Friday, March 30, 2012

Article: Why Snow White and the Huntsman wasn’t instead titled Bad-Ass Evil Queen

From the ever-sassy (and very fun to read) reporters at io9, here are some excerpts from an interview with the director of Snow White and the Huntsman, talking about Snow vs the Queen and about fairy tales and fairy tale films:

If you've seen the spooky dark magic trailers for Snow White and the Huntsman, then you too might think that Snow White will be eclipsed by the awesome Evil Queen's (Charlize Theron) kick-ass soul-sucking and milk-bathing.
We asked this dirty fairy tale's director, Rupert Sanders, why this movie wasn't called Evil Queen: Unhinged, and just how much screen time Snow White has.  
This movie makes us think about Eighties fantasy flicks like Willow and Beastmaster, Labyrinth, Dark Crystal — did you revisit a lot of these films?I didn't actually. I actually tried to, but I don't know, they belong to a different era. I revisited Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Victorian fairy painters who had been locked up in mental institutions. I revisited the Grimm's fairy tales and a lot of the other Hans Christian Andersen tales. And just tried to immerse myself in the real fairy tales. "Black fantasy" is very different from "black fairy tales." Fantasy films are here and fairy tales are here. There's definitely a very thin dividing line. But a fairy tale film is very different, to me, from a fantasy film. 
From the look of the trailer, it feels like this movie should be called Evil Queen not Snow White. How much is Kristen Stewart in this film?She's in it, ironically, more than the Evil Queen. I think when you market a film you have to kind of create something that people grab on to, a very simple story line. Our film has so many characters we chose one thing that people would understand and that's the villain. And I think you will see, as the marketing gets closer, you'll see more of Kristen woven into that.

You can read the whole article and interview with director Rupert Sanders HERE.

Best line in there? "...just tried to immerse myself in the real fairy tales..." With those ten words I am more encouraged to see the film than by any (awesome) behind-the-scenes featurettes on spectacular costumes, though, that certainly helped boost my enthusiasm, I admit. :) Now I really hope there's a behind-the-scenes book of this film!

1 comment:

  1. I'm very happy to see that really good artists are interested at telling fairy tales in such a careful way. This movie seems to be very precise by constructing the dark atmosfere this histories originaly create to make this narratives so intense. Congratulations to Rupert Sanders and his art direction crew; Andrew Ackland-Snow, Alastair Bullock, John Frankish, Oliver Goodier, Stuart Rose.

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