The Cast of “Wicked” the Movie Talks Inspiration and Approach – Part 1
Wickeddebuted to rave reviews at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, with John Cooper calling it an “exhilarating hybrid that continuously surprises and amuses” in the festival’s program. The thriller is a twisted tale of murder and incest with noir sensibilities and biting dark wit. The driving force behind the film is its stellar cast, who deliver complex, compelling, and sometimes shocking performances.
Directed by Michael Steinberg and produced by Frank Beddor, Wicked served as the breakthrough for Julia Stiles. The then-16-year-old is electric as Ellie Christianson, a troubled teen who despises her mother and has an unhealthy obsession with her father. Stiles won Best Actress at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, and her performance as Ellie led to her being cast in the teen classic 10 Things I Hate About You.
William R. Moses delivers a nuanced performance as Ellie’s father-turned-lover, Ben, while Chelsea Field is an excellent counterpoint as his doomed wife, Karen. Vanessa Zima exhibits uncommon depth for a child actor as Inger. Newcomer Louise Myrback is captivating as the Christianson’s au pair, Lena. Grammy-winner Linda Hart brings humor and soul as nosy neighbor Mrs. Potter, while screen veteran Michael Parks seems to step out of the ‘40s as the Bogart-esque Detective Boland. Melrose Place baddie Patrick Muldoon is a serial scene-stealer as quirky next-door neighbor Lawson Smith.
We recently digitized a treasure trove of onset interviews in which the cast goes deep on everything from their characters’ psyches to how they think audiences will respond to the incendiary subject matter.
This is Part 1 of a three-part series that will be a fascinating look at an actor’s process, how they handled the challenging material and the fulfilling experience of working on Wicked.
*Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
On Her Character Ellie’s very complex and very interesting. She changes throughout the movie, and it’s hard to sum her up in a few sentences. She loves her father very much and focuses on him and getting his undying love. She’s very powerful and in control. She knows how to get what she wants and uses that. She goes through her life with blinders on and has her own little world in Casa Del Norte.
What Attracted Her to Wicked So many things in the script attracted me to the project. Normally, when I read scripts, I stop halfway through and can’t finish them. This one, I was racing through pages. Ellie is such a great character, and artistically, it is so challenging to play her. Then, I saw Michael Steinberg’s work and thought it would be great to work with him. As far as the controversial subject matter, I was a little hesitant, but I’d written a letter to Frank and Michael about my thoughts on the script, and I mentioned I was a little uneasy about how it might be perceived. But they had such good ideas for the whole thing I really wanted the job.
The Controversial Nature of the Script One thing that was so refreshing to me when I read the script was I really liked the way they dealt with the controversial subject matter. Absolutely nothing was shown. It was all implied. I read so many really sleazy, gross scripts involving people as young as me, but in Wicked, it’s all implied, so it’s almost even freakier. I really like that.
Ellie’s Arc At the beginning of the movie, Ellie is very spunky and playful. She doesn’t have any friends. She goes to school and gets picked on. She’s also very rebellious in the way she dresses, the way she acts, and the way she fights with her mother. It’s a little weirder than usual. But in the middle of the movie, she’s emulating her mother.
As a Suspect in Karen’s Murder Ellie’s motive to kill Karen would be to get Karen out of the picture so Ellie can get her father’s love. Also, Ellie doesn’t get along with her mother. Karen threatens to take the kids away because she and Ben are gonna get a divorce, and that scares Ellie so much because she wants to be with her father.
Ellie’s Relationship with Inger At the beginning of the movie, there’s sibling rivalry, but Ellie defends Inger. Ellie doesn’t focus on Inger that much, and sometimes they fight, but it’s not unusual. Then it starts to turn.
Handling the Tonal Changes With certain scenes, the point is going along with the murder mystery aspect but with others, it’s going along with the comedy aspect. You can tell when it’s supposed to be funny and when it’s not. When I read the script, there were parts I laughed at, and I thought, “Am I supposed to laugh at that?” After talking to Frank and Michael, I saw that they knew they wanted it to be funny at times. That made it appeal to me even more. It’s the kind of comedy where you laugh at something and go, “Maybe I’m kind of sick for laughing at that?”
On His Character Ben Christianson is a family man who lives in the suburbs. He’s a very successful man financially and very concerned with pursuing the American dream. He presents the image of a very successful, very loving father. He’s a bit like a walking Ford commercial. It looks perfect from the outside, but his interior spaces are darker and more conflicted. Ben is full of guilt, anxiety, and anger and is involved in a relationship that’s not working. He is not a very forward-thinking person. He can only see what’s right in front of him. He becomes this walking time bomb of anxiety, guilt, and depression. Ben’s a prime candidate for a Prozac sandwich.
What Attracted Him to Wicked The daringness of it. There are elements in this script that are so daring and so frightening that it’s like being on the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and looking down. People who fear heights become so frightened they have to jump. This was a role that, as an actor, because it’s so unsettling and disturbing, compels you to jump into it.
The Controversial Nature of the Script You always have those trepidations. I am a father with a small child. But on the other hand, I’m also an actor, and you look for material that can be exciting, unique, innovative, and even controversial. Not just controversial for the sake of controversy but because of the challenge of making the unimaginable become imaginable and understandable to an audience. How do you create that emotional reality and then put it up on screen? I’ve been acting since I was 19 years old and trying to solve this paradox within this part in this movie is the most satisfying creative experience I’ve ever had.
How He Would Describe Wicked How do you describe the indescribable? How do you explain the unexplainable or imaginable? Wicked is a murder mystery but it carries into some very different realms. It exists in an imaginary suburb called Casa Del Norte, the world of which is astounding. The movie starts with a very firm reality and starts spinning into this amazing, unique tale.
Ben’s Troubled Marriage Ben is involved in a miserable marriage. Ben and Karen have probably been married for quite a while and have had trouble for many years. At the start of the movie, we’re witnessing a marriage collapsing. The family is very close to being blown apart. Ben is having an affair with his nanny, and Karen is having an affair with the neighbor, and they both suspect each other. We’re witnessing a very troubled marriage.
Ben’s Relationship with His Daughters Ben loves his daughters and is particularly close to his oldest daughter, Ellie. He thinks he’s the most wonderful father. Dr. Spock or family psychologists probably wouldn’t view him that way, but Ben sees it as, “Look, you can tell my daughters love me. I’m very special to them.”
Handling the Emotional Roller Coaster of the Film Living in the confines of the Casa Del Norte soundstage for the last ten days has been amazing. It’s like somebody put Alka-Seltzer in my bloodstream because it’s been an amazing ride, especially with the emotionality required for the character. I’m becoming a very strange human being playing this part.
I feel like a trapeze artist. You let go of the bar, and you’re soaring through the air, and you either hope the catcher catches you or you catch the bar on the return. You’re either gonna fall into an abyss, or you’ll catch the bar and swing to the other side and have this tremendous feeling of exhilaration.
Working with Director Michael Steinberg I’ve been acting since I was 19 years old, and Michael Steinberg is the best director I’ve ever worked with, bar none. The whole process of working with Michael has been incredible. He’s like this mad scientist, and we’re working on this project that plays with you on every level. Michael is an amazing talent and an amazing human being. I think The Waterdance is an incredible film. Wicked is quite a departure. This movie, for all of us, represents a departure. It’s a very unique script. Any actor who gets to work with Mike Steinberg is truly blessed. He’s wonderful, and he and our producer, Frank, are quite the dynamic duo.
On Her Character In an early meeting, we discussed that Mrs. Potter is probably a former Miss Casa Del Norte. It’s not really discussed if she has kids from a former marriage, but she’s definitely a single woman. You can tell by how she carries herself and how she dresses that she is definitely looking for Mr. Right to come back around, or maybe for the first time. She meets this interesting detective, played by Michael Parks, in this movie of ours, and they hit it off in an odd way.
Mrs. Potter is the comic relief. I get to sing in this movie and at a wedding—I won’t tell you whose wedding—but I sing at a wedding. They picked the song “I Honestly Love You,” which I used to do years ago in my act, so it was fun to do it again.
Karen’s Murder When Detective Boland first meets Mrs. Potter, she is questioned as if she could be a suspect, but that ends pretty quickly. However, Mrs. Potter has some good instincts, which she combines with being a nosy body. She’s trying to piece things together, but she feels it’s one person throughout the movie, even though other little clues fall into place. She never lets go of her initial thought on who it is.
What Attracted Her to Wicked I was attracted to the director before I read the script. Michael Steinberg wrote me a couple of letters and asked if I would read the script and consider playing Mrs. Potter. With that letter came a wonderful bio on him and some of the work that he’d done, which I was familiar with. I thought that was very flattering. I liked his style and I liked the way the guy wrote a letter. He wrote two letters. It was, “Read the letter. Read the script. Then read letter two after you read the script.” Then he told me how he was gonna shoot it and all of that, but when I read the script, I couldn’t put it down. I read it on the plane from New York to L.A. and I just kept flipping those pages. When I found out who had done it, I was shocked
The Weirdness in Wicked There are a lot of weird people in this film. Everybody is scarred. Everybody is flawed. It’s interesting because Mrs. Potter is really one of the good guys in the script along with Detective Boland. But he’s had a checkered past, you can tell by looking in his eyes. Mrs. Potter is more of one who wants a checkered past. But I think she’s one of the few redeeming characters. Everybody in this movie should be in therapy. They are not going to Sunday school on Saturday and Sunday morning, that’s for sure.
Working with the Cast I worked with Julia only on two scenes, but she was really connected to the material and absolutely terrific. She’s a fine actress, but I can only imagine where her career will take her.
Michael Parks, talk about “still waters run deep.” Michael and I met years ago. My very first job in the whole world was on the Johnny Cash show in Nashville, where Michael came on and sang. So, on the first day of shooting, I went up to him and said, “I’m sure you don’t remember me. I was a teenager in Nashville, Tennessee, and we did the Johnny Cash show together.” He looked at me and looked at me again, and he said, “Now I’m gonna have to fall in love with you, too.” We had a great time. We sang on the set almost every day. He knows every song ever written, from Cole Porter to Hoagy Carmichael to Kern to Rodgers and Hart. He knows Willie Nelson, too. The storehouse of musical information in his head is really overwhelming.
Billy (William R. Moses) has the best name show business. Billy Moses, it sounds like he’s gonna come out of a Ben-Hur movie or something. He was great. He has a unique wiriness that is so perfect for the part. He has a unique combination of talent and chemistry and a vibe about him that is very mysterious. It’s absolutely dead-on perfect for this part.
How Audiences Will Respond to Wicked Everybody loves a good murder mystery, and so many people could have done it in this particular script. So many people had the window of opportunity and the reason to do it. Everybody loves a good ole whodunit.
On His Character What makes Boland tick? A paycheck. Curiosity. People in this field of criminology are curious folks. They’re invasive, though he’s a little less invasive than most. From looking at the film, they tell me that it looks like something out of a film noir, out of the 1940s or something, but there are few of those old dinosaurs left. They had a different approach than a lot of the younger ones now.
The Unimaginative Liddells: Princess Alyss’ Never-Before-Seen Letters – Part 2
Back in 2007, we collaborated with noted Alyssian historian Agnes MacKenzie to publish Princess Alyss of Wonderland, a stunning collection of letters, journal writings, and art from Her Royal Imaginer Princess Alyss Heart. These breathtaking documents chronicled the incredible childhood of Wonderland’s exiled heir apparent and future hero of The Looking Glass Wars.
In April, we released the first round of never-before-seen letters, journal entries, and art from Princess Alyss Heart’s exile on Earth. Part One spanned Alyss’ flight from Wonderland and how she survived her first days on the rough streets of London.
When we last left Princess Alyss she had just been arrested by the London bobbies and sent to the notorious Charing Cross Orphanage. In Part Two, Alyss recounts the horrors of this ignominious institute, her disappointment at being adopted by the unimaginative Liddells, and why she tried to break into Buckingham Palace.
(*As always, I am indebted to the tireless and exhaustive research of the eminent Wonderland historian Agnes MacKenzie. Her dedication has helped keep the true story of Queen Alyss alive!)
Agnes MacKenzie Worlds collide in this document dated May 24, 1859, when a man of science, Dr. Williford, the physician at London’s Charing Cross Foundling Hospital unknowingly examined a princess from another realm. Written in his precise script, the intake form lists Alyss’ height, weight, and hair color, and contains notes on her attitude and dress. Special attention was paid to the unusual fabric of her dress, “finer than any silk and yet so strong as to repel all stains and misc. damage with the exception of one vicious gash”. Alyss is described as having luminous coloring, a willful, imperious attitude, and an intense aversion to felines. When asked where her family is she insisted they are in a place called “Wonderland”. The doctor’s keen eye noted the unusual qualities of the child, but his mind could not open to the concept of ‘Wonderland’. Dr. Williford comments that if her oddness can be contained the wardens have high hopes for placing her in a family of good standing because “the child obviously has quite exceptional bloodlines”. Indeed.
October 2, 1861 When I was delivered to the orphanage I erupted into a terrible screaming temper tantrum. How dare they???? This place was certainly not meant for children, it must be a prison for something exceptionally evil and nasty. But I was wrong, children were everywhere and the only things evil and nasty living here were the ward mistresses with their stiff collars and drab skirts weighed down with bundles of heavy keys to lock the doors that kept us all from running away. I loathed it there so much that I looked forward to escaping into my dreams each night but even this became unbearable because my dreams soon had a very unwelcome visitor.
The Cat! Each night it would sneak into my sleep and invade my dreams with its growls and hisses and hot, stinky cat breath! It had the stinkiest breath I have ever smelled in a dream!
October 8, 1861 Dreams are only nightmares if you let them do what they wish. One night I decided that rather than being frightened of what was chasing me, I would imagine that I was running towards something beautiful. There were endless doors lining the halls and I imagined I would find my mother if I opened the very last door. But when the door opened, instead of seeing her I saw all her favorite flowers. And I could smell her favorite perfume. Eau de’Pink. It smells very PINK and I love it.
November 10, 1861 I was adopted by a very dull and unimaginative family named Liddell and brought to live in their home in Christ Church, Oxford. Living in a home was very different from living in a palace and I found it difficult to adjust as I believe ANY Princess would. Everything was so small and smelled rather of burned vegetables while my bedchamber was just ridiculous. The bed didn’t even float! How could I even begin to get a perfect night’s sleep???? The Liddells did not believe in Wonderland or that a real princess could come to their world and even though I repeatedly corrected them, they insisted on changing my name to Alice. HOW RUDE!!!!!
Agnes MacKenzie Uncertain of their adopted daughter’s bloodlines and wishing to make a suitable marriage (a prince perhaps???) Henry and Lorina Liddell chose to keep her origin top secret by destroying all records of the adoption, even going so far as to forge an ‘Alice Liddell’ birth certificate which modern genealogical forensics easily exposed to be false! The child was simply not born in this world.
November 11, 1861 In Wonderland I had always remembered my dreams. Why was I unable to remember my dreams now? Aha! I wasn’t sleeping in a dreamgown! When I inquired of Mrs. Liddell when I would be fitted for my dreamgown, she looked alarmed. I explained that in Wonderland there were special gowns in which you slept to capture your dreams. The dreams would be reflected on the gown so you wouldn’t forget anything important. I had closets full of dreamgowns in Wonderland but requested only ONE for here. I thought I was being quite modest but Mrs. Liddell opened her mouth very wide and shouted at me “You must STOP your incessant impossible imagining. You dream too much as it is ALICE!” Dream too much??? How sad to think that anyone could ever dream TOO MUCH. I spent the rest of the day locked in my dark little dungeon of a bedroom imagining and drawing dreamgowns….
From left to right: Proper sister Lorina – A grown-up lady in the body of a little girl; Cruel Governess Pricks – She actually prefers sour to sweet!; Mr. and Mrs. Liddell – Equally gloomy on all occasions; Me – If it weren’t for my hollizalea headdress and mini-rainbow I should fear becoming just like them!; Baby Edith – There may still be hope for her.
February 22, 1862 Yesterday Mr. and Mrs. Liddell brought Lorina and I to London to visit the exhibition at the Crystal Palace. The palace reminded me very much of Heart Palace and I felt all sorts of sad and glad memories about Wonderland. It also made me remember something VITAL! When I first arrived in London I shot out of that puddle into the center of a parade and saw a golden carriage. There was a woman in the carriage waving to the crowd. It was a Queen! Had mother traveled here to meet me? I had run after the carriage and chased it all the way to a palace but a row of soldiers blocked my entrance. I told them I was Princess Alyss Heart and ordered them to allow me to pass. At this, they began to laugh. Vowing to return to this palace called Buck-ing-ham I ran back in search of the puddle that had brought me here. I had forgotten all of this until the Liddells brought me on this visit to London. And suddenly I knew what had happened! Mother had followed me to London but had been kidnapped and imprisoned by Redd at the palace known as Buck-ing-ham!!!!! It all made perfect sense and it was up to me to rescue my mother.
February 23, 1862 Enough was enough! How could I pretend to live the childish life of Alice Liddell in her nursery eating porridge when I was certain that Redd had imprisoned my mother in the palace called Buck-ing-ham? This had to be the reason for everything horrible that had happened. Redd had wished to be queen but Wonderland already had a queen, my mother. Redd must have come to London through the Pool of Tears and become the queen known as Victoria! Being the Queen of London was not anywhere as grand as being the Queen of Wonderland and Redd was jealous of my mother so she kidnapped her and locked her in Buck-ing-ham Palace!!! I was positive that my mother was there now waiting for me to rescue her.
February 27, 1862 My preparations complete, I set forth on my mission to rescue my mother from Queen ‘Victoria’ (ha!). I noticed that whenever I thought of seeing my mother my imagination would suddenly become very strong. I would picture my mother and I in the garden at Heart Palace and I would suddenly be filled with all sorts of imaginings on how to get to London and how I would find a pair of jollyjelly wings and sail over the wall past those snickering guards. I had my train tickets, maps, and a packet of peppermints should I become weak from hunger and need energy. I was so excited I could have flown to London. I did consider collecting and pasting bird feathers to my arms and setting off from the roof of the Liddell’s house but I could not find enough feathers.
March 10, 1862 Disaster! Unable to locate a pair of jollyjelly wings I decided to dig my way in under the palace fence. The passage under the fence was a tight fit and horror of horrors I became stuck! I felt a tug on my feet and was soon face to face with the redcoated guards laughing harder than ever. I was imprisoned and given only a very small amount of tea and cake until Mr. Liddell could come and fetch me back to Oxford. Oh, the dreadfulness of my mood. And the worst was yet to come. Governess Pricks was waiting at the front door when we pulled up in the carriage. Her words felt like a storm of pinches as she scolded me for being a selfish, ridiculous child. But as she continued on and on with ever more insults I could only hear my own small voice repeating over and over “How shall I ever return home now?”
Agnes MacKenzie Not long after this ill-fated excursion to London, Alyss was to meet someone who would lift her spirits and give her hope (if only to later smash it to pieces!)
*Stay tuned for Part Three, in which Alyss meets the Oxford mathematician who would change her life forever – Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll).
All Things Alice: Interview with Mark Saltzman
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have screenwriter and playwright Mark Saltzman join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Thanks for being on the show, Mark Saltzman. I was delighted to come across your musical, somebody else who’s been inspired by Alice in Wonderland. It never ceases to amaze me how Alice has become a muse for so many creators. I’m really curious. Why do you think Alice has lasted so long and continues to be reinvented?
Mark Saltzman I have given that a lot of thought. There’s a uniqueness about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass that nothing’s really eclipsed. There’s a looseness and an irrationality to the original books. I think that could only be from Reverend Dodgson, Caroll’s intimate knowledge of logic, which allowed him to avoid logic. He knew where it would fall. Most children’s stories have a moral and a very clear narrative. A beginning, middle, and end, with a heroine or hero who learns a lesson or something like that. Alice defied all of that. I think it’s because of that uniqueness that nothing else has ever come along in the past 150 years that qualifies in the same way or entices kids when they first read it.
Alice has inspired but really, where is the adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that truly, truly succeeds? The adaptation of The Wizard of Oz absolutely supersedes the original but with Alice, from stage productions to Disney to Tim Burton, they have just avoided the whole story completely. Nobody’s been able to really wrap their arms around this elusive, mysterious piece of work by Lewis Carroll.
FB That’s a really interesting take because you could never teach writing using that book because there is no beginning, middle, or end. You could never write a TV show, a movie, or a play for that matter, because it’s so episodic and there is a randomness to it. But thematically, it’s really interesting and really strong, because it’s asking “Who am I?”
To your point, there is no adaptation that stands out. There are just really good references like The Matrix. The Matrix did an amazing job. Tim Burton threw it out. You focused on parts of real-life Alice, Lewis Carroll’s muse, Alice Liddell. I did the same thing in a different way with The Looking Glass Wars.
Tell us the concept behind your play, Alice, Formally of Wonderland, A Musical Story of the Real Alice. The real Alice inspired Lewis Carroll and met Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s youngest son. So you went from there and did this show, which I’m assuming is some sort of romance.
MS Correct. It is a romance. We know there was some sort of relationship, presumably romantic, between Leopold and Alice Liddell and it seemed to have not been chronicled. Out of all the Alice works, somehow that was missed. I just loved this idea. Because for one thing, you knew going in this did not work out. In the Victorian era, if there was a romance, it was not going to end with them skipping down the aisle to be married. “So what did happen?” I wondered. When you’re writing historical fiction, you want to always be plausible and factual as much as you can. From what I learned from my research talking to a Lewis Carroll expert at Oxford, it seemed they did get together. There was proof they had a hunting trip together up the Thames which echoed the original Alice in Wonderland boat trip. In the scene in the musical, I figured Alice would certainly reflect on that. Ten years earlier, she took this boat ride with an Oxford don, Lewis Carroll. Within those 10 years, she became this famous figure as the muse of the Wonderland books and now she’s on the boat with Prince Leopold. It also made me think, “Who is this young woman who thinks she is worthy of a prince?” She’s an Oxford professor’s daughter who, for all we know, had never been to London.
Then I started thinking about her character, being this beautiful young woman, one of the few young women in an all-boys school, and the daughter of a professor. I felt it doesn’t give you the impression of a modest, humble, young lady. I thought, “That would be a fun character to write.” Then I started looking at Leopold the same way. What could he have been like? Here’s a prince royal and he wants to go to Oxford, he wants to be educated. He’s not a Playboy Prince. They seem like they really would be interested in each other. Then, what would destroy this? Of course, Victorian society, not to mention Mom.
FB She had a little bit of power back then.
MS She did and she didn’t seem to use it for good very often.
FB Indeed she did not.
MS She’s held in such high esteem, the beloved Queen Victoria. As England was becoming more and more woke and Oxford was trying to redo its past and take down statues of Cecil Rhodes and similar benefactors, Queen Victoria remained untouched. Here she is, the epitome of British imperialism. Who represents it more? I asked an English friend, “Why does she get a free pass? Why aren’t they taking down statues and renaming streets?” He said, “Well, she’s Queen Victoria.”
FB I got a little criticism for portraying her as a baddie, along the lines of comparing her to Redd as if they were doppelgangers. People said, “We really love our Queen Victoria so you’re gonna rub some people the wrong way.”
MS I could see loving Prince Albert, her husband. The more I read about him and his policies, which were much more progressive, I wonder if the history of the 20th century would have been different had he lived. He was kind of skeptical of the future of colonialism. Charles Dickens is writing here in this era. How much more blatant could the social ills of England be than in Dickens? Did she open a book? Did somebody mention workhouses and child labor to her? It seemed like all of England was aware of it because of Dickens and others. People were so riveted to his work, other than Her Majesty. It’s hard to even picture those two in the same room.
FB I’m with you. I’ve been playing around with it a little bit more in adapting my book series into a TV show. I didn’t focus very much on the part of her story that you’re focused on. But then when I started to work on the show, I thought, “Oh, let me see. What was she like as a teenager?” I jumped from her at 13 to her at 20 and then I brought her back to Wonderland, not dissimilar to what Tim Burton did, I suppose. But I was wondering what was going on in English society at that time. What was going on with Queen Victoria? What is something that would make Alice feel a bit more modern? I did quite a bit of research and came to the same conclusion. They’re really giving her a pass. So, you have a scene on the River Thames with Leopold and Alice?
MS Yes, that’s maybe the one thing I can say is absolutely factual. They did take that boat trip.
FB That’s very romantic and very intimate.
MS What do they talk about? That’s what it comes down to. Once again, you want to make it plausible but still a little surprising. I imagined she would have spoken about the golden afternoon, being on the river with Lewis Carroll. I imagined he would have asked, “What was it like that day?”
FB Do they have a perspective on the books in your musical? Alice is famous because of the book but does Leopold have a take on it that might reflect your take on Alice in Wonderland?
