Alice in Burtonland

Opening day for Alice is still seven months away,but Burton might as well have an impatient white rabbit following him around with a ticking pocket watch tucked in his waistcoat. The movie is being made using a combination of live-action,animation and other techniques.

Penned by screenwriter Linda Woolverton,Burton’s Alice sees the curious blonde (19-year-old Australian actress Mia Wasikowska) tumble down the rabbit hole into a world populated by an array of human and animal oddities. One of them,the outrageous-looking,orange-haired Mad Hatter,played by Johnny Depp,accompanies her on much of her journey across the strange land.

In assembling a story that borrows from all of Carroll’s Alice material,he wanted the movie to be more than simply a document of a girl wandering through a surreal landscape; all of the characters needed to have an internal life and to be more richly drawn. Alice,for example,evolves from an astonished naif to empowered action heroine,sporting her very own suit of armour,over the course of the film.

“Every other version I’ve ever seen,I’ve never really connected to because it’s always just a series of weird events,” Burton said. “She’s passively wandering through,meeting weird characters. So instead of the Hatter just being weird,(we wanted to) get some kind of character underneath him. The goal,is to give the Alice material a little more weight to it.”

Before filming began,he tried to ensure that the actors would be comfortable reacting to characters and locations that are being rendered only now during post-production in London,where the director resides with his partner and Alice actress Helena Bonham Carter,who plays the villainous Red Queen.

“This is the first time I’ve dealt with a lot of green screen,and it drives you nuts,” Burton said. “On a live-action (film),you’ve got actors,you’ve got sets and that’s what I like. This is almost the opposite of that. After a while you start to get kind of jittery and crazy.”

For now,he’s shepherding Alice through her many adventures in Wonderland. And time is short.

“Any film you do,you just kind of finish and you wish you could have spent a little bit more time on this or that,” he said. “I don’t yet know how much at the end of this I will have felt that I’ve compromised or not. This one could be pretty rough that way.”