‘Alice’ director was inspired by Grace Slick, not Lewis Carroll
LOS ANGELES – it wasn’t Lewis Carroll’s writing that inspireddirector Tim Burton to create his film version of the classic story”Alice in Wonderland.” it was how the story seeped into popculture.
“I’m from Burbank so we never heard of ‘Alice in Won-derland’except for the Disney cartoon, the Tom Petty video, the JeffersonAirplane (song “White Rabbit”),” Burton says. “I knew more about itfrom listening to music, other illustrations and artists that wouldincorporate that imagery into their work. That’s what made merealize the power of it.”
Despite having seen the characters from Carroll’s book becomedeeply ingrained in the culture, it wasn’t until he had successfulconverted his 1993 animated release “The Nightmare BeforeChristmas” from 2-D to 3-D that Burton finally decide to bringAlice to the big screen.
The trippiness of Carroll’s writing, says Burton, was a perfectfit with 3-D technology. Burton filmed the movie in 2-D and thenmanipulated the footage to make it appear in 3-D.
That was necessary because he used so many special effectsmethods – from green screens to computer generated backgrounds -there was really nothing on the set, other than actors, to film in3-D.
Just as Burton had noticed, the new “Alice” joins a long line offilm, TV and stage versions of the Carroll novels. That didn’tworry Burton.
“I had never seen a version I really liked, so I didn’t feellike there was a definitive version we were fighting against,”Burton says.