MS Her first take is she loves what it did for her. She loves the fame and she loves the social position. Her dad does not. He thinks it’s too much attention and it’s gone to her head. Leopold is so enchanted with Alice herself. He wants to know if the girl in the book is like Alice the real girl. It’s more about the young woman than the literature. But the book gets him curious. She says, “Really none at all. The fictional Alice is in a strange and dangerous land. She never thinks about her family, sister, or parents. She doesn’t even miss them. If that happened to me, I would just be destroyed.” She’d be Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. This doesn’t cross the fictional Alice’s mind. The girl in the book has a strange emotionality.
That’s another reason why the book is sort of unadaptable. The central character is essentially passive. She’s just taking it in, like a camera, and isn’t motivated to get from one place to the other. In Through the Looking-Glass, there’s a mission, but in the original, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she’s wandering. Alice happens to make it home but she’s in no real rush to get there. She seems happy to be away from her family. Leopold says, “She must have had a mother like me.” That’s their exchange. He’s also a little interested in Dodgson and what he was like. Through my research into Dodgson, it seems like he was quite the entrepreneur.
FB He was way ahead of his time in terms of being in control of everything surrounding his work. He picked the artist, the print style, and even the font. I think he might have been the first author to come up with merchandise for a book.
MS How come we don’t talk about him the way we’re talking about Walt Disney or any other entertainment industry titan? We like to put him in a garret.
FB It’s a very good question. L. Frank Baum. We all know his story.
MS Dodgson was maybe the wealthiest don teaching at Oxford. They don’t get paid a lot.
FB He was one of the first people to explore photography. He was very ahead of his time in a lot of ways. But he was never married. He was entrepreneurial but he didn’t seem to go out of his way to promote himself, even though he wrote endless letters to all of his friends.
MS He did go out of his way but it was to promote Lewis Carroll, not himself. The characters were on plates and tea towels. There was always an Alice show somewhere. Not to mention, Through the Looking-Glass is an actual sequel. What did he do with his money?
FB That’s a good question.
MS Why don’t we know that? I feel like there’s some English social taboo around this.
FB I don’t understand why Charles Dodgson is not recognizable and why you have to say Lewis Carroll right afterward. But to my point, he didn’t want any recognition. That’s why he had that name he worked on. He came up with a bunch of ideas and it’s some kind of anagram. It creates space between him and the work.
MS But, you can be pretty sure the bank accounts were in the name of Charles Dodgson. But that’s what makes me curious. This aspect of him is just ignored. It’s like writing about Walt Disney and saying, “Look at how beautifully he drew,” and that’s the end of it. You’re missing the whole point of building an empire and the “Alice Empire” is still with us.
The Dodgson estate isn’t making anything off it. But just as a thought experiment, if Alice wasn’t in the public domain, how much would his estate be taking in from the licensing of Alice projects around the world?
FB It’d probably be hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars but, of course, it wouldn’t have been so successful if it hadn’t been in the public domain. It wouldn’t have been successful because it was so episodic. But once it was in the public domain, then you’re just riffing off of it. But nevertheless, it’s still remarkable. No matter what medium you think about, Alice is everywhere.
I think the idea you put forth is right and I also think a lot of people can see what they want to see. Some people see it as a fairy tale, as it’s described, while some people see it as a horror story. I think it was written for adults on some level. They didn’t have all the categories we do now – Children’s, Middle Grade, Young Adult.
MS This really wasn’t meant for a huge popular reading public given the satire and references to local Oxford residents. It was meant for the Liddell girls and their family.
FB Your show, Alice, Formerly of Wonderland, is in Santa Barbara but it originated in Wyoming, correct?
MS I used to be affiliated with the Wyoming Theater Festival and when the show was in the workshop stage, I brought it there to put it in front of an audience and see what I had. It was a very skeletal version but I needed to put it on stage because the musical element is acapella singing. Leopold was musical and joined musical groups at Oxford and I love musical theater. I thought, “How am I going to make this musical? I didn’t want to do a traditional musical, it would seem like just another Alice musical. I thought, “I can use the Oxford Glee Club as a musical motif through it and Leopold would sing with them. I used some traditional British folk songs, Victorian parlor songs, and standard historical Oxford songs, and I wrote a couple of new ones. With six actors, it wasn’t easy to get that big glee club sound but our music arranger, Jack Woodson, is so brilliant. He managed to make it sound like a big chorus. We were very pleased with the musical sound of it and that people consider it a musical even though it’s very unorthodox.
FB The glee club is a great idea. I didn’t realize Prince Leopold was in the glee club. That’s just a natural fit and using music of the time is appropriate. Plus, you don’t have to deal with the rights.
MS We used the public domain songs and my own because, as you know, music licensing is one of the most unbearable aspects of making good art.
FB When you say you’re putting your show up, this is at the Wyoming Theater Festival so it’s public and people are coming to see it, but it’s rough. What’s in it for the audience? Do they participate? Do they give notes?
MS Generally, I talk with the audience and find out what they think. But I found at that point, at the end of the show, I already knew the audience’s reaction. If there’s a joke and the audience doesn’t laugh, you don’t have to ask them. You just bury your head in your hands and now you have to fix it. But you can’t find that out sitting in your office at the computer. You really have to have actors.
This show has not had a typical development. We were in Wyoming then I went home and did rewrites and then COVID came. As soon as COVID started to abate, I did another reading here in Studio City at the Whitefire Theater. It’s a black box and I use that for my local experiments. We went in there with a bunch of actors and some UCLA a capella guys. Then I did one more when COVID was basically done. That one I actually solved the problems and then submitted it around and it found its way to Santa Barbara.
FB How are people responding to the music?
MS They seem very surprised. Even though we made no secret that it’s a musical, it’s a capella. I don’t think that’s really processed until you’re in the room. Such exciting things have happened because it’s a tightrope act. I didn’t see any loss of attention during the numbers. In fact, there’s more leaning forward because it’s such an act of derring-do to sing this much a capella. We had terrific actors who all had a capella experience and knew how to adjust if you feel yourself going off. There’s so much nuance involved and so much concentration. Sometimes they even had to dance while they were doing it while with glee, they rarely had to do it. So it was a surprising and pretty unique element.
FB It’s a romantic comedy so when you’re fine-tuning, you’re making sure you’re putting those buttons on the jokes. Having seen it now, were people laughing where you needed them to laugh?
MS At this point, all the bad jokes are gone. We also had two previews before opening night. Fortunately, most of the clunkers had been weeded out by then. I am going back up to see it next weekend and from what I hear, as the actors have been relaxing into it more laughs emerge because I think they feel free enough to explore and try different readings. “I’m going to try to get a bigger laugh on this so I’ll hit that word harder. I’ll look right at the audience on this word.” They make these discoveries as they realize how to play this particular kind of comedy.
I tried to do that in the English drawing room style. You can’t do an Alice story without a tea party. Alice is trapped by her father into having tea with the young Oxford man he has chosen for her. Alice is already in love with Leopold so it’s awkward, to say the least. I did that in a drawing room style and the actors got it to go into a different gear. Some of it’s pretty broad. I figured one Wonderland character oughta have an appearance and I made that the Caterpillar. He really was the only one with actual useful advice in the novel. Other people were saying the most insane things to Alice but the Caterpillar really was helpful in his haughty way. I thought in her mind Alice, if she needed advice, could imagine herself going to the Caterpillar as a thought experiment. We have Matthew Greenwood, a British actor playing the Caterpillar and doing it in the style of one of the knighted-grade actors.
FB What are the conflicts with Alice? You brought up Queen Victoria. That’s pretty clear. Are there other conflicts these two lovers are dealing with?
MS They both have parental conflicts. One of the things that’s also factual is that Queen Victoria was not a fan of Leopold’s desire to go to Oxford. It could have exposed him socially to the “wrong family”. There’s a very funny scene on stage, but it actually happened. There was a negotiation between Leopold and his mother as to how he would live there. Certainly not in student housing, God forbid. He would have to be in a rented house. There was a discussion about who needed to be on the staff. Would there be a doctor in residence? Talk about control over-controlling mothers.
FB The ultimate helicopter parents.
MS Queen Victoria demanded if Leopold had a dinner, she would have to approve the menu and the guests.
FB It was her youngest son. I think he was the fourth-in-line to the throne. So he probably knew he had no chance for the throne and the youngest are usually a little bit more rebellious. He had some health issues as well.
MS That’s what made Queen Victoria feel it was valid to have 24-hour medical observation, but Leopold was having none of that. Alice has a conflict with her father, who wants to see her happily married but knows when he finds out about her relationship with Prince Leopold it just can not be. Alice’s father has the cream of England right outside his window, these Oxford guys, and he picked one especially for her, Edward Brocket. This is an invented character but I’m sure there were many such men. I made him the captain of the Christ Church rowing team and a medical student, a perfect guy.
FB Tall, strapping, big shoulders. Okay, I got it.
MS Exactly. Played by tall, strapping Sawyer Patterson. When he walked into the audition I went, “Well, there it is.” As Leopold says, ruefully, Brocket is healthy. Leopold backs off and says, “Go with the healthy personnel and have a long life.” Alice is too insanely in love at that point. But Brocket isn’t a big dumb jock or a hostile Gaston. He’s a good guy and he’s exactly who she should have had. One of the reasons I made him a jock was eventually the real Alice Liddell married a professional athlete, a cricket player. That probably was on her radar. She married a famous man. She didn’t marry the country doctor.
FB That was Reginald Hargreaves.
MS I think she still wanted to maintain her position. She married someone famous in some way so she wouldn’t suddenly fade from sight because she married an obscure, even wealthy, son of an Earl from Northumberland or something. I don’t think she was married for money. I’m sure she loved him but it was good for her public image. A famous athlete was certainly an attraction.
FB I made the connection between Leopold and Alice having a love story. That was real because they both named their first child after each other. She had a boy she named Leopold and Prince Leopold named his daughter Alice. So I thought, “Okay, that’s enough of a connection. There must have been something there. I’m gonna go with that.”
MS When I got to that in my research I thought, “The universe just handed me the end of the play.”
FB Is that the end of the play?
MS The Caterpillar is a kind of wrap-around character. He gives that information and there’s occasionally a little gasp in the audience. It hammers home the truth.
FB Beautiful. Very exciting. How long is it running?
MS This is the last week. June 16th is the last show.
FB What’s the hope for the next steps?
MS It’s six actors and off-Broadway sized. My last show in New York, Romeo and Bernadette, was off-Broadway. It was in a nice little theater on 42nd Street. I’d like to have Alice, Formerly of Wonderland follow that trajectory to Off-Broadway in New York.
FB Fingers crossed.
What was your introduction to Alice in Wonderland? Did you read it as a child or was it the Disney movie?
MS I think I read it before the Disney movie. I was a big reader. Reading the initial books, I don’t think was that life-changing because you’re reading everything. I remember gravitating to English children’s books like Winnie the Pooh when I was really little. But when I was a little older, I found The Annotated Alice, which I’m sure you know. That was a rabbit hole I dove into. I talked to fellow English major nerds about this and it turns out, for a lot of us, that was the first literary criticism we ever encountered. It was the first time we recognized there’s more to a book than we may have imagined. It was so easily readable and digestible. Martin Gardner did the notes in the margins.
FB I thought it was brilliant. I think everybody should read it, even if you don’t care about knowing everything about Alice, because to your point, it’s so consumable and digestible.
MS It gives you the goods. It’s not holding back. Rather than reading a magazine article about literary criticism, The Annotated Alice was in these teaspoon-sized bits to take in and be fascinated by. In some way, that put me on a path towards being an English major in college. That book said, “There’s more than you imagined here. Let us explain.”
FB Have you thought about your play as a show or movie?
MS I have but if it’s not Merchant Ivory making it I’m not sure I’m interested. The depiction of the Victorian period has to be so beautiful. I don’t know if that’s a Netflix movie. What else are we gonna have?
FB They don’t make movies like that anymore. Barely any movies at all.
MS I don’t really see how it could find its way into the media universe that way. I wish but we just don’t live in that world. Maybe there’s some English film company. But first, I want to move it down the theatrical path.
FB Your other show, Romeo and Bernadette, what was that about?
MS That was another fantasy, exploiting an English author.
FB Wonder why they hate us American authors.
MS We try so hard. Romeo and Bernadette started as a movie script that never got made. It’s essentially, at the end of Romeo and Juliet Romeo doesn’t drink the poison. He drinks more of Juliet’s sleeping potion and that puts him out. He wakes up hundreds of years later and finds a girl who looks a lot like Juliet but she’s an Italian-American girl in Verona on a family vacation. Romeo follows her back to Brooklyn and finds out she’s the daughter of a mafia don. He gets involved with the wrong mafia family and the whole thing starts again, except they’re happy. It was knocking around, including with some British companies for a movie and it didn’t happen. Everybody said to me how good it was and how funny it was. So I made it into a little musical, nine actors, and we played New York with really nice reviews.
FB That sounds like a great idea.
MS We’re mixing the cast album right now.
FB Are you musical yourself?
MS I am. I always say this, coming out of college I had an Ivy League English degree and the ability to play piano. What was gonna get me work? I started playing piano in New York for auditions and bars, got my feet on the ground, and started writing. On occasion, I’d work on a show like Sesame Street where I could also write songs in addition to the script writing and Alice has two songs that I wrote. So I tried to keep a toe in the musical world, too. I really love it and listen to a lot of music every day.
FB When you were writing on Sesame Street did you just suggest some music or did they ask you if you could write a song? Or was that just part of a song that you put into a script?
MS I think one of the reasons they hired me in the first place was because they knew I was musical. I was writing songs and sketches for off-Broadway reviews. A Sesame Street actor was in one of them and she brought me over there and said, “He’s gonna write for me now. When you were writing a script, often the writers were the lyricists. For Sesame Street, every sketch has to teach something. So if you want to teach that it’s good to try new foods, you might do that in the form of a song or you might do an informative sketch. On occasion, I would be paired with a composer but other times a tune was hidden in my head and I would just submit it. Sometimes they’d take it, sometimes they rejected the music and passed it along. But it was a rare opportunity to be writing songs while writing television scripts.
FB It sounds like a great experience and a great gig.
MS It was. It was exhausting though. It was the hardest scriptwriting I’ve ever done. It had to appeal to preschoolers. It had to appeal to adults. It couldn’t be lame. It had to teach something and it had to be funny. That’s a lot in a little sketch.
FB So you’re saying it’s difficult to put all that into a little sketch? Or were the powers that be demanding these things have to all work together? Were they difficult or was it just the actual writing and creating that made all those elements gel?
MS Everyone agreed this was the Sesame Street formula. This is what made Sesame Street, the notion that the humor was not going to be lame. It was going to be sharp humor, like any sketch comedy show. If you think about it, if you’re writing for Saturday Night Live or any other comedy sketch, it just has to be funny. But with Sesame Street you have to do all those things at once in every single sketch. They’d be tested on kids to see if the sketches actually did teach them. In my time the head writer was focused on television comedy, not education, but over your shoulder was the Harvard School of Education saying, “That’s not teaching.” Also remember, this is public television so the wages aren’t going to be like the compensation at a network. So if you’re a good comedy writer, what are you doing here at PBS? It was tough to find the right kind of writer and keep them. But if you didn’t get paid in wages, you got paid in Emmy Awards.
MS That’s a TV musical musical with songs by Jerry Herman (Hello, Dolly!) and starring Angela Lansbury. It still seems to be a perennial online. I used to get contacted about people enjoying it. We gave it a progressive slant. I still can’t believe we got away with that. Mrs. Claus comes to New York in 1910 and she gets involved with the women’s suffrage movement, child labor, and unions. The feminists love us for it. It’s an easy way to teach how difficult it was to vote and how to organize around that. I’m pretty proud of that one. I’m glad it’s been living on.
FB Do you see many Broadway shows? Anything you’re a fan of that you wish you had written?
MS When I get to New York there’s never enough time. The last thing I saw was a production of Sondheim’s show Merrily We Roll Along. I had tremendous affection for it when I was young. It first opened in the eighties and finally, people are making it work and it’s a hit now with Daniel Radcliffe. I love that. I also saw Sondheim’s new posthumous show, Here We Are. To be involved in musical theater at all is to be worshiping at the feet of Sondheim. Whatever might be playing of his, I’ll make a special effort to go see.
FB Do people come to you about writing a book for an idea? Or do you generate most of your ideas and work on those?
MS It works both ways. I’m trying to think what people in theater have come to me for that has actually been produced. There’s so much of it. If I’m doing it myself, I have my steps. I know what to do but it can be very painstaking and slow and I’m not sure collaborators can put up with that. People do come to me and I’d say fifty percent of the projects I want to work on and fifty percent I don’t, whether it’s because I’ve done something like that before or I just don’t see how it’s ever gonna get done. But it’s always flattering when someone comes to you and invites you to work with them. But I would say the shows I’ve had produced have all been originated by me.
FB Theater is much like film or television. There are a lot of plays or musicals being developed that we never get to see because it’s really difficult to get them up on their feet and for all the elements to come together. One of the things that’s really underrated is the book writer. To get that book right to make a musical work is really hard.
MS It’s no different from screenwriting or TV writing. It’s the same skills. you know, playing songs. But if you find yourself with those skills at an early age, wouldn’t you jump into TV? I did. I needed to make a living,
FB They don’t pay very much in theater.
MS As they say, “You can make a killing but you can’t make a living.”
FB So if you’ve done Wicked, you’re good.
MS Pretty much. But there’s only one or two shows like that per decade. Yet there are so many other positives about it. But if you’re starting out and you do need the paycheck, you really can’t do theater. The payoff is after opening unless you were lucky enough to be commissioned, which you won’t be at an early age. You could be working for years on a project and then get to opening night and hope for the best that maybe now you’ll get paid. Whereas, in TV and film there is a union, of which I’m a proud member, and the union makes sure, like any union, that you get paid at a specific pay rate. On the other hand, you’re selling your copyright. Whereas you own the copyright in theater and you have the final word on casting and the script. That’s all up to the playwright.
FB It’s the same with the novelists. Part of my interest in writing was born out of losing copyright and being frustrated and saying, “I’d like to be the author from beginning to end and play in my own sandbox.” Not that those always pay enough to pay the bills and so forth. But creatively, It’s so fulfilling.
MS That’s it. There are other rewards. The union jobs for money, the theater, and novel jobs for us.
FB If you were a character from Alice in Wonderland who would you be and why?
MS The Annotated Alice is still in my head but it’s the White Knight. There’s inventiveness and kindliness about him. The Caterpillar was helpful but had that horrible attitude, which I exploited.
FB And he’s stoned a lot.
MS If only. To me, it would take that horrible haughty Oxford edge off him. He seems to me, and I wrote him this way, as the most Oxfordian of any of the characters in Alice in Wonderland. That attitude of “Who are you?” That superiority is so absurd. Whereupon the White Knight is humble and kind but completely inept and not helpful at all. But at least she didn’t end up in an ocean of saltwater or having your head stretched. At least he was kind. I think that the Caterpillar’s attitude is coming over decades from The Annotated Alice. It was pointed out there and I never forgot about it. I also remember there was speculation that the White Knight was the Lewis Carroll self-portrait because you can’t imagine him as any of the other characters. The White Knight is slightly ridiculous and that might be how Dodgson felt with his speech impediment, that he was a figure of ridicule. He probably was ridiculed because of the way kids talk about their teachers.
FB Riding in on the horse also puts him above everybody so that’s got to feel good.
MS It’s a quiet episode compared to beheadings and croquet. That was always a place in the books where I felt at home.
FB Very good answer. I read in an interview, that somebody asked you if you were an expert on Alice in Wonderland or Lewis Carroll and you said you weren’t an expert, but you did so much research. I did the same thing. I went to Oxford and spent six months there and it was so much fun.
MS This is the one place where the show expresses anything I felt, but Prince Leopold has a speech where he says, “Oxford is Wonderland.” That’s how I felt. I’ve been to places in Europe before and nothing was ever like Oxford to me. I just can’t compare it to any other place I’ve been. I would love to spend months there.
FB I’ve always been a big fan. I love the British Museum and then being in Oxford it does feel like its own Wonderland. There are Wonderland Gardens that look like they are from Oxford. I didn’t even realize there were so many people who create Wonderland hedges out of characters.
It’s been a real pleasure speaking with you, Mark. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have video game developer Stan Just join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Welcome to the podcast Stan Just. Thanks for being on the podcast. It’s always exciting to talk to another creative person who has been inspired by Alice in Wonderland. But I’m particularly interested in games because when I first started writing my books and I went to comic book conventions, people would always say, “We’ve read all of your books, but what are you going to do?” So I had the idea of doing a game, but, this was so long ago, it was in Flash. A lot of people came to it but I didn’t know I could monetize it with microtransactions or anything. So it cost me a fortune. People were really happy but I didn’t make any money. Then Flash disappeared two years later and all that work went for naught. Since then I’ve had a keen financial eye watching how people put games together and monetize them.
Stan Just I’ve had a similar experience with my first game that went out last year. We spent a lot of money and effort on it but, all in all, it didn’t pay it out. Not many people bought it.
FB I hear it’s pretty tough. I also had an agent for a while who worked exclusively in games. This was probably 15 years ago. My book was first published eighteen years ago and we went to all of the Activisions of the world. I would get in the room and I would pitch a vision of what I thought the world could be in the game. In the room, people seemed really engaged but at the end of the day, if there wasn’t a movie first, they weren’t interested. They would say, “Come back to us as soon as you have a deal with Warner Bros. I thought, “Well, once I have a Warner Bros. movie, what do I need you for?” Warner Bros. Games would have probably wanted to buy it. It’s hard to be independent out there.
SJ Absolutely. It’s very difficult to be publishing games right now.
FB Let’s talk about your game though. I’m gonna get into your history. I want to hear about your work on The Witcher games. I’m a big fan of the TV show.
You’re the CEO of your company. It’s called Covenant.dev. Tell us about the inspiration behind your upcoming game To the Star.
SJ It’s a survival adventure game that is aimed to support cooperative gameplay for up to four players. It’s a game in which players explore a whimsical fantasy realm inspired by Alice in Wonderland and The Little Prince, craft bizarre objects in their private dimension, and fight incredible creatures on their way to the star. The initial inspiration and the initial idea kind of came out of the blue. I was thinking about a game that would have a relatively simple main objective. This main objective was the spark. It’s inspired by the notion of a star falling on your planet and you want to get to it and uncover the story behind it. So that was the initial idea.
It evolved after a few months. We were exploring what the star will be. What kind of environment or what kind of a planet did it hit? Is it Earth? Maybe it could be something different? That led me to be inspired by this literature and led me to answer the question of what the star is. We decided to go more fantasy. It won’t be a comet or asteroid or something like that. It will be more whimsical, more fantastical. There’s a character on the star and that character has a story. I don’t want to spoil too much but he comes from a different planet and he crash lands on our planet. Again, our planet is not normal. It’s more whimsical because whimsicality is something cool and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity, as the creators, to do something new, to do something crazy, to do something surreal. It’s easier to surprise the player. If the game was set on Earth, it would be more grounded and more boring in the sense that people would have seen it all before. There’s not much room for surprise. So it was, let’s take the story of The Little Prince for the character on that piece of a planet that fell on our planet. He traveled some ways across the galaxy. He has a story of his own.
FB Let me ask you about combining genres. You have a fantasy, you have sci-fi, and you have Earth which is very grounded. So when you start to put those pieces together, how do you find a tone that feels consistent in terms of the gameplay and storytelling? Because, from my creative process and experience blending different genres, if it feels fresh and grounded enough that it’s not just random, then you feel like you’ve come up with something new that people can relate to. But if you combine too many things, they bump up against each other and then it doesn’t feel like a new form.
SJ I absolutely agree. If you mix too many things, it just becomes an unattractive blend. You need to be very careful about the believability of the world and the believability of your creation. For example, the sci-fi aspect is very, very limited. When you say “sci-fi”, many people think of technology and spaceships and lasers. We don’t have any of that. For example, the vehicle the character is on when he crashes on your planet is not a spaceship. It’s just a fragment of earth. There’s no technology there. The player doesn’t have the feeling of, “This is a sci-fi technology kind of thing. It’s rather a fairy tale, whimsical thing.”
That’s the most fun part, creating a believable world that is different, and whimsical, so the player can believe in this fantasy and be immersed in the atmosphere. Even though there are crazy things happening, it is all within the constraints of your creation. For example, we’ve got a character who’s a honey bee that is in the form of a jar with wings. But this creature doesn’t, for example, relocate within light speed, it doesn’t suddenly grow a shotgun and shoot you. It wouldn’t fit the story setting. He needs to fly. He’s a jar filled with honey, so he needs to be heavy in the animation. The movement needs to be believable even though it’s a jar of honey with wings.
