burton brought to life back in 2010, the big-screen adaption of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland, along with frequent collaborators Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, and bringing in a billion dollars at the worldwide box office, no doubt the studios decided to do a sequel. This time, James Bobin directs Alice Through the Looking Glass where Mia Wasikowska reprises her role as Alice and is joined by a new face, Sacha Baron Cohen playing the villain.

 

Comingsoon managed to talk about the sequel and got a few things about it.

Suzanne Todd, Producer said on doing a sequel:

“Once we came across the idea, which was a small notion in the book, of time and the important of time, the significance of time, that seemed like something that we could all relate to. It feels like everybody struggles with it, or in some cases, you don’t struggle with it and you just waste your time all day, surfing Facebook or doing Buzzfeed quizzes… We wanted to take that on in a serious way.”

Bobin said:

“This film is a prequel and a sequel… It’s very hard. Time travel movies are very hard… Luckily we have the license of it being Wonderland, which is kind of crazy, but helpful, because obviously, logic in films is always a nightmare anyway. Logic in a time travel film is 100 times that… [But] I wanted to have an idea that she couldn’t change the past. The past is the past. It’s been and done, and that’s not normal. Normally in films, if you change the past, it affects the future, the fading photographs and stuff. That’s a normal trope with this. I liked the idea that she couldn’t change anything. She can’t help his wife from dying. She can’t do that. She couldn’t change the past, but she could observe it and then learn things that could help her solve the problem in the future. That, I thought, was a much more clever idea and that’s what I wanted to pursue with this. 

The rule in the second movie is you can’t go where you’ve been before. Which is why they need Alice’s help, because, as the White Queen will tell you, we’ve already been there, so we can’t go there again… We call it Alice brain, when you talk too much about who she was where when and at which time and where you could go and where you couldn’t go.”

Through the Looking Glass begins some time after the events of the first film, with Wasikowska’s Alice returning from a trip to sea. Wasikowska said:

“In the first one, she’s very much finding her feet and is a little awkward and uncomfortable. In the second one, she’s got a much stronger sense of who she is. She has just spent a year abroad traveling and being the captain of a ship, so she’s got a very strong sense of who she is.”

After returning to England, Alice finds herself suddenly returning to Wonderland where she learns that something went wrong with the Hatter. In an effort to save him, Alice confronts the living embodiment of time– Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen.

Bobin explains:

“Time itself has this design whereabout he is clockwork. He’s not a human, though he has human traits. He is clockwork machine.”

Baron Cohen found his inspiration for Time for a surprising source. The character’s accent is largely based on legendary German film director Werner Herzog.

“There was a guy that had written this very famous piece that went viral, called “Werner Herzog’s [Note to His Cleaning Lady]. You should read it if you haven’t read it. It’s really funny. Sacha had read it and that had sparked in his mind as a Werner thing that plays throughout the film.”

Wasikowska said of Alice’s relationship with Time:

“Their dynamic is quite funny, because she’s the only one who makes him explain himself a little bit, because he’s sort of just talks in like a circle and everyone else is just really confused. So, they have a really cute, really funny banter between them.”

But that doesn’t mean all the banter will be between Alice. Baron Cohen also got some moments with Depp’s Mad Hatter too.

“I know both of them very well and they’re very dear friends, but they both like to talk a lot… It was a hot day and obviously Pinewood doesn’t have air conditioning, because why would it? England is never that hot, so don’t bother. Basically, we are doing an outdoor scene, indoors, so we have a thousand lights upstairs shining down. I think it was 105 degrees. It was very, very hot and they’re both wearing these enormous costumes, but they’re having such fun. They’re talking and talking and talking and, in one take, they did an eight-and-a-half minute take, which broke the camera. The camera was hovering on a crane and suddenly it just powered down, because it was massively overheating. Because they keep going and going and going.”

Alice Through the Looking Glass hits theaters on May 27.