WONDERLAND behind the scenes: Remaking Alice

26 March 2010 | By HUSVAR

Casting Brooke Rewa as Alice was definitely one of the easy decisions I got to make for this series. I’ve worked with Brooke on other shoots before and since, and on top of being really easy on the eyes, she’s just a great model to work with.

It had always been my intention to somehow blend the youthful storybook look of the original Alice into that of my depressive ex-debutante. My first step was to put her in a shinier (and shorter) version of the original dress—a sexy little something that Alice herself might have worn to high school prom.

For my next trick, we had to make Alice look not only truly melancholy, but just a little crazy. I know it might seem like an easy trick, given the broken-down hellhole of an environment we built for her. We’d even surrounded her with incriminating paraphernalia that looked like it came straight off a mad scientist set in a 1950’s B-movie.

After shooting tests for a while, the problem became very clear. She really looked like Alice, all grown up and tragically beautiful. But she didn’t look tragic. She looked as if she could walk out the front door of the Hotel Wonderland and fool anyone she passed into believing that she was totally right in the head. The melancholy was definitely there, but now we needed to find the crazy.

Then I remembered a note in the prop list from my early sketch of the set (which you can see in the previous behind-the-scenes feature, Building Hotel Wonderland). Taking my own forgotten advice, we added my version’s equivalent of the little cake that said “EAT ME”—a giant blue bow that made her appear as if she was shrinking back to her childhood. Suddenly, that beautifully vacant and melancholy stare had the lunacy I’d been looking for! The woman wearing this bow is trying to quell a troubled mind overflowing with life’s miscalculations and a lot of bad memories.

In an interesting twist, no one ever recognizes Alice in the test shots before the bow was added, but everyone seems to easily identify her once its there. Perhaps the 1951 Disney Alice, who had a very small bow, dominates our cultural memory, but not a single one of the original etchings from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland show her wearing a bow at all. All I can say is, you know you have something when you don’t have to explain it.

So as we watch this second Alice struggle to get back through the looking glass, is she more or less real than the original? One Alice seems to be in complete denial, oblivious to her reality, while the other seems desperate to embrace her true self. But which Alice is which?

Visit WONDERLAND for more behind-the-scenes features and to view the photo series!

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