FB There’s a logic to the weight and so you feel it’s not a speedy thing. It has its limitations. You bring up whimsical aspects a lot. Alice in Wonderland, to some people’s minds, is really a whimsical story because there are a lot of absurd things that happen. But, at the same time, there are a lot of people who interpret Alice in Wonderland as very dark and nightmarish because you’re out of control, you’re shrinking and you’re growing. It depends on your point of view.
Do you see Alice in Wonderland as a fantasy? Do you see dark elements? Which elements did you blend in? What was inspirational for the game?
SJ That’s a very interesting question. We use some scarier elements to a degree because we are still targeting a relatively young audience (10+) so we do not want to use very significant fear themes. That said, even if I watch animation or Disney movies with my five-year-old, there are some fearful themes. They’re oftentimes very useful in storytelling in order to show there is a threat or a challenge that the protagonist needs to overcome. This is useful in games as well, which rely pretty heavily on the notion of challenge. The challenge doesn’t need to always be scary. But if the challenge isn’t scary from time to time, if it’s funny, it’d be rather irritating. If something is rather scary, you’re feeling motivated to overcome it.
My point is that it will be used from time to time but it is not something you will see often in our game. It’s rather very visually appealing, even during the night. The biomes in the game, during the day, look like a fantasy world, dreamlike. But at night, they look similar to the Avatar movies, which is also attractive. So people don’t need to be afraid of the dark, right? We do not play on this theme anymore because we’ve played on this very often in our previous game. Now we’re not using it.
FB Can you share anything specific from Alice in Wonderland? Or is it more the idea of somebody coming in on a star and coming into a new world like Alice falling into the rabbit hole and encountering these quirky characters and the conflict she feels as she’s navigating this world? For instance, is there a Jabberwock?
SJ Not yet not in the current design but we are using bits and pieces. We are using references to either Alice or The Little Prince whenever we feel we’d have a good idea of how to use it. For example, in terms of enemy design, that’s definitely a direction we will be going in. But not necessarily in the format that you might expect. The rabbit was a very important character, obviously, in Alice but it was a positive one. We are using the rabbit in the form of an enemy, a very important enemy. I won’t spoil much, but it’s in the form of an iron Golem. It manipulates time and it has watches incorporated in its body. So we’re playing on this notion of a rabbit with clocks but it’s a scary one and he’s actually a robot with a clock. We want to be creative about it, we don’t want to just copy-paste things.
FB I love that idea because it incorporates elements from Alice in Wonderland but, as we just talked about, it has a sci-fi feel because it’s a robot. It serves both purposes, it gives you the whimsy of Alice that people will identify with and think is cool but it’s got the sci-fi bent. You’re talking about the development of To the Star, where are you in the process and where are you trying to get to?
SJ You can break the development of a contemporary video game into a concept phase where you do all the thinking and writing, and then prototyping, then you usually go for something called a vertical slice which is a representative fragment of the game. So concept, prototype, a very rough element of the game, then the demo. Then you go into full production. All the enemies, all the story, all the environments, and at the very end, you’re debugging. You’re erasing any mistakes that you made along the way. Currently, we are after the prototype but before the production so we are trying to do this demo that will showcase the idea that we’ve got and hopefully get some interest from potential investors in order to fund the project.
FB So, the demo is to show off the design and the gameplay. When you say investors, are you talking about going to publishers? Or are you looking for hard money, then move it along and take it to publishers afterward? Or are you going to be the developer and the publisher and have it on Steam or Twitch or something like that?
SJ We are considering both options. We are a stock option company and we are considering issuing shares or getting a publisher and proceeding down that path.
FB As a CEO raising money and doing a stock option, that’s its own beast.
SJ I have been there already. Our previous game was financed through both options. We started with issuing shares and then signed with a publisher.
FB What was your previous game?
SJ So the previous game was called Gord. A gord is a Slavic fortification from ancient times. It’s a strategy game, a very dark game based on Slavic mythology that we adapted to our needs. We actually wrote the whole mythology around the game. This is posted on YouTube, the player has an option to actually read through our version of Slavic mythology before playing through our story.
FB Wow, that’s amazing. Did you grow up writing? There’s so much creativity and writing needed when developing games, especially when you’re building worlds. Was that something you did a lot when you were a kid and into your adulthood?
SJ No, unfortunately, not. I was always somebody who had a talent for organizing stuff. That’s why I became a producer and that’s how I started my career. But when I became an independent developer, owning a small studio, I needed to wear a lot of hats. I needed to learn a lot of things. I really enjoyed both writing and directing so that was something I was really keen on doing. We even received a nomination a few days ago for a Digital Dragon Award for the Best Polish Narrative for Gord. That’s quite an accomplishment for us.
FB Congratulations. Since you’re playing in the Alice space, why do you think Alice continues to be a muse for so many creative people, whether it’s musicians, movies, or games? In your culture, Alice is big like it is in all cultures. Why do you think it translates?
SJ It’s appealing to me because it really opens up your imagination. There aren’t that many creations of literature that you actually know. Works that have so much imagination and, at the same time, are not totally crazy surrealistic things that don’t make any sense. It’s still believable and very appealing in that manner. But from a utilitarian standpoint, as I have to emphasize as a game creator, it is very practical to have such a setting because then you can allow yourself to do a lot of strange things and still have it fit in the setting you’ve chosen. Because not all the settings are like that. If you go with a realistic setting, you cannot teleport people or do anything magical. You are constrained within your setting. So the more open-ended setting you choose the more weird mechanics you can throw at the player and surprise them. So that’s very valuable.
FB What about the value of Alice in Wonderland being recognizable, or the value of The Little Prince being recognizable so that the player is grounded at the beginning of the game? You have Wonderland as a brand, as an IP, that’s helping position your game.
SJ Absolutely. That’s a good point on its own because when I’m saying I’ve got a game that’s inspired by this piece, then immediately people who know and like the inspiration can relate to the game. They already know how I’m positioning the product. So that’s very valuable. Because if I would say I’m doing a fantasy game, we wouldn’t be talking.
FB Exactly. That’s true.
SJ That’s very valuable. I’ve learned that when talking with investors but also publishers like you, you need to have a short sentence where you explain what your product is an interpretation of Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton, especially the movie. You immediately know it’s these mechanics with this setting.
FB They understand what it is. You’re taking a brand and you’re redefining it for your own storytelling. Hundreds and thousands of people have done it and it’s really going to come down to the execution. If you execute right and you get that tone and you get that playability, then the investors can see there’s a way of selling it. It works in all businesses. As you said, Alice in Wonderland is a universal story and a universal world. It’s been around for so long that we almost forget how often it interplays with our day-to-day life, so why not put it into gameplay?
Why did you choose a survival adventure game for To the Star?
SJ Gord was a strategy adventure game, as I called it, so strategy adventure and now survival adventure. The main genre would be adventure. Doing adventure games is something that is very close to my heart. I think this notion of traveling, going on a journey, is very attractive and I had an idea of how to execute it. Why survival? Survival video games are not necessarily defined by the fact that somebody is struggling to survive.
It’s not the only element of the definition. It gets tricky when you’re talking about game genres. For example, if you ask somebody from the games industry what the definition of a survival game is, they would say the survival aspect is one thing, but there is also the base-building aspect. The progression of the character or the crafting itself as a core mechanic is very important. Crafting is a part of the definition of a survival game. Those mechanics are useful in your journey in order to craft stuff, have better gear, and in our game you also grow food because Alice has magical food so we wanted to build on that. Then we figured out we’ve got a survival adventure game. This genre is also very popular on our target platform. So that was also an argument.
FB As the CEO of a company you get to work with your team on the creative aspects and then you have the business aspect.
You mentioned when you’re pitching to investors, you have to have your elevator pitch. What games do you reference when saying to investors, “It’s like this game versus this game?” In movies, it’s “this movie meets this movie.” Do you have an equivalent for your game that our audience might be able to relate to?
SJ The main game we reference is called Grounded. We say it’s Grounded mixed with Tim Burton’s interpretation of Alice in Wonderland because we are using a lot of swirly shapes and Burton-esque art style. We wanted to use it in a positive and optimistic version, not a dark one, not a scary one. This is also our angle because a lot of survival adventure games are scary, very grounded, and very down on Earth. We want to offer the game to the same audience but give them something more positive, something more whimsical, and something more fun, hopefully.
FB This just popped into my mind. Do you have a boy or a girl?
SJ I’ve got a boy, Gabriel.
FB Since you’ve had Gabriel, how has your thinking towards games changed, if at all?
SJ Absolutely. My thinking about indie development actually started when I was preparing to be a father. Then he was born when I was actually doing my first indie game. So my child and my company are being developed simultaneously. It definitely affects me as a creator. In my first game, Gord, we were playing with the fact that you were a steward supervising a village full of subjects. You needed to provide them with food, tuition, housing, etc. But there was also a sanity parameter. You need to take care of the psychological aspect of their health.
As a psychologist by education, I was asking myself what would be the strongest stressor, the most emotionally heavy thing that would affect the mentality of your subject. So, immediately, the death of a child popped into my head. Being a father affected some of the decisions I made like putting children into Gord. There are also some aspects of To the Star but I cannot spoil it.
FB I have two children, 16 and 18. I’m a little further along than you are but when I was writing my novels, the way they would see the world, the way I would tell them stories, and the way they would react to these stories really influenced my writing. That whole thing you talked about with imagination and opening up your imagination when you’re a kid and having these really powerful imaginations. That became thematic in my books as a magic system. Because you start to lose that when you get older. The world wants you to fit in a box. There’s no such thing as a box for kids.
Can we chat a little bit about The Witcher? I’ve actually never played the game but I’ve watched the shows and it’s a very deep mythology and very complex in the way they tell the stories using different timelines and then connecting them. But can you talk a little bit about your experience with the game? Then, have you watched the show?
SJ My first question is, have you watched the Polish show from the early 2000s?
FB I have not. How are they different?
SJ There are a lot of similarities, especially to the first Netflix season. However, the early 2000s adaptation had a much lower budget and production capabilities. The Witcher franchise is very political, it gets very complex. There aren’t as many main characters as in Game of Thrones, you’ve mainly Ciri and Geralt. But I would say The Witcher is on par with Game of Thrones in terms of complexity.
When I was playing the second installment of the game, after just thirty minutes you’ve got the dialogue, you’ve got so many names of regions and characters. If you haven’t followed the books you can get easily confused about what’s actually happening. The people are trying to explain the political dynamics of the world and how it came to be in the current setting. That’s not often seen in video games.
FB You see that in novels because you can read it slowly and you can go back. For The Witcher game, why do you think that ended up working? It was so complex and there’s so much to carry in your mind. Or was it that, if you couldn’t carry it all, the playability was still really engaging? Because that’s a lot to ask of the audience or the player.
SJ Absolutely. The games are often framed in a way that allows the player to choose what they’re interested in and what they want to ignore. There is a deeper story layer that you can get into and it will be rewarding to you but if you’re not interested you can just follow the marker on your map. You keep the dialogue, skip the cutscenes, and just follow the marker, kill the guy, and get the reward. You can fine-tune the game to your needs. That helps.
Then The Witcher games were framed in a way that they had their own Unique Selling Point (USP). The main USP of The Witcher franchise was the choices and the consequences. We tried when working on the third installment, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, to make a game where you felt the choice and the burden of the choice you’ve made along your journey. The game definitely succeeded in that, although it was very difficult to pull off because it’s a complex game. It has a lot of quests and a lot of missions. It’s a very long game. Then the quest designers, who were the best in the world, actually needed to control that. So they needed to say, “All right, so if you just ignored that guy a few hours before and then you get into a romantic relationship with this person a few hours later, then it somehow intertwines into this aspect of the game. It gives you a bonus option you can pursue. That was very, very complex. I was the producer of the cinematics and the dialogues and we had around 1,500 interactions. In each interaction, there was a lot of branching off in how you could go about your dialogue. That was very laborious to pull off and still give value to a lot of those options that you chose.
FB How many years did it take to develop that game? I mean, I’m assuming it’s built off of games one and two, The Witcher and The Witcher Two: Assassins of the Kings, but given the complexity you’re talking about, it’s a long haul.
SJ I wasn’t at the very beginning of the concept phase of the game, but I think it was five years. The next title I worked on, Cyberpunk 2077, took even longer and it went even further in terms of the consequences and how you behave within the world.
FB Have any other games come along since The Witcher games that have anywhere close to that level of complexity?
SJ Yes, especially Baldur’s Gate3, which launched last year. That’s a very complex game but they do it in a different way and it’s also fantastic. But The Witcher has its own flavor.
FB I assume you’re not playing The Witcher with your son yet?
SJ No, no.
FB Does he play any games or do you allow him to play games?
SJ I allow him to play games. He has his own phone, on which he cannot call, but he has some games there. Those are the only games I allow. They’re usually logic games, chess, and learning words.
FB Very, very good parenting. How about other kinds of games, like tabletop games? Are you a gaming family across genres?
SJ Absolutely. We try to play as much as we can. However, video games have the advantage of oftentimes being flashy and very rewarding, and also being very helpful in regards to showing you moves that are allowed and preventing you from doing something that is not allowed in the game. I’m thinking about chess, for example. On the physical chessboard, you can do some stuff that is not allowed by the game but is still fun to do. But in the video game version, you can’t. So I see many advantages of the video game, but tabletop is something that we utilize as well.
FB I understand you lecture quite a bit about game development. How are you in front of an audience of I’m assuming students?
SJ Right now, I feel rather good, especially if prepared. I’ve been lecturing for a few years now but at first, it was a struggle for me since I’m rather an introvert. Also doing it in English because it’s not my native tongue. But right now, especially if I’m prepared and not improvising, it’s going pretty well.
FB What you just said about improvising versus being prepared is a critical component of speaking in front of a large audience. I did a lot of school visits. If you’re talking to fifth or sixth graders, they’re so happy to be out of class you can just start telling them a story. It’s great when you get around eighth graders where they’ve hit puberty and they’re all trying to be cool. They’re all chatting and there’s a couple hundred of them. You better be on your game to get them engaged and if they’re not engaged, you better be brave enough to call them out. Whenever I did school events, there were always the two kids who weren’t paying attention that I focused on, not the hundred who were engaged. I would try and make a joke like, “Do you guys want to go make out somewhere?” Then the audience would laugh and they would be embarrassed and they would shut up.
SJ I wasn’t brave enough to talk in front of the younger audiences.
FB It’s a different skill set but I enjoyed it almost more than the adult audiences because with the adult audiences, they’re really engaged in the process. But when it’s a young audience, especially fifth and sixth graders, they would just sit on the ground, it looked so uncomfortable, and they would just look up. You’d just have to find some way to turn their attention away from the friend next to them and then they would be like, “Whoa,” and so you tell a little story. It really showed the power of storytelling.
The other part of it is you’re teaching, so once you have them, then you can communicate the lesson, whether it’s the struggles of being a writer or being a game developer, and how that relates to life and overcoming challenges. Lots of times, the teachers wanted me to say how many times I had to rewrite my book because their students would write their work once and say, “I’m done.” And the teachers would say, “No, you have to rewrite it.” So I would show photographs of all of the notes from my editor, the things they liked, and the things they didn’t like, which were in red. On the first page, there’d be a couple of items in red, and on the next page, it would be full of notes. The kids would go, “Oh, whoa,” and I’d say how I had to rewrite it ten times. The English teachers would come up to me afterward and say, “Thank you so much.”
SJ The rewrite process you’re talking about is also very often used in video games. It’s always very painful. One of the ways CD Projekt RED is doing what they’re doing is through iterations. When they were asked in an interview how they achieved such high quality in the writing and quests, they said, “Through iterations.” Some people were working on their quests for a year or two but their work actually ended up not landing in the game. Somebody else took over, rewrote it, and then they released it. You were working on the game for some time and you’d be amazed that your work hadn’t actually made it to the final version. That’s sad but this is the cost of quality. I’ve done many versions of a trailer for To the Star. I think we’re currently on the twenty-second iteration and I’m getting a feeling from my editor that he’s already tired with my notes. I think we need to be wrapping up.
FB Luckily, you pay him. So he has to continue until you’re satisfied. Just have them read Steve Jobs’ biography and they’ll probably be very happy he has you as a CEO. In the movie business, that development process can be very similar. You’re developing and developing and sometimes you do over-develop and you don’t even remember what the inspiring idea was in the beginning. Then it turns out to be terrible and you have to go back and bring in another team and they go back to the beginning. But, in redoing things, if there’s somebody in charge, if there’s the general and they’re making the decision it’s okay. It’s when there’s a committee, that’s the problem. I don’t mind rewriting it over and over if my editors have good notes but at the end of the day, it’s my decision on what the sentence is, what the paragraph is, what the chapter is, and what the book is. I imagine you’re the one who says, “Okay, this is good enough or this is perfect. Let’s put it out there.”
SJ That’s how we structure our work at my company. I am a big fan of participatory management styles that invite anybody to participate in the process regardless of your position in the company. Whether you just joined and began or you have been a director at some posh company, that doesn’t matter. If you have good ideas, then just bring them up. Hopefully, I will see that and use that in the development process. But also, I do agree with you that there needs to be a person who actually keeps it all together, a vision holder.
FB I really appreciate chatting with you today. I wish you luck in finishing To the Star, your Alice in Wonderland, and The Little Prince video game.
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have the hilarious and talented Jake Curtis join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Welcome to All Things Alice Jake Curtis.I’m interested in your creative journey as a young writer and how one comes to their creative process and aspirations. Where did it all start in terms of writing? Were you someone who loved to write in school?
Jake Curtis I’ve pretty much always done some kind of performance thing. I come from a big family of writers and artists who are all too loud for their own good. So growing up, you had to learn to talk fast and talk loud.
FB Was that at the dinner table? Or was that all the time?
JC Twenty-four seven. We used to say that everyone was unconditionally loved, but not everyone was unconditionally liked.
I came to performing and writing from improv actually. I started doing a lot of improvised comedy when I was 12-13 and it was huge for me because I’m quite an anxious person in general. I’m an analytical person. So the chaos and acceptance that has to come with improv was pretty huge for me. There’s no second draft. There’s no planning.
FB There’s no getting out of it. I thought improv was the most terrifying concept I’d ever heard of. I’m not going to get up on stage and then somebody’s going to tell me some little story and I’m supposed to go from there. I admire the chutzpah at 12. But I suppose at 12 it’s like sink or swim. So much stuff is going on at that age.
JC I was a big lover of live comedy shows. England, especially then, had a really vibrant live comedy scene. Going up to the Edinburgh Fringe at young ages, you see all these shows, and at first, I became obsessed with the idea of an audience. I think that was always the bit that gripped me. It’s not so much the glitz and glamor of a million followers, but it was getting to watch these people who can walk into a room with 20 people and just connect with them and entertain them for an hour. I’ve always approached writing from an entertainer’s perspective. We’re all dancing monkeys making something fun. So I did improv for years and it excited me and I got to go around the world and do shows in Canada and the US.
FB So there was something more structured than you getting up there as a young person and doing something in front of the class. Were you part of a troupe?
JC I was part of a troupe called School of Comedy, which is an amazing company in the UK that gets professional sketch writers to come in, but then they have a troupe of kids to perform the sketches. We did shows up in Edinburgh for two years we would perform around the country at festivals and comedy gigs. That was an amazing experience because we were very much treated like we were a part of a professional show. Like we were an asset and a commodity and a member of the troupe. They were lovely and respectful. But also it was like, you have an expectation. There are people out there who have come to see a show and you are the people to deliver it.
FB How many shows would you do a day?
JC When we went up to Edinburgh, we would do a show every day for 30 days or for 21 days, which is the length of the Fringe. You’re on a full run there. Then, generally, you’d have a week with a couple of shows or a little run at some theater and then a couple of months without a show. But we were working and it gave you this idea of having to accept how the audience reacts. I think a lot of writing classes and creative media share the message of “Oh, you’ve got to tell the story that’s yours. You’ve got to find your soul or your calling.” That’s wonderful and people need to be told that, but I think it does sometimes remove the audience from the question. It tells you to find the thing you think is funny, but I love performing to live crowds because you’re reminded even if you think it’s funny, it doesn’t really matter that much if they don’t. We’d go into shows where we had sketches that had been written for us and that killed five shows in the last five shows. But you deliver it and the crowd doesn’t like it. You can either just say, “Well, this is my schedule and I’m gonna keep going,” or you can try and change it on the spot, try and work out what this crowd needs from you and the show.
FB Obviously, when it’s going well, it fuels you and you can charge ahead and you will take chances and it’s invigorating. When there’s a lull or you feel like the audience’s leaning back and they’re not engaged, for me, I had a sense of panic when I was doing some plays. I went, “Oh, it’s one of those.” I would get into my head on the negative side and trying to find a way out of that into the next moment and being present was difficult.
JC I’ve done shows that have bombed and kept bombing. Sometimes you’re in the mud and you’ve got to stay there. In those shows, I would just try and make as much eye contact with the people on stage as I could. You don’t have to look at the crowd, right? And I’d try and tell myself, “I’m here having a good time with my friend, not bombing and ruining these people’s night.” But generally, with the crowd, I always took that as a challenge and it’s a challenge you can win. Especially with comedy shows, people want to come out and have a good evening. Now working as a writer, all these decisions you make are fueled by “We think these markets might want a script that looks like this.” I hate all of that because it’s not real. You’re like, “Oh, maybe I can do it. I’m a technician.” But when you have a crowd, it’s you and them. It’s head-to-head. My panic mode was usually monologuing. If I’m getting stressed, I’m just gonna keep talking and I’m gonna keep going until I hit something. I’m gonna move faster. I’m gonna go through more ideas until you find a little inkling of a laugh and then just grip onto that for dear life.
FB Is that what you did with your family? Is that what the competition was, people gripping on for their lives to find a little kernel to be heard?
JC One hundred percent. You’re waiting at the dinner table like, “Come on. Someone mention dog. Someone mention dog.” Someone brings up the word dog and you’re like, “That’s interesting! Listen to what happened to me today. I went out and I met three dogs.” You’ve got to take your time when you have it.
FB Wow, that must have been hard to even get the food and drink down. That’s a diet in itself.
JC When someone else starts monologuing, you speed eat. I just loved the immediacy of improv and the presentness and the engagement. For me, the joy of making art is making it for a specific person or specific people.
FB You were making art in that moment. There wasn’t a committee telling you, “I think this joke will work or that joke will work”. The audience is telling you instantaneously, which you don’t get when you’re writing a script for television. That’s amazing because you’re basically writing on stage as you’re going.
JC It forces you to engage in the truthful fact that the majority of art is just people observing other people and enjoying it. There’s this top tier of if you can write a sentence so good it is etched into history. If you’re gonna write “to be or not to be,” go for it. But the majority of art isn’t the cleverest thing you’ve ever heard. It’s some people watching, reading, whatever, some other people and trying to enjoy it, trying to have a good time.
FB It’s the connection to the human experience which is why it’s interesting you’re describing your family because so many stories are about the dynamic of family and it’s very relatable. So when you tap into something like that you’re going to engage the audience in a meaningful way. Your family dynamic sounds really exciting and really competitive and that set you up with the mindset of “I’m being creative all the time, not just when I’m improvising. But my whole family is creative.” Did you have actors in the family? You said writers?
JC In the immediate family, we have a lot of writers. My sister’s a writer, my dad’s a writer, my little brother’s a writer. My mum was a TV presenter in the 80s, which was cool. She used to do little practice things like she’d be playing songs in the car and, in between them, she’d be like, “Okay, you could introduce this one.” I’d have to be like, “And this next song coming on is a smooth hit from Lionel Richie,” and try to time it to the intro to the song. It was all just fun. Then in the extended family, they’re also very loud. I have like 30 cousins on my mom’s side and we have actors, we have everything. It was just a general feeling of trying to have fun trying to push yourself. I thought if I was going to be able to make a career in the arts, it would be partly from muscle growth. How many reps can I do? How many different art forms? I spent so long doing comedy sketches, I don’t do those anymore, but the experience all of it filters into everything else I do.
FB Is comedy the genre you’ve started to really hone is comedy, whether it’s television or film?
JC Comedy is definitely where I lean. That was where all my experience came from in improv. I think these things are muscles, especially comedy. I think people often underestimate how much of a muscle comedy is because people are so naturally funny. But it is a very different thing, being funny to four friends than writing something that can slot into a specific scene in a specific script.
FB It’s completely different. When you’re with your friends and you’re saying it out loud, it can come or go. But when you write it down, people can judge the rhythm and the cadence of it. Somebody’s got to perform it to really nail that cadence. It’s a lot different putting it on.
JC I sometimes hear writers, who are great writers but haven’t done comedy, saying, I think I might, for my next script, just do a comedy.” That’s great and maybe it’ll be amazing but I think the reason I’m good at comedy is, I hope, twenty percent something natural in me but I did a hundred appalling improv shows before doing a hundred mediocre improv shows before doing fifty decent ones. I have so many scripts that are so bad and so unfunny, so many files on my phone, stand-up gigs, improv, and freestyling. This is the thing I’ve done the most and I’m still mediocre to okay.
