04 March 2010 (Movie Interview)

Words: John Balfe

Sitting outside room 180 in the Merrion Hotel and having two of the most recognisable actors working today in rooms to your left and right is quite a strange experience. Timothy Spall's overwhelming laugh bellowed through thick wooden doors from time to time easing my nerves, however not a peep was coming from Michael Sheen's room. What's going on in there? Suddenly the door opened and Marty Whelan, all spritely effervescence and moustache, bounded out informing anyone within earshot that Sheen is a "lovely fellah". Thanks for warming him up Marty, my turn now.

It would seem like the obvious choice to have Tim Burton - the man responsible for such cinematic oddities as Edward Scissorhands, Mars Attacks and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - direct a big-budget adaptation of Lewis Carroll's beloved Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, a piece of literature so surreal that you could be forgiven for thinking that the story originated from the warped mind of the Californian filmmaker, were it not written roughly one hundred years before he was born. Alice In Wonderland is Tim Burton's most ambitious and high-concept project yet. Burton, who famously eschews computer animation and CG in favour of practical effects, has finally relented and made a film which relies heavily on effects added in post-production. This is all well and good because Alice In Wonderland is a story which is next to impossible to tell by conventional means alone.

Most people are at least in some way aware of the story of Alice In Wonderland and the incredible patchwork of characters dreamt up by Lewis Carroll over a century ago. Tim Burton has used this as an opportunity to work once again with artistic allies Johnny Depp, as The Mad Hatter, and Helena Bonham-Carter as The Red Queen, but he also cast some of the most respected character actors working today in the many bit-part secondary roles. Two of these are Michael Sheen, who plays The White Rabbit and Timothy Spall as Bayard The Bloodhound.

Spall and Sheen are amongst the hardest-working actors of their generation but have they ever been involved in anything as large in scale and grandiosity as this? "I suppose there are films that I've been in like, I guess, the Twilight Saga: New Moon and the Underworld films that are more down that road, but this is probably the most ambitious of all those", said Sheen when remarking on the sheer visual feast that the film is, especially when you consider that this is, perhaps only behind Avatar, the most large scale 3D film ever made.

"I've not been involved in anything as eye-frying as that", agrees Spall. "I found it actually quite overwhelming to such a degree that I kept forgetting I was in it!" An mistake easy to make; Sheen and Spall provided only voice-work for animated characters who mingled with their live-action cohorts Depp, Bonham-Carter, Anne Hatheway and Mia Waskikowska's Alice.

This being a Tim Burton film, and if you've seen any of his other movies, you won't be surprised to learn that this isn't a straight down the line literal adaptation of Carroll's work. Alice isn't a young girl, she's now 19 and is making her second journey down the rabbit hole having completely forgotten about her initial expedition. Everything is familiar to her but slightly different, just as it is for the audience.

"There are all the familiar things with the characters, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, but you take what's familiar and look at it from a different angle", continues Sheen. "The White Rabbit is very similar; it's the same White Rabbit from the original story. He's still the first point of contact for Alice into the world of Wonderland. He still is the one who she follows down the rabbit hole and is kind of a guide, to begin with. But then once she's down there, she realised things are different. But I didn't want to do anything radically different with the character."

Michael Sheen has become well known for his dead-on facsimiles of the likes of Tony Blair (The Queen), David Frost (Frost/Nixon) and Brian Clough (The Damned United) but where does the White Rabbit rank among them? "Well I think the White Rabbit is probably the most iconic of them all. He's certainly the most famous character I've ever played. You can take a picture of the White Rabbit anywhere in the world and people would know who it is. I suppose because he's an archetype in a way. There's something that even goes beyond being iconic."

"There was a thing at the British Library that I went to the other night which was a celebration of Alice In Wonderland. (English novelist) Will Self was doing a sort of appreciation of it. He was saying that he's written seven books and in every book he has in some way quoted or referenced Alice In Wonderland. He said, and I think he's right, that it's had more influence on western literature than any other story or any other book. It goes into popular culture, for example, with the Matrix films. There is something incredibly basic and fundamental about the story if you pull it back to its bare bones. Someone is tempted out of their ordinary world, into a kind of special world where everything is upside down and unfamiliar and what is familiar becomes strange."

Timothy Spall, however, was less familiar with the source material. "Like most people, I assumed that I had read it but I hadn't. I used to assume that I'd read Dickens, but I hadn't. Then one day I read all of 'em! It's one of those amazing iconic things, like Dickens, where everybody sort of knows the characters without knowing how or why."

What about the mechanics of providing voice work for film? How does the process work? Spall explains, "we did this up in Air Studios in North London, George Martin's old place. I literally went in, first time for half an hour, second time for an hour. I roughly read the script and said to Tim that I was going to try a particular voice, so I did it. He said he liked it. I was probably there for about 8 hours in all. Something came to my mind and I did it (adopts Bayard voice) in a sort of deep, jowly way. Tim liked it. The thing about Tim Burton is that if it's not great, he'll tell you! He facilitates it and, as I said, you feel like you're part of the process. I think he just genuinely enjoys actors, which is another thing. Not all directors do."

Tim Burton is quite a divisive director. He has legions of fans who adore him but there are those who abhor his work in equal measure, claiming that he rarely strays far from his comfort zone, casting the same people and continually making films with a zany lead character. But what is he like to work with and what impression does he give off on set?

"I would say he's one of the most delightful directors that I've ever worked with", says Spall. He's incredibly engaged with what he's doing. But he allows you to come up with it. You get the sense that he's expecting you to do something extraordinary, so you end up trying to do something extraordinary. Before long you're collaborating with him, you're not being told what to do."

Michael Sheen agrees. "He's an incredibly visual man. Very imaginative and creative, but at the same time he's very good with people. He's very good at communicating what he wants. Everyone who worked with him on the set would all say the same thing, which is that he'd always want to see what you bring to it, to begin with, so the first few takes would always be about what you wanted to do with it. Then he would be very specific about what he was looking for. He has to hold the whole world in his head. No more so than on this film. I asked him at one point how the film was looking, about half way through, and he said that he had absolutely no idea. He said it was the first film he'd done where there wasn't one frame he could look at now that would be the same in the final film. There was no set. It was huge green screen."

"Johnny Depp and Tim are great together", continues Spall. "They're very funny together. They like having a good time, I like having a good time - that's one of the great things about this job. You can have a good time. I think it was the late, great Colin Blakley who said, 'you take the work seriously - not yourself', a sentence which could easily be applied to this, and any other, Tim Burton film.

 

Alice In Wonderland is released nationwide on Friday 5th March.

 

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