Interview with Alice Through The Looking Glass Director James Bobin #ThroughTheLookingGlassEvent

James Bobin is an English film director, writer, and producer. He worked as a director and writer on Da Ali G Show and helped create the characters of Ali G, Borat, and Brüno. He has also directed the feature films The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted, as well as Alice Through the Looking Glass.

What Alice Means to Him Personally

I was working for Disney already and I made some Muppets movies for them back in the day. I remember being on set she (Kristin Burr) mentioned the word Alice to me and of course I jumped at that because I grew up in England and Alice is like part of your life. She’s just someone who you know really well. She’s like Christopher Robin. She’s just part of your makeup. I read it as a kid. My grandparents read it to me. Everyone has it. And so for me, I did the same with my children. I have in my kid’s playroom, we have a poster from the British library. We love Alice in our family.

Creating Alice

So when I found out we were doing it I was really excited.  You think you have a clear idea of who she’s gonna be in the film and who I felt Alice was to me growing up but also because I keep saying when I read Lewis Carroll as a kid he used to make me laugh. He has a very witty way of writing and he’s very clever with language. So it felt like a very natural thing to do 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. So it’s a bit different. I mean, it needed to be different. I think sequels need to be different. It’s nice to pay tribute and make sure you respect the origins of the story and the characters. But people want to see generally something which is a progression or something new or if it has a different sight, feel or tone.

You’ll notice that in the design it’s a bit different too. The palettes are a little bit brighter. In the movie, the story itself is very much about the human relations and the family. The world is more Victorian in some ways and that’s partly because when I was a kid growing up the books are illustrated so beautifully, that to me was where the world where Alice lived.

Creating the Character Time

Sacha Baron Cohen was fabulous as Time. James explains how he Time came to be and how perfect Sacha was for the part.

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. Hatter says, you know, when he very first meets Alice at the tea party, he’s kinda stuck and he says to her I’ve been stuck here since last month where Time and I quarreled. 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,  so 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.

What he (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 having free Time. It’s a very English way of  doing time travel.  I felt that would be a very nice way of starting the character, 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 and Sacha’s very good at playing the sort of over confident idiot. And that was a very good character for him.

Sweeney Todd was very much inspiration for us. Like when I watched that movie I loved his character in that and obviously he plays with Johnny. So that feels like that world fit into this one neatly. If you’re gonna work with Helena and Johnny as he has many times he kinda fits into that– into the universe already. So that was a good start because to raise your performance to match the levels of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter is not easy to do.

I knew he had it in him. It was just a question of kind of working out what that guy was gonna be like then we started talking about the character like we did with Borat and Bruno. Sacha could do pretty much anything and we thought that Time as a concept is a kind of Swiss idea, like clockmakers etc. and in Switzerland there are two languages, there’s French and German. And we thought German was quite precise in its language.

Time is a very important character in this movie and he has great moments of kind of wisdom in the movie when he says to her, you cannot change the past, but maybe you can learn from it. That’s a very profound thing for him to say and it’s a very nice thing for everyone to learn generally because it’s true. You can’t change the past.

Most Challenging Aspect In Directing 

Directing a movie made from a beloved book is challenging for sure, here James explains the most challenging parts for him personally.

 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. But 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, so I knew that for a film would make an interesting avante guarde movie. I’m not sure I could do that in this situation so 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 but at the same time I wanted to pay tribute to the book. The book’s incredibly important and Lewis Carroll is very important to me. 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.

On Directing Live Action 

James is well known for The Muppets, so we wondered how different it was to do live-action and which did he like better.

I did this film because it’s so different. The Muppets I dearly loved and was (it) really fun and it’s very in camera, you kind of shoot where you shoot. With this (Alice) what I found was you had much more flexibility because you can basically keep pursuing ideas way longer than you would be able to in live action because it’s animated. So you could have an idea almost like a year later and put that into the animated creature’s mouth, which is fun. So it’s good in that way.

You can be very creative for a long time, but it means you’re basically shooting for like two years, which obviously is physically very tiring. So, it was really interesting. But the other thing I’ll say about it is that what’s funny about ideas is it’s really the idea doesn’t ever change. It’s just the execution of those ideas.  The only thing that changes is really how you come to approach the execution of the idea. I really loved it. It was really fun.

I really wanted to make sure everyone was very happy and you sure must be sad to leave at the end. It’s like that’s the feeling I wanted to convey. And I hope I succeeded in that.

Paying Tribute to Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll is a huge inspiration for many, and for the English a part of childhood. James explained how he wanted to pay tribute to Carroll, and the ways in which he did so.

When Alice goes into the backwards room for the first time with the chess match in progress, the chess match is in the original positions, so the chess game in progress in the book is the same chess game in progress in the backwards room. So there’s those kind of things that are very important to me. I liked the fact the mantle piece clock in the room is the same mantle piece clock that John Tenniel drew in 1871. So those little touches mean a lot.

Also, when the Red Queen bumps her head as a child the first thing she sees upon coming round is white roses, so we (I) always wondered, in my head, what’s up with the white roses thing? Why does she keep changing it to red? And then maybe because in her head there’s a kind of moment where this is a thing that she sees, of the terrible moment in her life and that’s why there could be no white roses. So, you know, I think that’s kind of stuff I really like.

 Stay Social with Alice 

Website / Facebook / Instagram /Twitter (Walt DisneyStudios)

Disclosure:  I am being provided with an all-expense trip to LA by Walt Disney Studios to attend the Red Carpet Premiere of Alice Through the Looking Glass. All opinions are 100% my own. This is accordance with Federal Trade Commissions 16 CFR, Part 255 Guides Concerning the Use of. Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.