FB It’s the 10,000 hours. It’s the failing over and over. I don’t know if people realize what a gift that is, as the learning part of the process. When you talk about great comedians and you see their shows, if you see multiple shows, they are so specific night after night. They’re hitting every one of those beats. They’re so worked out. It’s kind of remarkable how specific they are from performance to performance.
JC That was a part of why I felt so lucky getting into comedy so early and the fact that my family did treat it as a serious pursuit. I was able to go through a lot of that education and a learning phase while I was at school. Because I think it can be really daunting if you go through life and you hit 24-25 and you go, “Oh, maybe I want to do comedy.” It’s a six-year path to being kind of fine.
FB Starting at 12 and starting to perform, it’s not dissimilar to sports. If you do it at a young age, it’s so inherent by the time you get to your late teens. It’s instinctual but you need all those reps. Starting that young, the filters are off and so you’re just doing it. It’s not as if you’re 24 and you want to do comedy for your career and you wonder how that’s gonna work out. I think that makes a big difference. With your family being so into all the arts, did you find that to be really nurturing or is there a competitiveness or an expectation you feel moving forward?
JC Not so much. There’s a competitiveness in my family anyway. I’m one of four kids and we all do very fairly similar things so there’s a bit of a jostling. But no, I think it was very much, “If this is a path you want to go down, go down it.” Me and my siblings do similar stuff but it’s different. My sister writes incredible feminist literature I couldn’t write and my little brother writes very dark, edgy films I also couldn’t write. It wasn’t as much of competitiveness but it was more of “This is a legitimate career and a path you can take. If you’re gonna go down it, take it seriously and put in work, put in the hours. We will drive you to the classes and pick you up but you’ve got to put your practice in and put your head down.” It wasn’t treated as a fanciful thing.
FB With a lot of creatives, the family or the parents treat it as a fanciful idea and not dependable.
JC I remember one time when I was 16 we had these national tests and I did really well on the physics one and I suddenly got this brain wave of, “Wait a second, could I be an engineer?” I was like, “Oh my god, this is a radical thought. A steady paying job, career development.”
FB Nothing like my family.
JC I’d become the black sheep.
FB You’re working for Intel.
JC It would be bizarre for them. It was always something I just appreciated and kept going and kept trying to see where I could go. I did a lot of improv. I got to do some shows I loved. I got to do two 50-hour-long shows in Canada with the group Die-Nasty, which was a great experience. It was really COVID that ended that portion of my life. I was already writing a lot by then but when COVID happened all improv obviously shut down. More than most industries improv took a really big hit. It turned out the improv theaters weren’t the people with big financial stores and genius financial skills. So improv took a really hard hit there. Then I just dove fully into writing. I’ve always enjoyed performing as an act for myself, but needing to get my face out there was never a priority. So I really tried to dedicate myself to screenwriting as a way of building a career I would enjoy.
FB Why did you move from the UK to the US? Was that for educational or opportunity reasons?
JC I was living in the UK until I was 19 and then I moved to Chicago to go to Northwestern University and study film there. I made the decision entirely based on improv. In the UK, I was doing what is known as Chicago-style improv, which is long form. Chicago is the mecca of that with Second City and the iO. So I Googled best colleges for improv and some dudes’ blogs came up and at number one he had Northwestern and the Titanic Players. I went great. I applied to two schools. I applied to Northwestern and then I applied to Yale because no one in England had heard of Northwestern. So I thought, “If I can get into Yale and reject them, then I’ll tell people I chose Northwest.” Then Yale rejected me so it wasn’t a great plan. But yeah, I went for the improv and it honestly was amazing. I was in this group, the Titanic Players, run by Mike Abdelsayed. It’s an amazing, incredible organization. I got to do so much improv at Northwestern. It wasn’t the worst decision.
FB Then you had the city so you could go to Second City and you could see some of the best improv in the country. You were getting your fix for sure.
JC A hundred percent. I go to do shows downtown and they brought in guest improvisers to teach workshops. It was an amazing experience.
FB Also, it’s a great city when you’re twenty-one years old.
JC I don’t regret the decision at all. I love Chicago so much. Oddly enough, of everywhere in America I’ve been it’s the place that most reminds me of London. So I felt quite at home there. Lovely people, lovely food, and some of the best improv in the world.
FB Who were some of the people that inspired you in terms of your comedy?
JC The first people were a lot of English comedians and stand-ups that I doubt people listening to this podcast have heard of but there are people like Daniel Kitson and Tim Key. These incredible people who would just do one-person shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. Partly due to the financial situation, one person shows basically dominate and it’s amazing because it’s so personal. I love these very personal stand-up shows. Moving to Chicago, TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi are like the greatest duo in Chicago improv history. They’ve been doing the same show for 35 years. They are genuine masters and are so grounded and confident and know each other so well. But honestly, my biggest inspiration was watching American sitcoms. That was kind of why I wanted to come to America. I grew up watching The Office, Parks and Rec, and How I Met Your Mother. All these shows. For one, they’re so phenomenal and they also made America seem so cool. I was like, “This is great. I’m just gonna go to America and meet all these beautiful people and date them. It’ll be great and everyone’s funny and the sun’s always shining.”
FB Did you discover that?
JC I discovered it was exactly like that. I have not been sad a day since I arrived in America. No, it turns out they’re a little unrealistic at points.
FB So moving to LA, what was the transition here?
JC So COVID happened and I was in Chicago and I started writing more. I only had a year left on my visa and I didn’t know if I could stay in the country. So I thought, “If I have a year, I should go to LA, the ‘City of Dreams.’” So I moved to LA and I got a job working for a motivational speaker, which was a weird experience, especially during COVID.
FB Why was that weird?
JC There was a point where I was locked down in my house and seeing no one. Except once a week, I would drive to this guy’s house, set up a camera, and he would motivationally speak at me for one or two hours. All of his stuff is just down the lens of the camera so I was going from total solitude to this man rambling about the meaning of life, and passion and purpose. Then I was going back to my tiny, empty house, and editing more videos of him talking about the stuff. It was just a bit of a jarring experience, but a wonderful one.
FB Did any of it stick for you?
JC It definitely got in there. It’s definitely deep in my subconscious. I can still hear his voice if I close my eyes. But I was doing that for a year and then I was working on my writing, but I felt like I needed more training, especially because so much of my experience had been in performance and live comedy. So I ended up applying to grad schools to do a master’s in Screenwriting. I got into the American Film Institute, and ended up going there, and that was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
FB How was Ed Decter? He introduced us and having him as a professor, what was the takeaway, the one thing you have been able to put into action?
JC Two things come to mind. Because I think the first, which was something I really loved from watching Ed, was where you can get to if you put all this time into screenwriting. I had so many examples of these great improvisers I’d seen who have this, it seems like a superhuman ability to improvise. You drop them in a scene and they know where to take it and where to go. It was seeing those people initially that made me want to do improv. I think it was amazing coming to AFI, all the professors who teach there have to also be working writers in LA. Ed Decter, who I was lucky to get in my second year, is a very prolific writer and has written so much stuff in so many genres. We were a class of six writing six very different scripts and watching him have immediate feedback for every single type of script, which ninety-nine percent of the time was immediately correct, was an amazing thing to see.
We talk about scripts so often like they’re hyper-personal, the story only you could tell, but if you get a really good screenwriter they know the direction a script should go from reading it. Getting to see that up close and getting to see someone be able to latch on to a story someone’s trying to tell, work out the key elements, work out what’s going to translate, work out what’s not translating, and immediately know a direction to go in. That got me excited and inspired because I think it can be depressing as a writer to think your only option for success is writing your soul’s calling. That’s wonderful. I hope to one day write a film that is me in a bottle but that’s a scary prospect. Going to AFI gave me much more of an approach to what a working writer looks like, of what a functional writer looks like, of someone who just gets the job done and who knows what a script needs.
FB Ed has written a lot of sitcoms. That’s where he started. So he has experience in sitcoms but the scripts he’s been writing lately have been adaptations of various kinds of mystery novels. He has a broad range of genres that he plays in. A couple of the latest crime dramas he’s written were really startling to me, because, we obviously did There’s Something About Mary together, but also he’s done so many sitcoms. So I can understand why you guys would have bonded. Also the experience of seeing him jump from genre to genre and script to script, I had a similar experience. We put a little mini-room together that he ran to break The Looking Glass Wars novels as a television show. Seeing him run the room was also another aspect of television production, writing, and development that I hadn’t seen before. That was unique for me because I hadn’t had that experience of taking my novel, breaking it up, and saying, “Okay, here’s where we have to get to for the middle of the season. Here’s where we’re trying to get to at the end of this season. Okay, now, let’s reverse engineer it and figure out the best opening.” It was pretty exciting.
It was not dissimilar to what you did with my world. I asked you to write a lore story and this idea came from you and a number of other young writers that I was introduced to from AFI, who play all these different kinds of games, Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. I looked at all the lore stories that go along with those games and I thought, “Well, I want that.” So you wrote this story, The Brother’s Wilde, which I’d like you to talk about. It’s a lore story, a prose short story. You did an outstanding job. Really brilliant, beautiful job. You used aspects of my universe and you made them feel fresh to me, which was like Santa Claus showing up.
JC It was a wonderful experience for me because I’ve played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons for a long time. I love that world and the high fantasy genre, but it never felt like something I was allowed to play in for actual creative work. That was my treat on the side at the end of a long week. So getting approached to write something in a world of high fantasy that already exists and writing backstories was such a treat for me. It felt like getting to my fun times for work. But it was also an odd process. I’ve never really written based on other people’s worlds before and other people’s work. So that was interesting and fun getting into that and trying to see how much I could stretch. The odd thing for me was when I got into it, I was very excited. I’d written out all these plot points and the beats and I was confident in the story. Then literally as I opened up the Word document, I remembered I hadn’t written prose in like seven years.
FB Be careful what you wish for.
JC I’d forgotten it was a completely different art form. I got ready to open up Final Draft and then I was like, “Oh God!” It took a little bit of adjusting. The part I forgot was you can’t refer to someone by the same name every time in prose. In the script, someone is their name and it does not change ever. But I was suddenly deep on synonym.com, “I can’t say ‘the great warrior’ again”. The mighty fighter, heroic hero, I was going deep into my vocabulary to try and switch something up. It was an exciting thing to get to work on. I think especially because Alice is a world that is so rich throughout culture. It’s kind of a bedrock piece of story. There are things I brought into the story that are pieces from Dungeons and Dragons. There’s a lot of Alice in Wonderland lore baked into Dungeons and Dragons like Vorpal swords and Jabberwock. It didn’t feel like building on something completely new. It felt like being given a chance to play in a world that is so familiar.
FB As a Brit too, Alice in Wonderland is probably the most famous piece of literature that you would have grown up with, right? So I can understand that and also the idea that Alice is everywhere. Of course, it makes sense it’s in Dungeons and Dragons. You took what was familiar from Alice’s Adventures, Lewis Carroll’s work, you took elements from my world, but then you brought this brother story together. Tell us a little bit about that part of the story, because you did often reference your younger brother.
JC I have two younger brothers who got amalgamated in the story. I always try to start from a place of relationship because I think that gives you the most fuel for a story and is the part you can’t retroactively put in. If you tell me this story needs a bigger fight scene, I can go do that at the end. But if a story isn’t built around a relationship, it’s tough to slot it in. So I wanted to build The Brother’s Wilde around a relationship. I was looking at the House of Cards, which was where we wanted to focus the story, and I thought brotherhood made sense. It’s this military organization and the brotherly bond felt like it made sense. I have two brothers who I fight with a lot. So that made that track.
But then I was interested in this idea of the houses and I loved the thoughts of the personality types associated with the houses. Me and my brothers are very different and if we’re gonna have two brothers in the story, let’s put them in two different houses. Let’s have them hate each other for the very reasons that make them unique. If we’re trying to expand the House of Cards we’ve got to bake it into the DNA of the House of Cards. So I wanted to build around there. Then I came up with these characters who are half brothers from a philandering father, who they both hate and there’s no love between them. At that point, it started to feel real to me and it started to feel fun. It felt like playing because you built this world and we have this amazing world of the House of Cards which has these rituals and dynamics built in. It was such a gift to build these two brothers who hate each other and try to give them a situation to learn why they need each other.
FB You were tasked with an origin story, an early origin story of the House of Cards. They send card soldiers on missions and when they send people on missions, they decide what kind of hand they’re going to deal. So you came up with the idea of “A Hand in History.” The Brothers Wilde is the beginning of the card soldiers going on these various missions when they’re tasked with saving the queendom or battling a competitive state.
JC I loved the idea of basing it around hands that are chosen and selected because that plays into the joy of Dungeons and Dragons and these old fantasy novels. It’s the idea of “The Party,” the troop. Every story is based around who was selected to go on this journey. That’s what’s so beautiful in a lot of these adventure stories, including Alice in Wonderland, it’s not the adventure that’s enticing, but it’s the uniqueness of who’s gonna solve the adventure.
FB The skill set they have and seeing how they’re challenged when they use their skill set with these various obstacles. That’s the Dirty Dozen idea.
JC I think that’s where a lot of modern fantasy and films go wrong. They put a lot of their energy into these big set pieces, these big boss fights with CGI characters. They put a lot of time into the obstacles when actually the thing we care about is the people solving them. In The Lord of the Rings, you care about Frodo, you don’t care that there are nine Nazgul. That’s what makes Alice in Wonderland so beautiful, and your novels, they revolve around the people going through them instead of the giant nature of the battle.
FB It’s fantasy but you need to be with the characters and with Alice, it’s so identifiable. It’s a “Who am I?” journey, and she finds agency in who she is and pushes back against the illogical world that she finds herself in. But it’s also very amusing. When were you introduced to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
JC I couldn’t say an individual date because, especially in England, it was just a part of culture growing up. My earliest memories were of my mum and my dad reading me the book. I must have been 10 or 11. The 1951 film was something I watched a lot. I love animation. I write a lot of animated stuff. The specificity of the visuals and the tone baked into that film was a real inspiration for me growing up.
FB Why do you think it’s lasted so long? You said it was in culture and this is generations after it was first introduced. Every generation re-interprets Alice. How do you view Alice in Wonderland?
JC I think the reason it has lasted is there are so many ways you can connect with it. It is such a beautiful human idea, the girl who falls through the looking glass and gets swept away on an adventure. The part I really gripped on to from a young age was the world-building. It was the idea of this world that works, that makes sense. It doesn’t feel like someone who’s picked, “Oh, this would be a fun scene. This is a fun character. That would look good.”
It lives and breathes like a world. Something that really drew me to it is I think a lot of world-building goes dark, “It’s a grungy forest with scary people in it.” Then obviously some other world-building goes saccharine and we’re in heaven. I love the feeling in Alice that there’s a danger to the world but there’s a wonder to it as well. There’s a whimsy and a seriousness. The world feels like it shifts based on the situation, like ours does. There’s no one thing to it. I just love learning more about the world, learning about the characters who inhabit it, the places to go, and being able to build this kind of escape.
FB I love the whimsy and the silliness of it and it reminded me of another book, The Phantom Tollbooth, which was one of my favorites growing up because of the silliness and the use of language. I really identified with that aspect of Alice. Many people think of it more as more a nightmare because of getting big and small and being stuck in a place where there’s no logic.
JC The lack of logic, I love. I know quite a lot of people who I would identify as crazy people. They would as well. We have a lot of fun mental health issues in our family. I always grew up with this acceptance that nothing’s gone wrong. There are crazy people who exist in the world and that’s fine. I think Alice, in a youthful way, takes that on the story. It accepts there are people who are going to make some weird decisions and that’s okay.
FB It really does capture that. In terms of pop culture, you mentioned Dungeons and Dragons and the references in video games, I’ve noticed there’s a huge through line of Alice. In almost every game I’ve ever seen, there’s some Alice component. Do you have a favorite Alice in pop culture item that you like?
JC I enjoy Dungeons and Dragons. I love the video game Borderlands, which has a lot of Alice imagery. I think my favorite is probably the Batman: Arkham Asylum graphic novel, which I just love. It’s this beautifully illustrated graphic novel about Batman going into Arkham Asylum and gradually losing his sanity. It’s very inspired by Alice in Wonderland. A lot of the villains in Batman already are. There’s very much these threads of madness and the Mad Hatter.
Even the Penguin, there’s all this imagery that lines up. So you have this beautiful graphic novel of him just going progressively mad, surrounded by Alice in Wonderland motifs and imagery. That’s what feels so special about Alice in Wonderland, it can be drawn for inspiration for something light for a younger audience but it could also be drawn for a very dark and disturbing graphic novel. And it works the same. It’s just beautiful. I think that’s what happens when you’re able to create something that taps so deep into a human level. It means you can use it in so many different ways.
FB A lot of stories now are based on IP because people like stories that are familiar and told in an unfamiliar way. On the business side, there’s a recognizable aspect for the marketing. I know this is not lost on you because you’re working on an animated series that’s based on Edgar Allan Poe, but your spin on it is a little different. Can you talk about that?
JC I’ve been working for a couple of years on a series called A Raven in the Woods. It’s a reimagining of Edgar Allan Poe. I loved Poe as a child. I loved the language, the poetry, the darkness, and, similar to Alice, the acceptance of madness. That’s where they meet in the middle. Poe, like Lewis Carroll, doesn’t treat his mad characters as nothing. They’re just his characters. They’re not irrational. They are just who they are and they are to be dealt with.
So I loved Poe and felt there was something so visual in his language that would pair well with animation. He writes in this incredibly emotive, twisted world that I thought could be best represented by animation. There are a lot of great live-action adaptations but they’re all dark and gloomy rooms, which is technically accurate. But when you’re reading Poe’s work, it doesn’t feel like a dark gloomy room, it feels like a twisting shadow and peering lights. I thought it worked well with animation but I didn’t want to do a direct translation. Similar to how you engage with the Alice world, I wanted to bring the feeling and the parts of Poe that I love into a new story that worked as a standalone piece of animation for kids. It shows a young Edgar Poe trying to get his brother Allan through the woods before Allan is turned into a raven. Allan’s cursed and as they move through the woods, a lot of the people in the woods have gone mad. There’s a curse on the woods and there’s a big, mysterious overlord. A lot of the “mad” people speak in rhyme and speak in poetry.
It’s this adventure through the woods and the logic in my head was that this was the real-life adventure that inspired the later Edgar Allan Poe to write his stories. He actually wasn’t very creative at all; he was just mining from two weeks he had as a kid. It’s got a lot of the characters and the elements and the moments of his work, but it’s its own story about a kid trying to deal with a lot of the themes that come up in Poe. Themes of fear, how to overcome that, and how to deal with yourself and the world when everything feels mad.
FB Not dissimilar at all to Alice. I think that’s really relatable and answers the question we often get from executives “Why now?” Given how chaotic the world feels, it’s great to deal with stories that are realistic to the anxiety that kids feel, whether it’s the various wars they’re reading about or the climate and the fact that there’s nothing they feel like they can do about it. I’ve noticed that with my kids. So stories that are thematically similar to what you’re talking about answer that question of why it’s important.
JC Thank you. I think we need this stuff. We live in a chaotic time and our art needs to reflect that. Thankfully, we’re not the first people to have lived in a chaotic time so there are lovely things from the past.
FB We’re also trying to get grounded in what’s real. One of the things about Alice in Wonderland, if you look back on it, the question is “Is this a dream? Is this real?” Trying to parse out reality versus fantasy, facts versus fiction, which we’re dealing with a lot of late. That sounds like a really exciting project.
JC I’m working with a producer, Rick Mischel, who’s wonderful, and we’ve teamed up with TeamTO which is a great French animation house.
FB They’re terrific. I love their animation.
JC They’ve been amazing so far. Wonderfully French, which has been a great treat. On one of the first calls, the head of finance was just sitting 10 feet away from the camera stroking a cat. I was like, that’s the kind of stuff we need. We’re working with them and a director called Christian De Vita, who’s an incredible director. He’s done a lot of Wes Anderson and Tim Burton stuff. We’re working on putting together a packet for it and then going out and trying to sell it. It’s been a great, great process and hopefully, it will lead somewhere.
FB Fingers crossed. We’ll want to check back in with you and certainly have you on the show when you need to promote it because it’s coming out.
I’m curious about the romantic comedy genre. I would imagine that you know something about that and that it’s been lacking. It’s one of the staples and one of my favorite movie genres. Why do you think we’ve lost that?
JC It’s a really tough question. My dad has made a lot of romantic comedies. That’s his bag. It’s tough. I feel like there’s very little to be learned from him because the truth about him is that he is literally the sappiest romantic person in the world. It is one hundred percent genuine. That’s how he talks, thinks, and breathes. But I think it’s a really tough thing. One thing, it’s a genre that needs to keep changing. Action is action, and you need to develop it, but honestly, action holds up. But both romance and comedy are things that develop as humans develop. If you are romantic in the way people were romantic in the 1950s, you’ll probably get arrested. If you tell jokes that were funny in the 50s, you are not getting laughs, I promise. I think these are things that need to keep being pushed and reinvented because, with both romance and comedy, it’s the feeling of something new. The feeling of being in love is, “I’ve never felt like this about a person before.”
FB What about the formula of the meet-cute and the tension of “clearly they’re not getting along”?
JC We got used to the formulas. I think you can get used to the formula for an action film and it doesn’t lessen it. But to me, When Harry Met Sally, feels radical. It’s weird. It cuts away to things, it’s skipping time. I think romantic comedies have to feel unique because it should feel like meeting a person who’s shifting your life. When we get used to the tropes, they can still be good if you want to make The Notebook. That’s proper romance. But I think with a romantic comedy, it has to feel fun and it has to feel fresh. That takes reinvention.
I think we’re in a weird spot at the moment where no one’s quite cracked it in a while. We’re all just really familiar with the tropes. Everyone watched these films, everyone started acting like the people in these films. There are all these people pretending to be leading men from romantic comedies in the 90s, and 2000s. They’re all on dating apps and it’s horrible. When you go on a dating app you see 200 people’s perceptions of who they are as a romantic lead. You watch everyone label themselves as the Hugh Grant type. Or, “I’m just a witty guy,” or “I’m the Billy Crystal, he doesn’t care.” These things are so played out. You’ve got to find a way of making something feel weird and fresh and new. But that’s really tough when we work in an industry that doesn’t like taking chances on fresh and new stuff. Also, let’s be real, romantic comedies live and die on the stars, on the chemistry. It’s tough to get a weird, new, fresh take that two stars are willing to sign on for and they happen to have chemistry. I think it’s a really tall order.
FB I agree with that. With all the dating apps, trying to find a way to make that at all romantic seems to be an impossibility. But also, somebody will do it and it’ll break out and maybe there’ll be a fresh take on it. But to your point, we have all sorts of other genres that people are spending more time on. I just miss the chemistry between two stars. The Notebook is something my daughter has gone back to and it works because both male leads are equally appealing. So she really has a dilemma that you can buy into. But that was based on a novel that was highly successful.
So the kinds of movies your dad wrote, were his own ideas, right? They weren’t based on anything, your dad had a romantic idea. For example, your dad wrote Notting Hill, which was one of my favorites. There’s an ongoing joke with my stepkids because whenever they say, “What should we watch?” I’m like, “Well, what about Notting Hill?” I’ve been saying it over and over and over so many times that they’re dead. They look at me like, that is the dumbest joke ever. But it’s a good movie. The chemistry between the two leads is so amazing.
JC I remember once asking my dad, “Did you know when you were writing these films that ended up being big hits, that they were going to be hits?” He said, “Absolutely not at all. I really didn’t feel it. I just wrote and tried to stay passionate about it.” Then he paused and went, “Actually not Notting Hill. I was sitting at home and I thought, ‘What if a movie star fell in love with a random guy?’ And I went, Oh, that’s a hit.’”
FB Also, you have Julia Roberts at the height of her stardom with that smile that would just crush anybody. Then you have Hugh Grant, who’s a very contained performer and when those two come into contact, it’s gold. It’s wonderful.
JC I think one thing that’s worth looking at is that romantic comedy is being explored in other mediums successfully like the Amazon show The Summer I Turned Pretty. It’s a smash hit for a younger audience and that’s a rom-com, essentially. Even looking at someone like Taylor Swift, her songs are romantic, amusing, and comedic at points and that has gripped people. Obviously, people want these kinds of things. I think it’ll just take someone breaking a new way of doing it in movies.
FB Certainly in television. My daughter keeps telling me “Dad, it’s one girl, two guys. That’s what you need to do. Just focus on teenagers. Two guys, one girl. That’s the formula.” She’s watched all those shows you’ve talked about.
You have a funny story about your grandmother knowing the Liddells, Alice Liddell, which you have to share with us. That’s the first time I’ve come into contact with somebody whose family member knew the literal muse forall things Alice, for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,for my books, for your writing The Brothers Wilde.
JC It’s a bizarre and wonderful story. My grandmother, my mum’s mum, Lady Jill Freud, is an amazing woman. She’s 96 or 97 right now but World War II broke out when she was little, six or seven. She was living in London at that time with her family and they knew London was going to be bombed ruthlessly. So the British government enacted this thing they called “the evacuation,” which was an insane thing to happen. It could never happen nowadays. They literally took every child in London, took them to a train station, put a number around their neck, and put them on a train somewhere. They literally just shipped them off. When they arrived at these stations, people from the local towns came to the station and just went “Yeah, I can take two,” or “I run a farm, I can take two young boys to work there.” These kids just got rehoused for what was, at that point, an indefinite period of time.
So my granny was sent to Oxford and taken in by this family, the Butlers. Mrs. Butler was 100 and wasn’t allowed to know there was a war on because they were worried it would scare her. But the house was run by these three Butler sisters. Two of them were university professors and they were three unmarried older women. They had been three of the kids that Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson, had taken down the Isis River in Oxford when they were younger. He’d done these long boat journeys down the Isis and he would read them stories every night. He would come up with stories and a lot of his early things were first tested out on these little girls. So my grandmother lived with the Butlers and they had these toys from their time with Lewis Carroll he had actually made by hand. He was a great craftsman and he had made these toys.
So every Sunday afternoon, my granny would be allowed to go into the drawing room and play with these Lewis Carroll’s toys. It was this incredible time in Oxford where all these great writers and poets and people who were allowed to not fight in the war for academic reasons would write. So she lived with the Butlers and she met Alice Liddell. Alice was close with them and would come over and she was this sort of enigmatic figure known and revered around Oxford. She had tea with J.R.R. Tolkien. By her memory, he was a friendly guy.
So it was just this amazing time she was around Oxford and absorbing it. But also it was a time of war and chaos and people dying. When she talks about it it’s this very mixed feeling of this beautiful time but so underpinned with fear.
FB Was she there for the entire war?
JC She was there for the entire war pretty much I believe. She was there for five years of the war. By the time the war ended, she was 16-17 and had been at C.S. Lewis’ house for a bit and she stayed on to manage his estate for another year or two, I believe. Then at the end of that, she was accepted into RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but couldn’t afford to go and C.S. Lewis paid for her entire education. He covered it and she went on to become an early movie actress.
FB What an amazing story and an amazing life.
JC At that time in Oxford, there were so many incredible people, incredible minds all talking to each other. These were discrete authors. They all knew each other and they had writing groups.
FB Could you imagine those writing groups? Wow, that would have been intimidating.
JC “Yeah, I don’t know if this White Rabbit character is really working for me.”
FB “I don’t think a closet is where you want the kids to go through. No one is gonna buy that.” The video you sent me of your grandmother, what’s that from?
JC She’s an incredible woman with incredible stories. A few years ago, I sat her down and we talked through her life and everything she’d done. It was a really wonderful experience. It was something I wanted to do, obviously to have the footage, but also it is such a privilege to get to talk to someone who’s lived through wars and everything. I mean, ninety-seven is a lot of years.
FB You’re very fortunate in terms of being surrounded by so many creative minds and creative family members and having a template on which you can base your creative aspirations. It’s been really delightful to listen to you articulate what you’ve experienced so far, in your life and I really, I really appreciated you working on this project. I didn’t know you very well and you delivered. I think our listeners are really going to enjoy hearing this.
JC They’re good, fun people. There’s a quote from a Madness song written on our wall at home that says, “There’s always something happening and it’s usually quite loud.” That summed up our family well.
FB That’s great. I hope you’ll come back when your show is produced.
JC Thank you so much for having me. This was such an absolute treat for the day and just fun to get into all this and chat about comedy and things
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have my dear, dear friend Eshel Ezer join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Eshel Ezer, welcome to the show. I’m really excited to be talking to you today. You are a photographer. You’ve worked on There’s Something About Mary, you did Wicked and worked with Julia Stiles, you did the art in Birdbath, you took photos at my first wedding, and you did a colorful piece of art for my parents’ 50th anniversary.
I have really strong memories of the There’s Something About Mary job. When I first went to the marketing department, they were really excited about the movie and there was a lot of pressure to deliver really great marketing materials. We had to have a photoshoot with Cameron Diaz, so I put my hand up and said, “Hey, I have a photographer who would be great. I believe he’s worked with Cameron.” The head of marketing said, “If you can get Cameron to sign off on it, then we can hire him.” And you had done a job with her before and she was excited to work with you again.
Eshel Ezer I don’t know how old she was when we first worked together but she was extremely young. She was a model then and I shot her a few times. We shot for a hair magazine, a big editorial with some famous hairdressers. It was for Modern Salon or American Salon, one of the two big trade magazines in the hair industry. They always used to do just hair, regular photoshoots. This fashion editor had a vision and we hooked up and I told her, “If you want us to do photo shoots together, let’s be creative. Let’s try and give another dimension to what regular hairdressers used to do.” So we came up with more of a fashion concept story and connected the hair into a bigger story with more body and action. The hair is part of a scene. I think that was the first job I did with Cameron.
We came up with a crazy scene. We shot it at a historic hotel in downtown Los Angeles. She was the star model in the editorial. It came out phenomenal. So beautiful. The hair was great. It was not cheesy or corny.
FB She is remarkably photogenic. When you see her in real life, certain angles are magnificent. Then there are other angles that sometimes you go okay, she looks like a regular person. But when you take a photograph of her or she’s filmed in a movie – just stunning.
EE She’s a professional. It’s not just how she looks. It’s her energy. She brings something with that smile, in her eyes. She’s a free soul. A Southern California girl who got hooked up in this fashion scene when I met her. We liked each other. She loved the photos. I liked the way she was not complaining about anything. Crazy hours, lava lights, and very specific directions.
She came to my apartment on Kings Road and I did a photo for her. It was beautiful. I shot her behind one of our windows, which was an old Los Angeles window with the squares. She just looks so innocent. So I think we had this thing. My mom was visiting when I was doing that shoot. It was more than just a young model. There was a connection.
FB No wonder she was so interested in working with you. I didn’t realize at the time. I knew you two had worked together before but I didn’t know it was so successful. The same chemistry seemed to be there when we shot the poster photos for There’s Something About Mary.
Just to go back, she is a relentless worker and she never complained on Mary. She didn’t complain when she came to that photoshoot. There was no prima donna posing at all. She just got right to it. But I remember the concern was her skin had broken out and we really needed to do a good makeup job. I thought we might not even be able to do the shoot but the makeup artist did a fantastic job and then you guys went to work. What do you remember about the photo shoot? Do you remember the shot that ended up on the poster?
EE We had a creative meeting right before the shoot at Fox. We were meeting with the head creative director, Tony Sella. We sat at his office and the advertising agency brought over 70 different layouts and you could tell that he’s not flipping over anything. I sat quietly. Let them do the talking and I’ll shoot it. But then Tony looked at me and said, “Eschel, what are you saying?” I didn’t know how to say none of what they showed was good.
FB You were trying to be diplomatic.
EE I was. I said, “I think I know what we need to do.” But the other people kept on talking. Tony Sella said, “Guys, the photographer’s talking,” and everybody became silent. I said, “She’s so innocent, she’s so beautiful, and she has this incredible free spirit. We need to capture that so everybody can relate to her.” Tony Sella said, “Meeting over. He knows what he’s doing.”
So on the shoot, Cameron was in makeup for three and a half hours. The makeup artist did a great job but it was killing our time. Then they wanted to have hours on styling. Then her manager said “Guys, that’s it. She has to go, you have half an hour.” I said, “Let’s stop it. I cannot shoot it.” We spent five hours on prepping and it’s super important – hair, makeup, styling. But now I need the equivalent amount of time to shoot it. Tony Sella arrived and he negotiated with the manager. Cameron was unbelievable. She was, “Let’s have fun. Let’s get the best out of this day. I don’t want to leave so don’t tell me to leave.” Her attitude was in our favor for getting the best shoot done.
Now, I knew that I was gonna have a problem in a technical sense. It was before digital so everything was on Polaroids. I knew that the first Polaroid had to be beautiful because if the first Polaroid was horrible, she would lose it. After so many hours, she knows her limitations, and it kills your confidence. She was an actress by then she wasn’t a model anymore. We built a crazy lighting setup. I’ll never forget it. We had so many lights. It had to be smooth but with contrast at the same time so it wouldn’t be boring and flat and the photo would have some depth.
I did the first Polaroid and it was amazing. Not for me but it was amazing enough for her to say “Wow, it’s beautiful.” But for me, it was not and I knew I had to work on it because when you put so much makeup on and then add the lights, you’re gonna see the difference between her skin color on her neck and her face. So you need little touch-ups so it’s not gonna look like she has a mask on her face. Then you need to work with the lights and everything is going to be nice and smooth. Then Tony Sella said, “Eschel,” and he stood like an inch away from my face. Tony said, “Make all America love her.” In my entire 25-year career as a fashion photographer, I never had more difficult creative direction than that.
When we started, she started to loosen up and she felt amazing. With the direction, it was to try to get her not posing. We used the wind machine just to have the hair blowing. Nowadays, with digital touch-ups, you can do it right away. You go to the computer and say, “We have the shot.” But when it’s on film, it needs to be processed. So we kept on shooting. I knew we had shots that could be the one. Sometimes the first one is the best but you just cover more. You take more film and shoot more. The bending, chin-up look, and smile is such a simple photo. I think that’s why all of America loved her. It’s a simple photo, nothing looks made up.
FB It captures what Tony was asking. You fall for her because she is the All-American woman – the haircut, the pose, and the kind of whimsy that she communicated. You feel the joy of the process.
What is your technique to bring out that with models and subjects? Is it different each time? Is the physicality a big part of it? Is it about the story and trying to tap into the character? Because you’re not going to say to her, “Hey, America needs to love you.” You’re just going to say, “Be who you are because we love you. I love you. Everybody loves you.”
EE There is a technique. Every successful photographer has his own technique on how to connect. Throughout the years, I’ve learned what I have to do to create this connection. So later on, when it’s show time, you get more out of the shoot than just a photo, you get feelings, emotions, and connection. What I did with her was exactly what I was doing, just on a more appreciative and sensitive level because of who she was. Our past connection, for sure, helped. And yes, the moment she knows you’re not just using words when you say “You’re beautiful and I easily fall in love with you.” If she knows you’re not just bullshitting her because you want to get the job done and leave which, technically, this is what happens. But it’s telling a story to her. The story is so important, especially because she’s an actress. The story is so important. It has nothing to do with the movie. It’s the story of the photoshoot. Who’s the character? What are we doing here? What are we doing together? What kind of feelings and emotions would we like to capture for her? At a certain moment, all barriers were off and something amazing happened.
FB I love that guy, Tony Sella. I remember from the first meetings when they put all the different posters up, he had a real sense of the artist. The art had a little Steve Jobs in terms of the aesthetic. I certainly did not hear that he shut down the room. Those are the talking heads. They’re the same people from different departments giving notes over and over. They end up diminishing the idea by little paper cuts. But Tony recognized one, the photographer who’s actually going to grab the shot is speaking, and two, once you said what you said, he cut the meeting off, knowing that you have to execute.
I remember the manager throwing his weight around and Cameron standing up because that’s who she is. It was a very stressful shoot because there was a lot at stake. We knew it was going to be a successful movie and we were rushing to come out in the summer when we were originally supposed to come out in the fall. Then right at the end, I snuck in and said, “Hey, Cameron, let’s do some photos.” You did the same technique on me and I have some of the goofiest photographs of all time. But there was Cameron Diaz and so they all look pretty amazing because she’s amazing. So I had the glow. I printed out some where I had at least a decent expression. But in looking back at some of the stuff we did, I was going “Oh, no wonder I never printed that.” Trying to dance. It was deeply embarrassing.
EE It’s embarrassing to stand in front of a camera when that’s not your job.
FB But those are some of the best photos I have of being on that movie because it was just a camera, myself, you, and Tony, there was nobody else. You nailed it. Every time I see the poster, I’m exceedingly proud of our collaboration.
EE That poster, the real size, hangs in my studio in Tel Aviv. Everybody saw that I was so in love with the movie and they’d ask, “Why do you have these?” “What do you mean why? I shot it.”
FB You shot Cameron when she was 16 and you also ended up shooting Julia Stiles for my movie Wicked, when she was 16. Both movies came out around the same time. Wicked went to the Sundance Film Festival in January 1998 and There’s Something About Mary came out in July 1998. What I discovered on Wicked was that I thought Julia Stiles was a movie star in the making. She was remarkable in the film and she was very photogenic. I told her I was going to pretend she was already a movie star and put her solely on the poster in the same way we did with Cameron Diaz. But I needed some really great photos so you and I went to work on that. Let’s talk a little bit about that shoot.
Wicked is a murder mystery that takes place in a gated community. Julia Stiles basically takes over her mother’s role when her mother is killed. So it’s a little bit of a Lolita-esque story. We needed to find the right balance of seductress and thriller. She had some really great costuming so we brought some of that in and we went with some All-American jeans, a t-shirt, and then some nightgowns because of the dynamic with her father. It’s no secret she wants to take over her mother’s role in all capacities. So walk us through what it was like working with Julia in comparison to the There’s Something Mary shoot and some of the choices you thought were important to capture the essence of the film and who she is as an actress.
EE It’s a totally different agenda when a person is just a model or it’s an actress. You basically have to shoot for a very specific assignment with a very specific name. So it’s not just to capture the beauty, “Let’s make you beautiful and do it in the desert or the beach or in a convertible.” That’s how you come up with stories for editorials. When you shoot editorial, just a story and a beautiful model, then you just go and perform. She’s a good model and you’re a good photographer, so you create whatever you want.
When it’s a movie, and it’s an actress what I have to do is hit right on the complexity of the characters. With Wicked, it was like a week-long job we did in one day. I remember we shot in the studio and we went on the rooftop and we did a lot of stuff on the rooftop in many different styles. The movie is called Wicked and Julia’s the lead part so we tried to bring out the wicked part of her personality.
FB We were looking to bring out three things, the danger, the vulnerability, which you also capture, and the seductress part of it. Remember, we’re talking about a 17-year-old, so it felt a little daring walking the line with her parents there. But Julia, like Cameron, was completely up for it and wanted to take a lot of chances.
EE She is, and I will never forget, extremely smart. Her IQ is way above average. Usually, we say “high IQ” for somebody who needs to go to a different profession. But, with Julia, I think it enables her to play different characters very easily. There was 100% cooperation with whatever we said and wanted to do. She was jumping in and out of different characters when we wanted to bring the softness and the purity. But then there were the twisted colors and the shadows. The wicked side.
FB Didn’t you use certain filters to get some of these crazy backgrounds from the sky?
EE Many times I use colors on lights to control and get the right density. But these are manipulations of the film that I knew would bleach out skin. The photo will come out like pure porcelain with this coldness and if we’re going to use the red lipstick it will pop because I knew what this manipulation of the color is going to do. It’s like skin dyeing.
FB Explain to me why the film is so different in the photographs for Wicked and the technique you used.
EE First of all, there is a format difference. When you blow up certain formats you will hold the grain. In film you speak about grain, in digital you don’t have grain. If you want grain you need to create. Back then, with film, different types of films had different sizes, different densities, different contrasts, and different ways the film would react to different lighting and exposure. What I wanted was to have the technique help us go all the way to the extreme. It’s mind-blowing to see her expressions combined with the lighting, the unique processing, and her look with the makeup. It changes so much. It’s really mind-blowing to see because you see the complexity of the character. She has so many different sides. It’s wicked.
FB Your passion for the work and the idea of creating something fresh was ever present when we worked together and now it’s many years later and you have a different career but I can still feel the passion you have for doing quality work. It really comes down to this being your art.
We met years and years ago.
EE We bonded over scuba diving.
FB We bonded over scuba diving in Cozumel. Then I asked you to shoot a poster for a play I did called Birdbath. I was super nervous and really bad. I had to have a few drinks to relax and then we really got into it.
EE We got into it.
FB It took a while. But once we got into it, those images were very arresting.
EE I remember our conversations to understand the play, what it’s about, and what we would like to capture. “So the poster will show just the actors? No, that’s boring.” We wanted to try and bring something from the feeling of the play. We used overtime exposure and transparent images. Nobody does these things anymore. Now you take Photoshop and “bang, bang.” But it was incredible to create. One of the things that we did technically was, we had to have lights on the outside but we were on the second or third floor in this building downtown and we didn’t have the budget for cranes with lights. We had nothing. I really think we were never prima donnas. Creative people do creative things. We had to bring lights from the windows at night and we pulled these stands and we extended the stands and we tied them to things inside the apartment. We just drove the lights from the inside of the loft and tied them with ropes so it wouldn’t fall on somebody in the street.
FB What we were doing was, on some level, illegal. Sneaking into the building. Putting up lights. Not asking for permission. Just apologize later.
EE Let’s go do it. Get it done. Beautiful.
FB You had an art show that I helped organize and Tony Scott was the first one to buy your art. Tell me that story.
EE It was a project I started during my second year in art school back in Israel. We got an assignment to shoot something in motion. So I took my brother to the beach in the Mediterranean just after sunset. I used a strobe flash and I was holding the camera and he did something in the water with the sun behind him. The manipulation of the colors of the film created magic. It was stunning. Then I had the final exam and exhibition at the end of the second year in school. Then I left Israel and went to New York to complete my studies but I kept on shooting this project.
One of the things my teacher in Israel said was, “This is beautiful. Try to see if you can get closer.” And I kept thinking, “What does it mean to get closer?” He’s in the water, I’m with a camera. It’s not an underwater shoot. How am I gonna get closer? Then it just kind of became a memory. But it was a project I wanted to keep on progressing. It meant something to me. It was a man’s body coming out of the water. I thought, “This is what I want emerging out of the water, man’s creation is from water.” The ocean is my forever love. With my old injury in the army where I shattered my back, I was physically in pain for too many decades. So there was a lot of emotional involvement for me in creating this image of a man’s body coming out of the water with a lot of power, but also experiencing and projecting pain. That was the general idea. Then I had to start seeing what kind of colors I wanted to use and how dramatic I wanted to be. We shot this project every time I visited Israel for 10 years. We kept on taking pictures in the Mediterranean, but also in the Dead Sea, with crazy hours because at the Dead Sea, we had to shoot at sunrise, and at the Mediterranean, we had to shoot at sunset.
I needed the sun as a background, as my theater. As an artist, nature is a background and if you know how to work with it, you can do whatever you want with the background. You don’t have to be in the studio, you can do it outdoors if you control the lights. So in the Dead Sea, the sun will be behind my model in the morning, and in the Mediterranean, it will be behind him at sunset. I needed the glow of the sun at those times.
FB Just the beginning and just the end.
EE It could be very apocalyptic. A very extreme environment. You don’t see it with the naked eye. It’s the film that later sees it. So we kept on doing the project. I visited home in the winter and we used to shoot it in January or February in the Mediterranean when it’s 11 degrees centigrade (52 degrees Fahrenheit) in the water and it’s blowing and raining. We used to stand on the beach looking at each other, “We’re crazy, right? We’re not going to do it today. We are going to do it today. No, we are not going to do it. Yes, we’re going to do it.”
FB You’re saying “We’re going to do it,” because he’s the one going in the water.
EE We were both in the water. He needed to be underwater. That was the thing my teacher told me, “Try to get close.” So I had a wide angle three feet away when he was coming out of the water, splashing water. I had my camera in one hand with the aperture, speed, and everything set according to what I wanted to achieve with manipulation of the light. In the other hand, I was holding a stove, a flash, with gelatine over it for the color that I wanted to create. He would go underwater and come out, splashing all over the place, and I had to grab the shot and move the camera away. Otherwise, it’s all gonna get wet. So it was just him and me, for years no assistance.
FB And how did Tony Scott become involved?
EE That was crazy. You’re artistic and you’re creative, and you’re an entrepreneur with the way you think and the way you see the future, and your ability to connect to different areas. We were speaking about these photos and we became such close friends, we shared things clients or friends in the business don’t usually share. We said we needed to do something with these photos. They have to be seen. But I didn’t want to do a regular show. I don’t care about going in to schmooze the galleries. I’m a photographer. I have an agent. I have to be nice to everybody and do these political things with the ad agencies and creative directors. I didn’t want to do it in the galleries. So we said, “Let’s do it ourselves. Let’s do two nights. We’re going to use your house. We’re going to show one photo. We’re going to have a party. We’re going to do the first night for friends and we can do the second night for industry people.” We showed one photo and we had a light table with some slides.
FB That one photo was spectacular. Remember, when you had to go blow it up, how obsessed you were about getting the grain right? Those poor people in the lab.
EE It was the biggest size back then. It was museum quality. So it will be preserved for 200 years guaranteed. Who the hell is gonna live to see if the colors stay right or not? So we blew it up and the grain just became like, “Whoah!”
FB It was part of the picture.
EE So we hung this huge thing on the wall and we covered it with a very light blue sheet. We hung it in a way that we could pull a string and the whole thing would fall. We had to have this surprise factor. Everybody walked in and there was this huge thing covered. People knew I was a photographer so they thought it was probably some picture. We waited and waited and people were anxious. We pushed it later and later we said, “People are probably gonna leave before seeing it. We have to unveil it.”
There were two important people I invited. One was a good friend of mine, an ex-model, and actress, Emmanuelle Sallet (Pytka). She was in Under the Cherry Moon, the Prince film, and she did beautiful photo shoots. She had a very famous perfume campaign in Vogue and Elle. She moved to LA and I met her at the agency and said, “Oh my god, I have to shoot this girl. Who is she?” We became best friends. I have amazing photos of her. She got married to one of the top commercial directors, Joe Pytka. Back then he was doing the Pepsi commercials with Michael Jackson. He was the biggest commercial director.
FB He’s also a wild man and really hard to work for.
EE Their story is crazy because she worked on the set with him on the Pepsi commercial and he threw her off the set and then apologized and took her for dinner. And married ever after.
FB My first wife worked with Joe and he loved her because she was so expressive. But, he was a bear to work with, though if you gave a lot, he loved you and would work with you over and over. I heard stories about anybody who wasn’t in front of the camera, certainly, if you were in front of the camera, you were at risk, but anything around the camera you were definitely a target.
EE I had never met Joe before but I invited Emmanuelle and I asked her to bring him because I knew who he was. Then, I was standing next to the photo speaking with the people who gave me my first shot in L.A. Tony Lane and Nancy Donald, the co-creative directors at CBS Records. I shot album covers with them. They knew me as a fashion photographer who was shooting rock bands so they were asking me about the photo, “Okay, Eschel, we know you shoot rock bands, what is this?”
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tony Scott coming in. Tony was a friend because I worked with his ex-girlfriend, Tanya and he loved the photos. I shot crazy photos for some editorial and she brought them home and Tony saw them and said, “I have to meet this photographer.” So Tony and I became friends and I invited him and Tanya to come to our opening. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tony coming with his red baseball cap and I saw him coming closer to the photo and then stepping backwards. Then coming in again and going backward. With his heavy British accent, he said “Eschel, Eschel, what is it?” I said, “Tony, what do you mean? It’s a photo”. He said “No, but what is it? Is it a photo or a painting? I cannot decide.” I said “Tony, It’s a photo.” He said, “So how did you do the grain?”
He went in and out to see the little parts of how the film was breaking. I shot it on high, extreme grain 35 millimeter film so when we blew it up that big it became like a painting. So Tony asked what I needed to finish the whole show and I said, “Well, I need money.” He said, “You’ll have the money. Let’s have a meeting.” So I went to meet him at Paramount, he was editing Days of Thunder at the time, and he said, “I want to do more. I want to buy it.” I said, “What do you mean you want to buy it? You can’t. It’s Frank’s photo.” That was our arrangement.
FB I wanted the first one. Remember we framed it and you didn’t sign it? That was so stupid. I should’ve had you sign it first.
EE We’re so dumb. But anyway, I said, “That’s my friend’s photo. It doesn’t matter how much you pay.” He said, “I need one.” I responded, “Well, I’m not making another one.” So Tony said, “I need to talk to Frank. I want to buy it for Anthony Quinn’s 75th birthday.” He had just finished shooting the movie Revenge with Quinn and Kevin Costner and Tony wanted this photo for Quinn’s 75th birthday. So he flew me to New York and I printed another photo at a different lab. I killed them because they were not used to the size and the preciseness of the colors and the grain and all those things. But we printed it, framed it, and I personally delivered it to Anthony Quinn’s penthouse in New York. The son opened the door and we delivered it as a present from Tony Scott and I left and that’s it. And it remained a great story.
FB I was also just reminded of the crazy story of when the two of us went to a party and we had just seen Dead Calm, which we were always talking about. “That movie is amazing! The girl is stunning!”
EE And she walks in with a girlfriend. Nicole Kidman. Our jaws just dropped.
FB Well, I had to go talk to her. I was so nervous and I started screwing that up. Luckily you were there. You were calm like, “Yeah, we saw the movie.”
EE She was so impressed that we loved the movie.
FB She was so into it because it was her first trip to America. She was stunning. She was engaging. Sweet. Somehow, I got her phone number. I said, “We should go get coffee.” She goes, “Yeah, sure. I would like to.” I’m like, “You would?!”
EE For us, she was the star of Dead Calm. For her, we were the Hollywood people and she had no clue how to get around in Hollywood.
I met her again maybe a year later. I shot this little commercial in Miami and then we drove up the coast to Daytona where Tony Scott was shooting Days of Thunder. It was the weekend they did the Daytona 500 scene. Nicole and I had lunch together on the set and Tom Cruise was there.
FB I talked to her two or three times trying to set up when we could get together because she had a hard out. She was leaving on a Friday and I’m like, “Okay, let’s try and figure out when we can get together.” She goes, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m not gonna be able to get together with you. I’m doing this movie Days of Thunder and I’m flying down Florida and Tom Cruise is in it.” As soon as she said Tom Cruise, I thought, “That’s it. Tom Cruise is going to fall in love with her.” Easiest prediction I’ve ever made.
EE On the set, Tom had a flu or something and then a few days later Nicole had the flu and everybody knew that they were dating.
FB That’s funny.
EE Insights from Tony Scott and his second assistant director, Scott Metcalfe.
FB You also do really beautiful black and white photographs. You were kind enough to come to Minnesota and shoot black-and-white photos of me and Sandra prepping before we got married. Then you took a bunch of photos at the wedding.
EE I used a red filter to get the clouds to pop like crazy. It makes the blue skies extremely dark and the contrast with the white clouds is just unbelievable. It enhances the contrast on the skin. You look amazing, bro.
FB That’s what 20-year-old skin looks like.
You also did a photograph in Minneapolis with my two brothers, Steven and David, and my sister Michelle. We wanted to have a photo as a gift for my parents for their 50th anniversary.
EE We flew together to Minnesota to shoot it and I had to dig through your siblings for their characters. Who is what? Where is the complexity? Of the four siblings, there is a reason why each one of you is doing what you’re doing. There is a reason why she’s on the sofa like a princess in the front. We worked and we used this technique again so her skin has the same tone as Julia in the Wicked photos.
FB Completely different from what you did with There’s Something About Mary but it’s a style and a technique that you have used throughout your career.
EE It was important to bring out the personality. I remember the conversations with each one of you. You look like a Hollywood producer.
FB I still have that jacket. I wore it two days ago.
EE That’s crazy. It looks good. There is a reason why he’s jumping in the air. The one you blew up was the one where his legs are spread out and he looks like an X-Wing. The skies are brighter and you can see the branches. With this brother, we did some with the helmet on.
FB Yes, but my mother would have lost it. She could barely accept that three of us were not smiling, at least Michelle was smiling. My mom hated photographs where the kids weren’t smiling but to your point, it does capture an essence.
EE It was a very, very unique, exhausting job to understand the characters.
FB You have to deal with somebody else’s family. Can you imagine?
EE It was a great experience. Everything we did was with a lot of fun and joy.
FB Then remember you came up for the Seattle Film Festival and shot PR for Wicked.
EE There are shots of Julia lying on the carpet, right? We had to show her and Patrick from above. They can be in any magazine.
FB Do you miss it? You’re no longer shooting photographs but I’m really struck by the level of professionalism, passion, and artistry, as if we just did this two weeks ago.
EE It was a major part of my life for 25 years. But the fact it has been doesn’t mean the stimulation is not sustained. It didn’t fade. It faded as a profession because I didn’t want to do it anymore. I got tired of doing it and, at some point, I didn’t see the purpose anymore.
FB Also a big physical toll on you.
EE Crazy physical toll. Big toll on the family. It got to me that I would have to take pictures for the rest of my life if I was gonna make a living. I felt enough was enough. I was in the studio shooting cosmetic catalogs or swimwear catalogs and most of them were always artistic. There was a photo I took in Africa with an American model in a bathing suit holding a cheetah out in the wild. It looks like theater and it’s beautiful. But I started asking myself, “What is it for? What’s the purpose?” It’s a catalog and a catalog is for people to buy. So it’s not really the art of generating something for others.
FB We all transition. We all have to evolve.
EE I even felt that at some point, most women around the world are not models. When I take pictures that extreme, “Does it do good to women or bad?” I got to a point where I felt it was bad.
FB People are not that perfect.
EE Nobody’s that perfect and nobody can be reached or touched like this. It was also the feeling of, when I’m on the set, I know what I want to get and I can get it. Because technically I know what I’m doing. But also emotionally, I know what I’m doing. I know how to talk to the models to get the sensuality or the feelings and emotions I want to get. But when the job is over, I’m done. I walk away. It left emptiness and I needed to move on and do other things.
To be able to build two good careers is not easy. It’s hard to do one over a lifetime but it’s not over yet. So who knows where we are going? I’m in the middle of a very exciting career that I have become very good at and it’s great to have these different colors inside as a person.
FB We’re really taking a step back to a period of time that was really creative for me. I produced two movies back to back. A lot of other opportunities came along through producing those movies and you were right there and I was listening to you and your aspirations. Then I transitioned into writing The Looking Glass Wars series and all the art that came with that. Hopefully, the artistry continues even if the medium changes.
EE We’re such good friends and we’ve been friends for decades and it’s crazy. No matter how many years go by, we stay so close. But it has always been your level of understanding the business, but also having the creative eye, and the sensitivity to judge and know what’s good, what’s not good, what you’re looking for. So seeing your artistic side inside your creative way, also as a businessman, I think made it very nice for us and easy for us to connect, because we could speak about things.
FB It’s about choices. When you’re making creative choices, some are elevated, you hope they’re elevated, but you’re still making a choice. So when you point to this one photo, where I put a dot and you put an “X” was because we both went, “Yeah, that is a choice.” We want to use those choices. We’ve had a lot of creative choices. Whether it was There’s Something About Mary, working with Julia for Wicked, doing Birdbath together, or something very personal like my first wedding.
EE It’s funny, my oldest son is sitting next to us and hearing stories that he has never heard before. I have to tell you we always had crazy laughs and hit it off together on a crazy level with where we could go as friends.
FB You were my first male friend, my first guy friend, that I felt was an intimate relationship in the sense of, I’m letting my guard down. That is where the artistry comes from, the vulnerability. We’re making choices, some good, some bad, and we did that for very many years. To your point, coming back here and having this conversation is crazy. So thank you for spending some time with us and sharing your stories and creativity.
EE What a great idea. It was fun being here. Thank you.
For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice, please read our blog and subscribe to our podcast! If you’d like to hear Gerard’s excellent narration of The Looking Glass Wars, click here!
All Things Alice: Interview With Jared Hoffman
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have the hilarious and talented Jared Hoffman join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Welcome to the show, Jared Hoffman. I’m happy to have you on. I wanted to chat with you about your background and your aspirations. My friend Ed Decter was on the show and he was your professor at AFI. He called and suggested we work together, which has been a fantastic collaboration because you bring a unique sense of humor to the blogs that I don’t have. Whenever somebody has a unique voice, I always like to exploit it for as little money as possible and I feel like I’ve done a really good job with you. But it turns out that I pay you more for blogs than anybody else.
Jared Hoffman I’m glad you’ve also said that now so that everyone can resent my blogs.
FB I wanted to go back to your pilot because it was a very funny take on high school, which is a genre I’ve played around in a little bit. Tell me about your experience at the American Film Institute. I’m imagining they said to write something personal or meaningful, something you know a lot about. Is that why you wrote that pilot? Or was there something you were working out that you didn’t work out with your therapist?
JH I’m always working stuff out with my therapists. That’s an awful process. But in my first year at AFI, the things I wrote weren’t necessarily personal things. Everything I write has some kind of personal flair to it but there was no real connection. And there was no “Why are you writing this?” It was mostly just, “Oh, I liked the idea. It seemed like a fun thing to chase.” But when I was going into year two, I realized that while I had samples that I liked, there was nothing I was really proud of besides a spec script I wrote, which is only useful for writing contests right now. They’re not used at all in the industry anymore. Unless you write a 9/11 Seinfeld episode.
FB Do you mean that in terms of television or that you can’t sell a spec script?
JH A TV spec. I’ve noticed the term, for some reason, keeps changing but in my first year, we had a TV comedy writing class and a TV drama writing class. I wrote a Big Mouth episode. We were writing an episode of an existing show. That was really the only thing that I was like, “This is good.” It was the only thing that was actually based on any kind of truth about me. Once that clicked for me, it was like, okay, everything has to be incredibly personal for it to be good, at least at this point in my career. So going into my second year, I knew I had to write something personal, specifically for Ed’s group because Ed wanted us to have some ideas coming in.
Ed handpicks his group based on what everyone else has written and because of their personal stories. Ed’s awesome and he’s very aware of what will help you find success in the industry in the sense, especially as a young writer. I could write some crazy fantasy, high-concept thing that has nothing to do with me and it’ll end up in the pile of high-fantasy concept things that a bunch of other new writers have and no one’s gonna take a second glance at it.
FB Right, right.
JH Ed wanted a paragraph pitch on what you wanted to write about. Also, I knew Ed before going to AFI. He’s actually the one who convinced me to apply to AFI. I remember in the first class he said, “Just so you know, Jared is friends with my daughter, proceed.” Then John, one of your assistants, pitched an idea about a knight because he has a history background. I think he got to the second sentence before Ed interrupted him and said, “No to all of that.” Then we just went to the next person. I was like, “Oh, cool. You said that we know each other. That’s great. Now everyone hates me.” I think Ed only passed two out of the six ideas to go on to the next steps. It took people weeks to get past even the idea phase to the beat phase of the script.
I always said, “Ed bullied me into writing well.” He didn’t really bully us, but sitting in the beat phase was probably the most frustrating thing ever for everyone in that class. Everyone was just like, “I just want to figure it out on the page.” And Ed was like, “I don’t want that. That’s not how this works.” I came up with an idea based on my therapeutic boarding school when I was 16 and the idea was a kid starts hearing the voice of Christ, but he’s basically at a place where if you were to say that you’d end up in the padded room. So it evolved from back to my original high school. I’m not going to say the name but it was a madhouse. I have really fun stories about that place. It was an all-boys Catholic school and everyone was weirdly really close and very touchy when there were no girls around.
FB That’s scary territory for me for a couple of reasons. One, I went to an all-boys Catholic school for my freshman year of high school and then St. Margaret’s, an all-girls school, merged with mine. I’m going to go back and just quickly take issue with the notion that Ed was bullying you because that’s what my kids say. I have a senior and a sophomore and they talk about their teachers being bullies at school. I said, “You are being teased. Bullying at school is when you come home bloody or the gym teacher has a paddle with little holes in it or you get hit on the hand by a nun. That’s bullying, not somebody teasing you for making a stupid comment.”
JH Oh yeah. It was not actually bullying. I remember, after the first class, when almost everyone’s ideas were shut down, most of them weren’t something that was going to stand out. I remember someone said, “You’re gonna be alright because Ed likes you.” I go, “Oh, no, Ed knows me. That just means he has my cell phone number and he’s going to call me and tell me to fix things. I have more classes.” He was a great teacher. I really wanted him. It’s known that Ed is one of the harder teachers at AFI and some people were afraid of that. I dropped out of college, so when I was at AFI, I kind of felt like the dunce. But it was like, “I’m here. I’m paying all this money. This is graduate school. I don’t want the easy teacher.” There were no easy teachers at AFI but I would rather have someone who would force me to be better.
FB It’s not just being tough on the story and tough on the writing. It’s the preparation for life in the business. I’m curious now that you’re out of school and you’re trying to make your way in terms of selling your projects. The pilot I read that you wrote at AFI was such a great concept. What have you learned from Ed? What was unexpected as you’re going through this as you’re going down this path of trying to get projects, meeting with producers, writing spec scripts, and trying to get jobs?
JH The most unexpected thing was a vast majority of people who go to AFI don’t outline, and I was one of them. That’s how I can tell if someone is serious about writing. I’ll be like, “I’ve been outlining for the past couple of weeks”. And people are like, “Oh, I don’t do that.” You don’t have to but it’ll be better if you do. So that’s one thing I learned, how important the outlining phase is.
I grew up in the film industry. I always say that I’m nepo-adjacent. My father passed away 17 years ago and my mom was a makeup artist. All of those connections more or less dried up in one way or another. I’ve gotten this far in the career not for lack of trying to use the connections that I gained through my family but, actually, the only success I’ve found has been through connections I fostered myself. Or being lucky enough that Ed is friends with you. The only reason he found out that we lived close to each other at the time was because I was late to class one day and the gate wasn’t working. I sent Ed a picture and he immediately goes, “Is Frank your neighbor?”
FB That’s funny. I didn’t know that.
JH Navigating the industry has been really interesting coming from my perspective, especially growing up in it and seeing how it worked as a kid and now trying to figure it out on my own with how much it has changed. There would be times when they would just be like, “Okay, so this is something that isn’t done anymore.” Just trying to figure out what is actually useful. One of the shocking things is how much truth there is to a lot of the jokes about the industry in shows and movies. I had a meeting and I learned that someone doesn’t read. I was just like, “Oh, I thought that was not real. I thought that was a joke.” Right? But, they don’t read. Someone else reads for them and tells them. I was like, “What? How can they make any good decision?” Well, they do. I guess, at this point, they’re in a part of their career where they don’t have to read. Or, something else I realized is you have to write a lot of “Thank You” letters. I’m not the best at writing thank you letters. I’ve always found them to be a little kiss-ass-y.
FB I haven’t received any myself.
JH Sorry, Frank, I have yours in the mail. I promise.
FB In school, I’m assuming there were pitch meetings and learning how to pitch and how has that translated to you? Talk about the ways you’re trying to get out into the world and take meetings. When you do have opportunities, what happens? I know you had a meeting for that game you love so much, Warhammer.
JH I didn’t have a meeting for that actually. I asked my manager, “Is there any way you could get a meeting for this?” She said, “I’ll look into it.” She emails me back the next day and goes “You don’t have a sample for this.” Warhammer is high fantasy and sci-fi and very serious. All I have are jokes. She said, “I can send your stuff, but I’m gonna look stupid doing that.” I was like, “Yeah, no, that makes sense.” Now I’m trying to push the fact that I’m helping you with The Looking Glass Warslore.
FB You’re so into the lore of Warhammer. It’s the idea of “Get me a meeting because I am so deeply seated in that world. I get all of it. I have the books. Let me just tell them all the great things about it. If nothing else, they’re going to feel good about their show coming up.” Yeah, exactly.
JH Exactly. So my manager and I made a deal. I’m going to write a 10-15 page sample based on that universe. Luckily, there is no shortage of stories in that universe that I can take inspiration from. I’m gonna give that to my manager. I was hired to write a treatment for a producer over the holidays and just finished that a week ago. So now I’m finally able to sit down and write my own stuff again. There are a lot of things I want to get done because right now I only really have one sample that’s being sent around to get meetings. Luckily, it’s the sample you read that won me the AFI contest as well. So I’m going to send that to her to have a little bit more leeway getting in the door. But I believe, with Warhammer, they’re actually making a movie first.
FB So they’re not putting a room together, which is what you would be ideal for.
JH Exactly. I believe they’re going to make a show based on how the movie does. It’s Amazon, MGM. Henry Cavill, and then Games Workshop, or maybe Citadel. So I’m just trying to navigate that. I’ve never written something specifically to get a job.
FB It’s a very good idea. Because it’s hard to know what’s going to work and everybody will say, “That’s never going to work. This is how you have to do it.” But there’s no rhyme or reason to it. If it’s a good piece of writing and it connects and it’s about the subject matter, people will respond to it. I’ve told the story a million times about the World War II feature I wrote. It’s about the skiing and climbing troops who fought during World War II. I wrote a treatment, a short story, and I thought would be The Dirty Dozen on skis. I knew nobody but ended up getting it to Kennedy/Marshall and getting a deal at Paramount. By the way, I sent a letter. Everybody really laughed at me. That’s when there was snail mail.
JH I feel like with email now, it’s become really easy to ignore emails.
FB It’s like vinyl. It’s nostalgic to receive a letter.
Where does the writing talent come from? Your mom’s side, your dad’s side, or both of them? Neither?
JH My dad passed away when I was nine. He only was a dad. I never got to know him as a person. That being said, my mom does say I am a lot like him. I’ve always been someone who likes to tell stories and luckily I’ve had a very interesting 27 years here so far. Or at least interesting enough to get adults’ attention. When I was a kid, I always wanted to talk to adults and have them actually pay attention. I realized the first time someone really paid attention to me was when I said something funny. So, starting from that, I was always trying to crack jokes. I was never a class clown. I talked a lot during class, but I was never the funny kid at school. I was always good at getting essays done. Everyone else would always be like, “I’ve been working on this essay for a while. How are you?” I would say, “I’m gonna write it tonight.” And I’d do well, depending on how good the spelling was which, as you know from reading my work, is not good.
FB Even with spell check. So I don’t know what you were doing way back then.
JH Here’s the thing. I’m so bad at spelling that spell check has no idea what I’m getting at. But I would turn in these essays and get passing grades. Then I realized if I spent a little bit more time on it and got better grades, I was going to go to college. I didn’t feel like I was ready yet. So I took a gap year and I lived in Indonesia for a while. I went through a program that set me up with families to live with, but one part of the deal with the program was I had to write articles about what I was doing and stuff like that. I remember reading other people’s articles and I thought, “Oh my god, what?” I just watched a South Park episode last night where they’re in San Francisco and everyone is smelling their own farts because they’re so pretentious and so smug.
But I was reading these articles and thinking, “Who are these Hemingway wannabes with their flowery language? You went for a walk.” So I started teasing these other articles in mine and they got attention. I would tease the reader. I was like, “Why are you reading this?” I wrote one where I said, “This is about cars. If you don’t like cars, don’t read this. I don’t care.” I’m not going to talk about brindled dogs. I still don’t really know what brindle means. That was when I fell in love with writing funny, sarcastic things.
FB You did an amazing job. You did what you just described in the blog where we played around with the upcoming movie Wicked, the musical supposedly, and my movie, Wicked, that I made years and years ago starring Julia Stiles. One of the things I was asking you to do is do a comparison of the two trailers. But what that morphed into was the idea of having a musical come out, but hiding the fact it’s a musical in the marketing for the film. You did a very, very good job, very sarcastic and funny. I really love that piece, which people can read on the website.
I wanted to go back for a second because I wanted to tell you a little story. You didn’t mention your dad’s movies. I don’t know if you know this story. Years and years ago, these two filmmakers came into my office and they showed me five minutes of a horror movie.
JH I have a feeling I know where this is going.
FB I was like, “Wow, this is kind of amazing.” I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking at the time but I definitely knew I wasn’t going to have the money to help them complete it, which is what they were looking for. Years later, I met Oren Koules. who was a producer and was interested in something of mine. We went into his office and he told me he had just produced this movie, and it turns out he produced it with your dad and a guy named Mark Burg. It turned out to be the first Saw movie, which has gone on to be probably the most successful independent film series of movies. Do you have any recollection of your dad making Saw?
JH It’s burned into my mind. They shot the first Saw it in two-ish weeks. It’s wild. I believe the total budget was $1.4 million but the shooting budget was actually only $800,000. The extra $600,000 came later for marketing. I remember my dad telling me a little bit about the movie. I was six or seven. I remember going on set. It was shooting somewhere in Burbank on this tiny little soundstage. I just remember the brick. The outside was brick. Before going in there, I remember my dad sat me down in the car and said “I’m shooting a horror movie. There’s gonna be a guy in the bathroom.” The police station was right behind the bathroom and then there was a bedroom. It was all very tiny, shared walls.
FB Minimal sets constructed to maximize the production values and minimize the cost. Your dad, Oren, and Mark saw more than I did. Boy, do I regret that decision. I should have put my house up and thrown down the cash for that.
JH I remember my dad saying, “There’s a guy on the floor and you can see his brains and there’s a big pool of blood. Then there’s two guys chained up.” I was there when they were shooting the scene where Cary Elwes cut his foot off. I was sitting behind the monitor watching it. I was so interested. As a kid, that could have been potentially scarring. But the thing is, I was so interested in how they did it and how they made it look like he was doing these things that it didn’t freak me out. I was much more interested in how they were hiding the fact he still had his foot. The only thing that scared me was Billy, the doll. Everything else was not scary to me. And there was a toilet that was filled with gross stuff.
FB Dolls are always the scariest.
JH I’m seven. I’m a boy. I thought that was the funniest thing in the world. My dad’s making a comedy. I was on that set a lot growing up. I think James and Leigh were younger than me now when they shot that.
FB The director, James Wan, that guy has gone on to do some huge movies.
JH He’s everywhere. James and Leigh wrote it. James directed it and Leigh acted in the first one. I remember my dad having a meeting with James once. James was so young and he came to our place and I was so little. I was like, “Cool, this is a guy to hang out with.” My dad was gonna have a meeting with him and I was like, “No, you’re coming with me.” I dragged his hand and we just hung out.
FB He seemed like a high school kid when I met him.
JH He was in his early 20s when he shot that, so yeah, younger than me now.
FB Exactly. In the short, they had a few scenes which were really great.
JH The scene in the short was the bear trap scene, which is now very famous. Oren is actually the body that Amanda has to get the key from, which is kind of funny.
Before Saw, my dad worked at Disney and I remember we went to Australia because he was shooting George in the Jungle 2.
FB That’s a better movie for a six-year-old.
JH That set was amazing. George’s treehouse was fully functioning and I got to play in it. For a five-year-old at the time, that was fun. There were trained birds. It was a great time. I remember when Saw became what it was because it always felt like a little movie that could. It was shot in two weeks. Then there was a newspaper article and my dad was in the newspaper. This is when being in the newspaper was still a big deal. They misspelled my dad’s name. He had two G’s for Gregg. I remember it just all kind of changed, overnight, it felt like.
FB It was a sensation. The box office performance was a big surprise. Now, micro-budget horror movies take off all the time but Saw just came out of nowhere. It’s rare that a couple of producers and a manager would throw their own money into it, which was a ballsy move. It’s one of the rare success stories where the original creators still own their own creation.
JH It’s really an amazing thing. It’s one of those things that just doesn’t happen. It’s wild. I have so much love for the Saw franchise. Even though they’re not getting a Pulitzer, they’re just fun. I think that’s something people want, just something enjoyable and kind of crazy and out there.
FB Over time as they tried to heighten the gore factor it was called torture porn. Which is legit, on some levels. But as the franchise evolved, they’ve found ways to develop more interesting storylines. The visceral thrill of that first one was extremely intense. Have you written any horror?
JH I’ve written one horror sample. It’s okay. It’s not the greatest thing in the world. I do love horror, just as a genre. As a comedy writer, people always say horror and comedy are two sides of the same coin. I think there is always a pull for me to write horror and I have some more ideas that I’m going to play around with soon. Horror doesn’t get as much awards love, except recently, thanks to Jordan Peele and Ari Aster. It’s starting to get taken more seriously. People are starting to realize horror isn’t just for teenagers. It can tackle really serious topics in an approachable way. It’s the same with comedy. If it’s done correctly, it makes serious topics approachable. It also makes it feel like you’re not being hit over the head with a message.
FB You’re right. Jordan Peele really elevated the genre with his movies. They’re really enjoyable and scary, but they have something to say, which is great for any genre. That distinguishes it. Then you have a broader audience where people are like, “Hey, there’s something else going on here.”
JH Exactly. I think have to trick people into listening if you really want to say something. We’re inundated with information. We’re inundated with people posting on social media about something happening somewhere and how you should care about this thing. It’s almost like a care fatigue after a certain point. Everyone’s always telling me to be upset about something. If you really want someone to listen, you have to kind of trick them. If you’re posting it on social media, the only people who are going to listen are the people who follow you. They’re following you, most likely, because they agree with you or they’re friends with you. You’re not really saying anything, anyway. It’s just shouting into an echo chamber.
FB Which is why storytelling is so powerful. You want people to be entertained and captivated but at the same time, it’s your chance to say what you want to say. If you do it subtextually they’re going to feel it. It’s going to be communicated because you’ve felt it and thought it when you put the words on the page. Then if you make the film or the TV show in a way that lets that subtext come out, people are going to get what it is you’re trying to share so badly.
This is a podcast about Alice in Wonderland so I’m curious, before you started working for the Frank Beddor Wonderland Factory, what was your experience with Alice in Wonderland growing up or in pop culture?
JH I mentioned my dad worked at Disney when I was a kid. So I had all the Disney VHS tapes. My initial introduction to it was the Disney animated movie. I’ve mentioned it in some of the blogs that I’ve written, Alice in Wonderland is not pop culture, it is pop culture. It’s become a part of our language. Before I started working with you, I didn’t actually notice it as much. I would notice it if there was a specific reference or something like that. But through working with you, I’ve seen how it’s just everywhere. It’s to the point where people don’t even realize that it is an Alice in Wonderland reference. It’s been really intriguing and eye-opening to me. I feel like I took the red pill.
FB One of the first blogs you did for me was Alice in Wonderland in politics. I don’t know how many cartoons I’ve seen with Donald Trump as the Red Queen saying, “Off with your head!” They use “down the rabbit hole” in these political cartoons. They often talk about the Mad Tea Party. They’ll put a lot of political people around the Mad Tea Party and start cracking jokes about the absurdity of what they’re doing. So to your point, it’s the perfect reference in that context. But then you might go over to music and you’ll get a Taylor Swift song that’s talking about a breakup and there will be lyrics about stepping through the looking glass and going down the rabbit hole of love. It really is everywhere. I love that blog you did and I know that that was one of the early initiations into, “Oh my god look at all this Alice stuff.”
JH I remember when I turned that in to you, my first thought was “Okay, I just got this job and now I’m gonna get fired.”
FB What was it about the blog that made you think that?
JH In the introduction, I made jokes about how you were keeping me in a cage and forced me to write these blogs. Or how you were beating the blogs out of me.
FB Because we had just started and you were making fun of me.
JH I thought, “He’s either gonna get it or he’s not gonna want to work with me anymore.” But I figured, “Well, this is my style of comedy.” I do love writing these blogs. They’re a lot of fun to write. They’re always interesting to come up with and I always can go on some weird rant.
FB Sarah sent me links to all of your blogs so I could reread them. We haven’t been working together that long but it’s such a big body of work already. I think it’s 16 or 17.
JH I have a file just called “Frank” on my computer and it has folders inside of it to break up all the different things that I’ve done for you.
FB You’ve done a series of blogs comparing IPs, the clash of the IPs. You’ve written about Alice in Wonderland versus Star Wars. Alice in Wonderland versus Lord of the Rings. Alice in Wonderland versus Harry Potter. You’re very funny in those because you’re writing it so you’re the judge, jury, and executioner. You’re like, “Oh, I think Alice wins this one.”
JH I think I mentioned in almost every single one of them, “This is an Alice in Wonderland-themed website. Who do you think is gonna win?”
FB Tongue in cheek for sure. It’s interesting because you think about the impact of Star Wars, which is so deep with publishing, theme parks, video games, TV, and of course, films. But then you look at Alice in Wonderland and you talk about how it’s been around 150 years, how it’s one of the most quoted literary works, the phrases that are used every single day. It’s a fun way of letting people compare and contrast Alice to other properties and enlighten them as to how much their favorite stories last and are in our pop culture. It’s the lasting impact that is so remarkable about these particular stories. What do you think it is about these stories, as a writer and somebody who wants their stories to live on? What do you think it is about some of these genres and stories that allow them to last for so many years?
JH I think specifically with Alice in Wonderland, it’s political satire.
FB On one level, for sure.
JH But it’s also political satire that’s a children’s story, as well.
FB It’s also a fantasy.
JH It’s also fantasy. It’s imaginative. It’s the perfect storm. It has just a little bit of everything to keep any kind of reader interested. As I was saying that, I was thinking of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies like My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. Those movies’ audience ranges from kids to grownups. It’s because it has a little bit of everything. They’re a little scary. They’re a little funny. It’s enough to keep everyone entertained. That’s the most important thing at the end of the day, that we create entertainment. If you manage to capture someone’s imagination and take them on a journey successfully, it’ll endure the test of time.
When I did Alice versus The Lord of the Rings, it was interesting because the Tolkien estate owns the word “Ent.” Just think about the words that were created. It’s the inventiveness of it. What was Tolkien on? It’s the same thing with Lewis Carroll pushing the limits of the human imagination. Putting something that inventive onto paper draws people in no matter what. Same thing with Star Wars or Dune.
FB It seems to me that these stories communicate and tell a story that feels fresh, but are grounded in something familiar. Star Wars did that. The Lord of the Rings really did a deep dive and made you feel like you’re in an alternative world. Harry Potter in the same way. Alice in Wonderland, Carroll was writing it for himself. That’s the best kind of work. There are so many genres of publishing now, whether it’s picture books, young adult, or middle grade. It just goes on and on. It’s all in these categories and then it’s okay, “What do I want to write? Where does it fall?” Somebody else tells you where it falls but if you write from the heart and it’s something you care about, hopefully, it comes through.
JH I think that goes back to what we were saying in the beginning. They were writing for themselves. The Lord of the Rings was actually a bedtime story Tolkien would tell to his kids. It comes from a place of not telling a story because you think that there’s going to be an audience for it. If it’s good enough, an audience will come. It doesn’t matter.
These are worlds that very creative people have managed to invent, and through that, other people were like, “How did you come up with this?” I think that’s why they’ve managed to endure, it’s just the inventiveness. With Star Wars, even though the story beats are ancient, it’s the world that drew people in.
FB They’re classic though, the reluctant hero. That’s a classic trope. How you tell that story is the most important thing and Lucas told a reluctant hero story in a way that no one had ever seen before.
JH Exactly. At AFI, they said there were only really six stories. Man versus man. Man versus the World. Man versus Nature. If you boil every story down, there are actually only six. It’s just how you tell all of those six.
FB By the way, you’ve not only written blogs for me, but you’ve written some lore short stories set in The Looking Glass Wars universe. I knew you were a little bit nervous about writing prose when you first started because your mom told me you were nervous.
JH I was nervous about writing prose. Because my writing style is not that of a proper essay writing style. Those who have read my stuff will completely understand. I like to write like I’m talking to you or you’re in on the joke with me. So when I was writing these lore stories in the universe that you’ve created from Alice in Wonderland, there’s a lot of whimsy but there’s also some seriousness to it. I wanted to treat your material with the respect it deserves and give you a good product. I was nervous, but in the end, I was really proud of what I came up with. When you called me and said those nice things when I’d sent it to you, I was like, “I have no idea.”
FB I genuinely really, really loved it. The stories are meant to go along with a card game and you’re deeply seated in the tabletop and gaming world. You’ve also been very helpful and instrumental in helping shape that game along with Sarah my producer’s partner Marco, who’s taking the lead on creating this tabletop game. These all have this kind of collective energy, especially all of you writers from AFI that I’ve been introduced to and trying to shepherd, between the lot of you, some product that I can make some money off of.
But it’s really trying to shepherd that creative, collective team energy to create this game. It’s really enjoyable to have fresh ideas and creativity and have it all come together for a reason. So your lore stories are for a very good reason. That’s to broaden the world of The Looking Glass Wars and the Card Soldier premise. I’ve really enjoyed it and you’ve done a fantastic job. But before I let you go, I’m going to ask for your favorite Alice reference in pop culture, if you have one. It can be the Disney animated film, because your dad worked at Disney, which is a pretty cool job if you’re a kid, for sure.
JH As a kid, but now as an adult, I’m like, “Oh my God, my poor father.”
FB If you were a character from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who would you be? And why?
JH Well, probably the March Hare. I think he’s interesting. I remember as a kid I always thought, “Who’s this rabbit sitting next to the Mad Hatter, who’s just as crazy?”
FB I don’t think you hear about the March Hare as much because that’s how crazy the Mad Hatter is.
JH Exactly. And it’s not necessarily an Alice reference, but my favorite thing I’ve written a blog about was the 1999 Alice in Wonderland TV movie with Gene Wilder as the Mock Turtle. When I first got the job here, I wanted to pitch a joke article that was, “I took LSD and watched Alice in Wonderland so that you don’t have to.” But after watching that movie, I don’t need to even pretend to do that because that movie is just so jarringly weird. It’s so odd and interesting. The cast is insane.
FB Whoopi Goldberg is the Cheshire cat. In that blog, you were casting the remake version, which was funny. So people should check out some of your blogs on frankbeddor.com. Do you have any projects you’re excited about?
JH It’s just a bunch of things that are in the works.
The treatment I was hired to do, I don’t know what I can say about it. Lots of comedies coming, which I’m very excited about. One is inspired by when I went to college for five minutes I joined a fraternity and I was just thinking about hazing. So it’s a comedy about hazing. The whole idea is there are those coed fraternities and they’re technically educational fraternities but are not educational. There’s an honors fraternity, which is coed. They’re not about throwing parties and all that stuff but the idea is that a kid who has just joined passes away and it looks like a hazing death. So they have to hide the body and it turns out all the fraternities on the campus have also killed. They’re like, “Oh, no, we kill a kid like every year.” The best example would be a comedic Pretty Little Liars set on a college campus. There are these idiot frat bros and then this honors society becomes cool because someone’s died.
FB It’s a send-up of that culture. I’d like to read that. Sounds like a fun read. You could do a version of this that is not that far away from your dad’s movie.
JH Hazing still exists even if they say it’s not legal. But to me, I’ve always just found it hilarious, to an extent. Obviously, the kids that are legitimately torturing people are messed up. But you could turn that into a thriller. There was the movie Goat, which starred Nick Jonas.
FB Also maybe focus on the reason people connect in that environment and the longevity of those relationships.
JH My old roommate went to a very big party school and he’s talked about the hazing he went through. I do think that there is some kind of bonding experience. “We made it through.” It’s that kind of hypermasculinity stupidity. I think, to an extent, guys like going back to caveman brain every now and then.
FB My son is at the age and he’s looking for colleges and we’ve been talking about certain schools and I’ve said, “This school, you definitely have to be in a fraternity because the whole social structure is based on that.” He’s not into that but a lot of people do it and a lot of people have lifelong friends from it. I suppose you might be right about that.
JH That being said, there were a lot of times when the guys I was in the fraternity with would say, “We’re brothers.” I would go, “No, you guys are my drinking buddies.” There are a couple of longtime friends that I did make but there were people I didn’t like here. It’s interesting to look at fraternities. The people who take it really seriously, it’s kind of weird. I was straight up when I joined. I was like, “I’m here because this is how I can get into parties.”
FB Good luck with it, let me know when I can read it. In the meantime, you’re writing a blog for me so I’ll expect it shortly. already. I think writers who are entering the business write in the mediums that they’re offered. You’ve taken this opportunity to write these blogs and I’m really proud of the work that you’ve done. Seeing it collectively is impressive. I hope we continue but maybe we can transition into some television work and make both of us a little bit of cash eventually.
JH That’d be fantastic. Thank you for not only having me here but for even taking a chance on me and hiring me. John and I and maybe five other writers from AFI are the only ones who are actually writing. It’s hard. So I appreciate you taking me on and giving me almost too much freedom with the blog.
FB I’m realizing that now but yeah, live on the wild side. So thanks for coming on, man. It’s been a pleasure to hang out and to talk.
JH This was great. Bye.
For the latest updates & news about All Things Alice, please read our blog and subscribe to our podcast! If you’d like to hear Gerard’s excellent narration of The Looking Glass Wars, click here!
Lost in London: Never-Before-Seen Letters From Alyss’ Adventures on Earth
Back in 2007, we collaborated with noted Alyssian historian Agnes MacKenzie to publish Princess Alyss of Wonderland, a stunning collection of letters, journal writings, and art from Her Royal Imaginer Princess Alyss Heart. These breathtaking documents chronicled the incredible childhood of Wonderland’s exiled heir apparent and future hero of The Looking Glass Wars.
Recently, we were astonished to discover a new treasure trove of letters, journal entries, and art from Princess Alyss’ first few years on Earth. This is Alyss’ amazing story in her own words – her harrowing escape through the Pool of Tears, the deep sadness she felt when her imagination began to fade, what it was like to be a princess when everybody thinks you’re just a little girl, her fury at Lewis Carroll for butchering her story, and how she reclaimed her imagination and kept her hope of returning to Wonderland.
These historic artifacts will be presented in installments over the coming weeks and months. Part One encompasses Alyss’ flight from Wonderland and how she survived her first days on the streets of London.
(*As always, I am indebted to the tireless and exhaustive research of the eminent Wonderland historian Agnes MacKenzie. Her dedication has helped keep the true story of Queen Alyss alive!)
HALT!!!!
If you have found my journal and intend to read further, BE WARNED that these pages are meant only for those who wish to know the truth. All others are hereby ordered to immediately stop snooping.
HRI (Her Royal Imaginer) Princess Alyss Heart
My squigberry cake and the Birthday Fairies who appear with every royal cake to sing “Deliriously Happy Birthday to You.” I wish I had been able to slice that cake open and discover what surprise the Royal Bakers baked inside (I had hinted at a singing tiara).
August 5, 1861
I am in this world but not of it. My home is in Wonderland and my name is Princess Alyss Heart. Someday I will return to Wonderland to become Queen. This is the story of how I began to find my way back.
Where to begin? Certainly not at the beginning when all was well, but further into my life, to the afternoon when I discovered the golden kitten in the garden. My best friend Dodge and I had just returned from exploring Wondertropolis, a forbidden excursion outside the gates of the palace when we came across the most peculiar kitten. It was wearing a card that read “Happy Birthday, Alyss.” Since it was my birthday and everyone in the Queendom was giving me gifts, it only made sense that this kitten was for me. Unlike most kittens, who only hiss and purr, this kitten smiled. And that is where all the trouble began.
August 6, 1861
It was I who brought the peculiar kitten inside the palace gate. ME!
And then it ran away and hid somewhere in the palace. I tried to tell Mother and Hatter at my birthday tea about the kitten who smiled, but a horrible LOUD, RUDE crashing sound interrupted, and my Aunt Redd, decks of her card soldiers, and a monstrous CAT exploded into the dining room. The kitten had become The Cat! What happened next was very very fast and seems most shocking and unreal.
Mother and I escaped and I thought that we would stay together, but she sent me away with Royal Bodyguard Hatter Madigan to be kept safe until I was old enough to return to Wonderland as Queen. I begged to stay with her, but she was very firm. I had to leave Wonderland and everyone I ever loved. And I had to leave immediately.
The kitten who smiled turned into a Cat who moved like a soldier and had claws as long as knives.
Agnes MacKenzie
One of our more recent, and more thrilling, discoveries is the bundle of undeliverable letters addressed to Heart Palace in Wonderland and collected by postmistress Annabelle Smith-White of Christchurch, England. The letters were forwarded to the Lewis Carroll estate, but for an unexplained reason they were returned to Miss Smith-White’s district stamped ‘UNACCEPTABLE’. Descendants of the postmistress donated the bundle to this venture with the hope that their great-great aunt’s postal diligence would finally be recognized.
August 10, 1861
When mother ordered Hatter to take me and leave Wonderland, we fled through a looking glass that took us to the Whispering Woods.
Once in the woods Hatter held me tight and ran faster than a spirit-dane. At last, we came to the cliff above the Pool of Tears and looked down into the black water. I had heard that no one ever comes back from the Pool of Tears, but Hatter assured me I would because I would one day return to be Queen. And then we jumped, but not soon enough, as The Cat’s long claws raked out across my birthday gown and tore away a piece. He nearly got me! But before I could scream we hit the water …
(continued)
… I know Hatter held me as tight as he could but a tremendous force tore us apart. Poor Hatter! He had promised my mother to keep me safe and Hatters always keep their promises, especially royal bodyguards. I tried to smile to let him know I would be okay, but the water smooshed my face in all different directions and I shot down very, very fast and then I shot up even faster and found myself in this world called London. Alone.
I vow to discover the secret of puddle travel! There simply must be a way of knowing which puddle is THE PUDDLE!
August 20, 1861
My arrival in this world called London was sudden and frightening. I shot up and out of the puddle and found myself standing in the middle of a crowded avenue. Everything was spinning and I was cold and lost and AFRAID. Where was my mother? And where was my royal bodyguard? There was no one to help me in this gray, frightening place. All I could think was that I must return home NOW! In desperation, I began to jump in puddle after puddle searching for the way home until I could jump no more. Then I saw a boy watching me and he was smiling and I knew I wasn’t alone anymore. I was about to meet the most honorable Quigley.
I didn’t know anyone could look so hungry!
Agnes MacKenzie
From Alyss’ description, it appears she first arrived in London on Whitehorse Street near the intersection of Piccadilly and Half-Moon. I have proposed that a plaque be mounted here to honor the struggles of this honored visitor from another realm.
As thoughtful readers of Dickens will recall, orphans, urchins, and estranged children were an all too common sight on the sooty streets of nineteenth-century London. It seems from Alyss’ journal that she was accepted into a den of street urchins by the boy named Quigley.While Quigley was an open-hearted generous sort, the others were less magnanimous and insisted Princess Alyss pull her own weight in foraging for food and rags. Alyss’ solution was, of course, to use her imagination.
They believed I was a real princess!
September 15, 1861
Quigley, in his patched clothes and cracked boots, brought me to an alley where he and a group of other very ragged, thin children lived. Everyone was curious as to who I was and where I had come from so I told them about Wonderland and what it was like to be Princess Alyss Heart. Quigley and the others loved my stories but unfortunately, they couldn’t eat them. What could I do to help? As I was thinking very hard I noticed a sad little flower in a cracked pot lying in the alley. To amuse myself I began to imagine the flower humming and soon it was singing in a beautiful high pitched voice. Quigley and the others were amazed. And then I knew.
We became street performers. I would imagine the flower singing and Quigley would gather the coins tossed by those who stopped to listen. Our first show was a hit. The next show was even bigger. Each day we made enough coins to feed everyone very very well.
(continued)
And then something extraordinarily horrible happened. My imagination began to weaken. Each day the flower’s voice grew fainter and fainter until it stopped singing and once again there was no food. I could not explain to myself let alone the others how I had failed. My imagination had always been with me. To have it fade was like losing my last connection to Wonderland. To eat, we all had to go back to stealing food from the markets. One day we were caught by a pack of London bobbies. The other kids escaped but I was nabbed and taken to the most frightening place I had ever seen, the Charing Cross Orphanage. I never saw Quigley again, though I still look for him.
*Stay tuned for Part Two, in which Alyss braves the brutal Charing Cross orphanage.
ALL THINGS ALICE: INTERVIEW WITH GERARD DOYLE
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have award-winning audiobook narrator Gerard Doyle join me as my guest! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Gerard Doyle, thank you for doing this. It’s really fun to get to know somebody in this format who has done work for me and I just know them through their work. I was, of course, preparing a little bit today and I was so delighted to read about your background in theater and with Shakespeare so I have many questions for you. The most important question is, how would you compare Shakespeare’s work to The Looking Glass Wars trilogy? Are they about the same?
Gerard Doyle Apart from the lack of iambic pentameter? Shakespeare wrote some epic plays and some epic battle scenes. I can’t say he was present in my mind when I was recording The Looking Glass Warsaudiobooks but the two are not a million miles removed, Don’t do yourself downly. That was a remarkable achievement.
FB I’m really interested to hear about the narrations but I do want to start with acting because I had a very short acting career. I studied with Stella Adler at the end of her life and she made us all not only read the whole play but read biographies of the playwrights themselves so we could really understand the connection between their lives and their work and do a better job of interpreting the text. Then she also had us write a scene before the scene that we were performing on stage and that’s what got me interested in writing because I was practically writing a play before the one scene that I was doing in the class.
I had no experience. I had come from doing commercials for when I was on the U.S. ski team. So my introduction to show business was through commercials and then acting. You’ve done a lot of work in the West End in London and you’ve done a lot of Shakespeare work. I deeply admire people who can make Shakespeare work, get on stage, and make it feel relevant for a contemporary audience. I’m really interested in hearing about your journey. Your work as an actor obviously translates to your audiobooks and narration. First listening to your work on The Looking Glass Wars was a shocking revelation because it didn’t seem like my book. I read it one way and the great thing about great actors is they find their own voice and their own way into the material. You have an extraordinary skill for that.
GD Well, thank you very much. I was very lucky. I was a late starter. I was persuaded to join a local amateur theater company in England at the age of 21. Having done a little bit of theater at school, it was my refuge really. I was quite heavily bullied at school because I was a bit of an oddball and I found refuge in the drama club. I experienced recognition and approbation for my acting in a way I hadn’t before. Being on stage felt very natural. In his autobiography, Patrick Stewart talks about how he felt the stage was a safe space for him. That really resonated with me. They couldn’t get me. I wasn’t being thrown down stairs. It saved me in so many ways. Then, in the way of these things, I dropped it. People said, “Oh, you should go to drama school.” But with my family, the expectations were fairly low in terms of one’s ability to forge any kind of career, especially in the arts. You left school at 15 and got a job. That’s pretty much what I did. Through one of the jobs, I was reintroduced to a girl I was at school with and she said, “Look, somebody’s dropped out of a play I’m doing, can you come?” It was a wonderful French farce called Don’t Listen Ladies. It was a gift of a role. It was the fixer, like the Arlecchino character.
At that time, all the local amateur dramatic companies supported each other’s productions. So in this tiny theater that held about 40 people with a postage stamp stage, suddenly, on the Saturday night, there were representatives from all these local drama groups. And they all invited me to join their company, which I did. I was so flattered and didn’t like to say no to anybody. But I realized rehearsals were on the same nights and all the productions were within a week or two of each other. So I had to carefully choose and I got it down to three in the end. One of the companies was a group of young people and we did some pretty in-your-face theater. A lot of “nudge nudge, wink, wink” humor. But I was playing to audiences in tiny spaces. The front row was two feet away. It was something I got used to, not being inhibited by the proximity of an audience that you could literally look in the eye.
It was a great education. From that, at the age of 27, I went to drama school in Birmingham, England. It, frankly, wasn’t a great drama school but I left with my equity card. The one thing about it for me was being a little older and more experienced than most other people, I got quite a lot out of it, including being invited to join this little acting company that was striving to get equity cards.
So I left drama school and got a job as an acting assistant stage manager at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton. They had just finished a production of The Hired Man, which was a wonderful musical based on a novel about the mining and farming industries in the Northwest of England. It was based on real people. The author, Sir Melvyn Bragg, wrote about his family. I played his uncle, who was instrumental in unionizing the mining industry in the Northwest. This was 1984, at the height of the miners’ strikes. So it was pithy stuff. It was a wonderfully close-knit company. There are nine of us who are still in touch. But my education was actually in doing rather than academic.
My first Shakespeare was actually in Dundee, Scotland. I played Trinculo in The Tempest. I come from an Irish background and I had an Irish accent until I was about five when I was allowed to go out on the streets to play with the other kids and I lost it very quickly. But I still retained the ability to do the accent. It was thick in the house. So when I first read Trinculo, I thought, “I’ll do him Irish.” But then I started having doubts and I backed away from it. I was having terrible trouble in rehearsal and the director wasn’t really being very helpful. Lovely man but an awful director. I was floundering. Stephano and Caliban were both university-educated actors and because of the absence of direction, they took it upon themselves to direct our little comedy trio bits. I just wasn’t comfortable at all. Finally, on the last rehearsal, with all the tech crew and stage management and everything, the last day before we went into the theater, I thought “Fuck it, I can’t do this.” So at lunchtime, I went back to my original instinct and without telling anybody, very unprofessional, I changed Trinculo to Irish. The difference was just tremendous. But it screwed up everything they had carefully figured out for themselves. They weren’t happy bunnies but we all got over it because it really did make a big difference.
I was actually reluctant to use my Irish accent but there was a girl who came to that rehearsal to visit her boyfriend, who was also in the play. We were talking afterward and she said that she recognized the accent. She asked, “Are you from anywhere near Kilsheelan?” Kilsheelan is in County Tipperary and eight miles from where my family came from. That was a huge reinforcement for me.
When I came to doing audiobooks, my very first one was an Irish novel, A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle. I got the job because, at the time, I was understudying two lead roles in a play called The Weir by Conor McPherson, set in an Irish Pub. We were on Broadway and my agent said, “Somebody is looking for somebody who can record an audiobook.” It came down to me and one of the guys I was understudying and I got it. I got an award from AudioFile Magazine my very first book.
The thing was, I’d never heard of audiobooks. So Claudia Howard, God bless her, who ran Record Books at the time, directed me for the first third of the book. Then when I finished it up and she felt I got into my stride, she went off and did more important things. When I finished the whole book, she called me back in for corrections and said, “Look, sit down and listen to the beginning and then listen to the end.” It was chalk and cheese. I was tentative and holding back so she said “I want you to sit down and rerecord the first 70 pages with the same energy that you had throughout the rest of the book.” That got me my first Earphones Award from AudioFile.
FB You’ve had so many since and been nominated for so many awards. But going back to that first book, what was the process for getting the job? It was between you and one other person for this audiobook. What did they say? Did you read it? What was the process?
GD I had auditioned for Claudia three years before, on a recommendation from a wonderful, wonderful Australian actor who had just finished doing The Lord of the Rings trilogy for Recorded Books. I was coming to America to introduce my son to his relatives here and my Australian actor friend said, “Oh, you must visit my friend Claudia Howard at Recorded Books.” So on the basis of his name, she gave me an audition and I was awful. It was absolutely dreadful. Three years later, when I went to audition for A Star Called Henry, she didn’t remember me, thanks be to God.
FB What was the audition like? Did you have to go in and read from the book cold?
GD I don’t think I got any sides or anything.
FB So it’s a cold reading with prose.
GD What they’re really interested in is trying to figure out if you can really tell a story. I had no confidence in that because I hadn’t considered acting as storytelling. Of course, that is exactly what we do as actors. I hadn’t the common sense to trust my instincts. So I gave a very stilted reading that first audition. When I came back three years later, I had a lot more experience under my belt and confidence, by that time, in my Irish accent. So when I read, it probably wasn’t all that she was hoping for. Certainly, when I recorded the first chunk of the book, it wasn’t all she was hoping for. But that was good enough to get the job and then she had me go back and match the beginning to the rest.
FB Because reading or performing dialogue in a play is so different than trying to take a line of prose and imbuing it with the storytelling aspect. But you’re right, we all tell stories. It’s in the way you perform it. But you’re making so many choices. What was so remarkable about listening to your reading of my novel for the first time was how it differed from how I originally had it in my head.
I would sometimes read the book out loud to see what the rhythm felt like and I knew that I would be not great for doing the audiobook because I was so typecast in the way I looked at the text. That’s why when I heard your version of it, not only is it because of the quality of your voice, but it’s the storytelling and the performance. It’s a performance piece and lines that I did not expect to be particularly thrilling felt really dramatic because they were setting up a moment that felt really suspenseful as you went into a piece of dialogue or a piece of action. It’s its own art form.
GD I’ve come to kind of realize that over the years. It’s amazing how much how much free range one is given. I’ve had direct contact with authors more recently but in the early days, nothing. I didn’t think to ask. So it was all instinct and guesswork, not entirely because you obviously don’t just sit and record the book, you have to prep it and read it.
The proper way is you read the book first to try and get all sorts of things. Depending on how much lead time one has, sometimes there’s barely enough time to read the damn thing. Then you’re recording against a deadline. But I pay attention to everything an author says about individual characters. I make a note of physical stuff, the timbre of their voice, their accent, whatever it might be. That’s something you have to be really careful with because an author, being the contrary bunch of bastards that they are, will introduce a character on page 15 and describe their bloody voice on page 90. Exactly. If you’ve made the wrong choice based on not doing your job properly or not doing the research, that’s an awful lot of rerecording to do. So paying attention to all those factors flushes out the character for me.
It depends on whether it’s first-person or third-person narration but for any narration that refers directly to the character, I try to imbue it with the personality I feel that character has. So it sounds like it’s from his or her point of view. It doesn’t always work like that but I’ve become more comfortable doing that in recent years and it seems to work.
FB What is the optimal way for you to prepare? I understand there are schedules and deadlines and they’re rushing, but that doesn’t seem to make much sense. Because then if you go too quickly and you haven’t had a chance to do the research, you’re going to be re-recording.
When you’re presented with a book and they say, “Okay, do you want a week? Do you want two weeks?” Then in that prep time, you’re making all of these notes. That makes a lot of sense because some of these books, like Eragon, are big bestsellers and you want to get that right.
GD I had eight days to prep that.
FB That seems short. Is that normal?
GD That was pretty short for my first big book, although I didn’t realize at the time how big it was going to be. But there’s a lot of controversy amongst readers who will instantly complain about the dragon voice. Eragon and the dragon Saphira communicate telepathically. So readers ask why I didn’t give the dragon a female voice. The truth is, I was in such a hurry to prepare I forgot they communicate telepathically. I remember Taro Meyer, the wonderful director whom I’ve done all these books for over 20 years, stopped me and said, “Is that the voice we’re going to use?” Rather than picking up on the hint, being young, arrogant, and nervous, I let it go. Of course, I didn’t realize at the time how many more dragons were going to be introduced in the following books and how doing all the voices and trying to differentiate them was going to rip my throat out.
FB The director didn’t directly point out to you, “Hey, this is a female voice.”
GD I haven’t gone back to check, but I’ve been reminded that in the first few pages when Eragon meets the dragon, Christopher Paolini describes the dragon’s voice as being kind of gravelly and growling. Maybe I picked up on that. It’s just so painful to do that I kind of regret I went for that. But a lot of people now seem to like it.
FB It was such a successful launch and you also won the AudioField Award. It seems like you’ve won AudioFile Awards for all of your books.
GD Absolutely not true.
FB Well, you’ve done 400 books.
GD Wow. Okay. I don’t know, maybe 10% of them have received an AudioFile Award.
FB That seems pretty good. I would definitely take that. By the way, The Looking Glass Wars audiobook was one of them.
You said you got a scratchy voice because of the demands on your voice to do the dragon characters in Eragon. How do you sustain that? How much of the book do you get done daily?
GD It depends on the material but I’ve been known to do 70 or 80 pages, I’ve also been known to do 35. It really depends. As I’ve gotten older, of course, my rate slows down and now for the last 15 years, I’ve been recording at home. So I’m punch editing, rather than continuous recording. So that’s a slower process. It takes me, on average, two and a half to three hours to record an hour. I make a lot of mistakes and I catch most of them, but then I have to edit them as I go.
FB Then you go back and you redo…
GD No, I never listen to what I’ve just recorded. I’ve made all the choices. It’s an intense process. I’m the narrator, engineer, and director, all in one, and I’m making those decisions constantly. I make the best choices I can and I tend not to go back. If there are errors that I haven’t picked up on, mispronunciations or whatever, that will come back to me after post-production and I get a voice match. I record it as closely as I can to the original and they just drop it in.
FB Do you have to take a day off if your throat gets sore or your voice gets a little hoarse?
GD I’ve rarely ever done that. I’m so lucky that my voice is quite robust. One of the Eragon books, I think number three, Brisingr, took around 110 hours to record the book over two weeks. I was pretty far gone after that.
The author, Paolini is a blessing. He’s a wonderful guy. He invented three languages for these books and he’s great with providing pronunciations. He has a whole linguistic structure for each language. He’s fantastic at supporting all that. But he’s a mischievous little bugger. Right before I started on either book three (Brisingr) or book four (Inheritance) he said, “By the way, I’ve changed the ending.” This was the night before the recording. He said, “I’ve added another dragon to give Eragon a springboard into a future book, and just for you, I’ve given him an extra deep growly gravelly voice.” I said, “God bless you, Christopher.” Anyway, I couldn’t do it. I was so tired after 100 hours of recording. I nipped upstairs to where they were doing the post-production and I said to the chief engineer, “I know you’re not supposed to do this, but can you do something electronic?” I think he did a good job. I’ve not listened to it, though. I tend not to go back and listen to my stuff at all. I can’t stand to hear my own voice.
FB A lot of people feel that way, including myself.
GD I’m delighted that other people appear to enjoy listening to my voice but for me it’s excruciating.
FB You’ve worked a lot with the Irish writer, Adrian McKinty. Were you acquainted?
GD Blackstone Audio are the publishers and I cold-called them 16-17 years ago and Haley Williams, a wonderful producer there, talked with me for 45 minutes. We hadn’t met. She didn’t know me from Adam. Towards the end of it, she said, “Can you do an Irish accent?” I said, “Well, yeah, actually.” “I might have something for you,” she said. Two weeks later, they sent me one of his books, which was great. I think he liked what I did. That was recorded in the same studio where I recorded your trilogy. Same director, Sue Makowiec, and the same audio engineer Barbara Vlahides.
Do you remember there was an instance in The Looking Glass Wars where General Doppelganger manifests himself into 10 or 12 doppelgangers? Rather than just duplicating my voice, Barbara asked, “Can we rerecord it?” I think we did seven separate takes of each line and then Barbara magicked it altogether. I thought it sounded terrific.
FB That was amazing. I was so excited when I heard that. The whole experience was a little bit surreal because they did allow me to listen to some different voices from the auditions. There were some really good choices but when your voice came on it was, “That’s got to be the guy.” Then when they did that little manipulation with Doppelganger and the multiple voices over and over, I would never have imagined that. It was delightful. Thank you for the creative instinct.
GD It was a bit of fun, really, but then we realized it was quite a lovely thing. I contacted Sue Makowiec a couple of weeks ago just to say “I’m doing this podcast. Have you got anything?” She said, “I gotta tell you that your characterization of Queen Redd was so close to my own. Every time we finished doing a Redd session, I expected to walk into the booth and find a red corset and a pair of red high heels.” I’m not much of a method actor, but that would have been taking things a little far.
FB Did you do much cold calling when you were looking for work?
GD I was working for an audiobook company, I’m not going to name them because this is illegal, that said, “If you’re working for us, you can’t work for these people.” I stuck to that and when another book came up from another publisher, I couldn’t turn it down so I changed my name. I used my birth name, Michael, and my stepfather’s name, which is Dehee. So I recorded several books for a lovely murder mystery writer named Deborah Crombie under Michael Dehee. I was doing this and I thought, “No, something’s not right here.” Then in AudioFile Magazine, many years ago, I saw that Barbara Rosenblat, who worked for the same publisher I’m talking about, had narrated for a different publisher. What sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. So, I called Blackstone. I think that was the only one I called because that was the company Barbara Rosenblat recorded this book for. So I called them and Haley Williams answered and the rest is history.
FB And you’ve done 18 of Adrian McKinty’s books. Do you talk to him, having done that many books?
GD Adrian writes a great blog. After one of the first few books of his I did he wrote something in his blog that I interpreted as a derogatory comment about my recording. Now having gotten to know him and his sense of humor I realized what it was but, at the time, being a little bit fragile about such things, I took it seriously. Then he wrote this trilogy with all these words he’d invented and I called the publisher who said, “We can’t help you. We can’t put you in touch. Call his literary agent.” I thought, “God, what am I gonna do?” As well as recording 17 books a year, I was teaching full-time. I was sometimes working till two or three in the morning and then getting up and teaching a class at eight. Couldn’t do it now. I retired from teaching last June, thank God. But, anyway, I was at school and I called his literary agent, Bob, in New York, and I said, “Hello, my name is Gerard Doyle. You don’t know me from Adam.” He went, “Oh my Godly fuck, I love you, man!”
It was the last thing I expected. I found out the audiobooks had boosted the print sales. So the agent put me in direct touch with Adrian, who lived in Melbourne, Australia at the time. It was like we’d known each other all our lives. It was extraordinary. I couldn’t have been more wrong. He was just so appreciative of what I’d done. So I asked him to explain these pronunciations for this trilogy. He said, “I don’t know. Say what the fuck you like. I just made it up.” That’s all very well, Sunshine, but my name is on this book as well. I need some guidance here. Anyway, he was absolutely fucking useless. Between us, we figured it out.
FB I remember sending you a list for The Looking Glass Wars. I can’t remember which words you were asking me about but I tried to be helpful. I also remember going “I don’t know, I just invented it. Can you please help me out?”
GD With the author’s permission, that’s exactly what I do. But I can’t just assume these things. Mispronouncing a name that’s been invented by the author is one thing but my wife, who’s a midwife, was put off audiobooks because she was listening to her first audiobook and in this book, the narrator mispronounced “midwifery”. That was it. That can make or break a listener’s experience. If they know what you’re talking about and you say it wrong, what’s your credibility? I’m very meticulous. I don’t always get it right but I’m very meticulous. I feel I owe it to the listener. Actually, not so much them, it’s my own self-preservation. I don’t want to get grumpy letters.
FB You’re sensitive to your own voice and you’re sensitive to readers’ reactions. Why is that? After reading so many books, you’ve won so many awards. Is it that you’re a perfectionist? What is it?
GD I’ve never lost my insecurity. Do you ever lose your insecurity as an actor? I don’t always trust myself to do it the way it needs to be done.
FB I can tell that.
GD I’m not as bad as I was. But I know you trust yourself.
FB There were some emails back and forth between us with The Looking Glass Wars and then when I listened to it I thought exactly the opposite. I just thought this is somebody who has such a command over their voice and the form. It resonates when you listen. Having been very insecure about my writing, I asked this question because I’m sensitive as well. I had a lot of really bad reviews which I thought was because I was an American and people knew that I worked in Hollywood. I was taking on this iconic literary work, reimagining Alice in Wonderland. There were so many strikes against me heading into it and I had to rewrite it so many times because I was very insecure about it being any good.
Again, your reading just grounded me. I just felt like, it’s a fucking good book. Listen to this guy. I want people to listen to your book before they read my book because I think it’s a better book. It seems like a better book as an audiobook, because of my insecurity. It’s a collaboration. You’re taking the text and using this extraordinary skill. I double back to the insecurity part because I relate to it. To answer your question, “I think you improve and then eventually, if they’re really snarky, you’re just like, “Fuck off.”
GD The most useful words in the English language.
FB But I’d wake up at 3:30 in the morning and have little night terrors about what a shit chapter that was and how I have to go back and rewrite it.
GD That’s not something that haunts me, really. Your process is much more protracted than mine. I’m making all my decisions as the words are coming out of my mouth. Nothing is pre-planned. I used to do annotations for every line and it just ruins any kind of spontaneity. So I found the confidence not to do that and to trust myself that I can actually lift the words off the page and do something with them and they come out in the way they come out. I don’t have night terrors about what I have or haven’t done because I don’t leave the booth without feeling I’ve done the best I can with whatever was happening in that session.
FB But, smartly, you don’t go back and re-listen to it. I have to go back and re-read it.
I’m curious. I listened to Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass and I think it had a cast audiobook. Philip Pullman was the narrator and they had all these other voices. Is that something that’s common? Is that something that you’ve ever done or participated in?
GD I’ve worked with two, three, maybe four other narrators. But we’ve never interacted. It’s always been separate. In more recent years, I’ve actually sat and discussed things with the other narrators. But again, I was so naive back in the early days. I didn’t want to put my head above the parapet. I just kind of read my bit and hoped that it was gonna fit in with everybody else. It mostly did, apparently. I really enjoy collaboration because I’ve done two books in collaboration with different narrators in the last two years, and it was just wonderful. They were so lovely to work with and we were very supportive of each other.
FB When audiobooks first started being released it was like, “Well, it’s not real reading. Why are you not reading the book?” It’s like it was cheating in some weird way and now there’s been such a big boom in audiobooks and they’re driving sales of printed books. Why do you think that is?
GD People don’t have to lug a Walkman or a boombox around with them these days, that’s one thing. It’s all readily available. I think the word just got out that audiobooks are actually fun, educational, and interesting. I prefer to sit and read a book myself. I’ve got several authors I’m trying to juggle at the moment.
FB Who are you reading?
GD Niall Williams, the Irish author. The man put words together like prayers.
FB I would love to have that as a blurb. It’s so great.
GD I think I’m stealing from a review. I’m also reading Amor Towles. His second book, A Gentleman in Moscow is now a TV series. Wonderful, wonderful storyteller. Each book is completely different. Not even closely related. Completely different context, different parts of the world.
FB That’s amazing. I envy that ability. With audiobooks, I find biographies to be ideal in terms of going for a walk and having your headset on. I don’t enjoy audiobooks when it comes to prose. I like to see the words in the sentences and paragraphs and find that rhythm. I’m with you on that but it is quite a booming section, which, anything that gets people interested in stories and books is great as far as I can tell.
GD Something just clicked when you said that, the rhythms and everything. I think that one of the things I tried to be sensitive to is how can I make this sound as interesting to somebody who’s listening to me as I find it reading it off the page. That’s the process. Elevating it is the wrong word but…
FB It is elevating it because it’s elevating it in a different medium.
You narrated one of the novels of a show I’m watching which is Slow Horses. I’m really enjoying the show but have never read the book. Can you tell us a little bit about narrating the novel? Have you seen the show? Did they do a good job?
GD I started recording the Slough House books in 2016 and I had absolutely no terms of reference, no contact with the author. So I just did what I do, I went with what he was giving me. Then three years ago the series came out and I was reluctant to watch it but finally my wife said, “Oh, come on. It’s Gary Oldman. You’ve got to watch it.” So I did and I was delighted to realize that I wasn’t a million miles away with any of the characters.
FB That’s so satisfying.
GD I was very happy. I’m within the ballpark.
FB That’s so cool. How about Eragon, the movie? That was not as successful. Did you see it?
GD I saw it but I don’t remember much about it. I know that certain people close to the author weren’t happy with it.
FB They didn’t quite get that right.
GD Normally I would record those books every four or five years in a plus studio in New York City with the director, Taro Meyer, and an engineer but this year, with the latest book, the executive producer said, “Look, we’d like you to record it at home and we’d like you to engineer it.”
FB Do they even pay you extra for that?
GD We negotiated something. But not including the engineer? I said, “Absolutely not.” It was a continuous record, which means you have to mark the script and you have to mark it in Pro Tools as well. I have trouble just interpreting the bloody story and dealing with my vocal errors. I absolutely put my foot down. She said, “We’ll get you an engineer from our pool.” I said, “No, my son is a brilliant audio engineer.” So they auditioned him and he got the job. He was sitting right outside my recording booth, managing my temperament and fairly a strong-willed director via Zoom from California and doing all that an engineer does. He was brilliant, not just with engineering, but with diplomacy, as well. It was an extraordinary experience.
FB That’s a lovely father-son experience.
GD They don’t normally put the engineer’s name on the packaging but I asked them and so they they put Aiden’s name, Aiden Doyle, on the packaging.
FB That’s a perfect button on a fantastic father-son story. Is he going to continue to do other books with you?
GD As I’ve gotten older and as the market has been flooded with 1000s of young and very talented and very tech and social media savvy narrators, my slice of the work has diminished significantly. I’m trying to reinvent myself as a director working with less experienced narrators. I’ve been thinking of marketing my son, Aidan, and me as a team. He can nurture them through the recording process and I can guide them through the interpretation and various other things.
FB That seems like a good idea because he’s quite young so he’s going to know and meet a lot of up-and-coming folks who are looking for narrators, authors, and books.
I wanted to talk about Alfred Bester, who wrote The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man. I wanted to talk about it briefly because many, many years ago I optioned the short story “Fondly Fahrenheit” and I’ve been developing it as a feature since 1995, which shows you how impossible it is to get certain projects going. But I still continue to work on it and my partner, Chuck Roven, just won the Academy Award for Oppenheimer. So hopefully, that might move the ball forward. But I’m a huge Alfred Bester fan. The two books I mentioned earlier are brilliant. They’ve been trying to adapt those into movies for years and years. How did you come to narrate those novels? Had you known about Alfred Bester before the narration?
GD No, I hadn’t ever heard of Alfred Bester. I’m not a big sci-fi or fantasy person. I find it all very hard to interpret because I simply have no connection with it. But there’s a publisher who lives on Shelter Island and I taught his kids at Ross School. He came to me one day and said “I’ve got a couple of books I’d like you to record for me.” It was extraordinary. In The Stars My Destination the writing in the print version is all distorted. One word will take up the entire page. It’s extraordinarily laid out.
But seeing that visual and trying to translate that orally was a pretty big challenge. But I just went for it really. I have a terrible American accent, my family has completely undermined any possible confidence I might have had in my American accent by guffawing outrageously every time I attempt one. So I had to interpret those books as being for English characters. I was concerned that might have diminished the impact, but people seemed to kind of enjoy the fact these voices weren’t from anywhere they were remotely familiar with.
FB I’m looking forward to listening to them. I’ll tell you a quick little story about Alfred Bester. When I read the short story, I was looking to see if there were any heirs and I couldn’t find anything. Finally, somebody turned me on to his editor, a British fellow, and I called him up in the U.K. He said “I have no idea. If I were you, I would call his bartender.” There was a bar he went to all the time outside of Philadelphia. So I called up this bar and the owner came on and I asked, “Do you happen to know the author, Alfred Bester?” He said, “Alfie, oh, Alfie was a good friend of mine.” I said, “Do you know who owns the rights to his literary estate?” He goes, “I sure do. I do.” He willed the entire literary estate to his bartender because he had no family. So I made a deal with his bartender to option this short story. That’s as close as I got to the author himself. But bartenders have a lot of secrets about their patrons.
GD Isn’t it funny how this profession takes you anywhere? You never ever know. A number of times, I’ve been completely floored by something out of left field that is deeply personal. Case in point, I mentioned The Hired Man earlier. We did that in 1984 into 1985 in the West End. Several years later, I was with the English Shakespeare Company for the second year, and this young lad turned up as our sound engineer. He wanted to be a pilot but was colorblind and ended up doing sound engineering instead. We were on a world tour and he came up and sat next to me on the flight and said “You don’t know me, but you played my great uncle Seth in The Hired Man.”
FB Wow, that must have floored you.
GD It was just unbelievable.
FB I’m curious, since you worked on The Looking Glass Wars trilogy, a reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, what were your experiences with Alice prior to that? When did you meet Alice in your life? Have you done any plays of the Lewis Carroll version? Then when you were reading The Looking Glass Wars, were you making connections? Or was it all fresh?
GD It was pretty fresh. I hadn’t actually read the Lewis Carroll version all the way through. I’d seen snippets of the movies and cartoons but my experience of the original was pretty much centered around reading it to my kids when they were both young. When The Looking Glass Wars came along, I was recording a book at Gizmo with Sue Makowiec and I was getting ready to go when she said, “Before you go, we’ve got this book we’re looking for people to audition for. Would you like to read?” I said, “Shit, okay.” She had me look through the book and choose a bit, which was the four caterpillars.
FB That was the scene she had you read?
GD I couldn’t resist because four of them smoking. I had fun doing that and thought no more of it. Then I was absolutely astounded when she came back and said, “You’ve got it.” So, thank you very much. I had so much fun recording all three of those books.
FB It really comes through and I’m so happy to connect with you on this podcast and hear your stories and learn more about the process. It’s a collaboration and I have to produce more books for us to collaborate on. I do have a couple of books, the prequels in the series, that I’m working on so I will be able to call you and we can do this all over again.
GD I’m a little more advanced now than I was then. I was listening to various sections and chapters in anticipation of this and I’m thinking “Oh, God, I let that go.” I’m hearing what I let slip away rather than using it in some way to advance and build. I didn’t recognize it for what it was and I’m being kind to myself and putting that down to an inexperience.
FB We can all go back. I was doing a podcast and talking about adapting the book for a television show and, in the process, came up with a scene that was so much better than the scene in the book. Then I started thinking about that scene in the book, how illogical it was, and how much more impactful the new scene would have been. So then I gave myself a break saying, “Maybe I can double back and do this in another medium one day.”
I wanted to mention because I know you are musically inclined and have done musicals in your career, that I have commissioned a British writer to adapt the book into a musical in the hopes of starting in the West End in the same way that I first published my book in the UK. I also have a composer and I have a couple of producers who are interested. So you’ll have to be one of the early listeners or readers of the book because of your background. Maybe there’s a place for you to be King Nolan. I want you to have a beautiful death of some sort, “Off with your head,” along the way.
GD How lovely, thank you. I’m your fucking man.
FB On that, I thank you.
GD Take care. All the best. Thank you.
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Everything You Need to Know About the “Wicked” Movie
Wickedis a pop art murder horror mystery. Scary and funny, youthful and smart, Wicked will keep you guessing, glued to your seat as the mystery unfolds.
The Plot
Ellie is a bored teenager living in Casa Del Norte, a sterile gated desert development somewhere east of Los Angeles, where life is far from idyllic. Mom is screwing erratic next-door neighbor Lawson and her father is carrying on with Lena the Swedish au-pair, which drives Ellie insanely jealous due to her unhealthy and extreme devotion to Dad. Then there’s younger sister Inger, who seems to be an innocent bystander to all this crazy action. Suddenly, Mom is found murdered in the kitchen, and suspicion focuses on the explosive Lawson. Then things start to get really creepy. Ellie begins to assume her mother’s role; not only fixing meals but wearing her revealing dresses…Her relationship with Dad transforms into something rather more lascivious than expected. Meanwhile, the veteran detective has moved Ellie to the top of the suspect list…Not even a man of his experience could foresee the last shocking twist.
The Cast
Julia Stiles – Ellie Christianson
Julia Stiles is electric in her breakthrough lead role. By turns childlike, bratty, calculating, and lethal, she is a combination of 40’s vamp and 50’s noir. She was totally in sync with Ellie’s wicked behavior. Stiles explained at the time, “Ellie’s got a very twisted view of her own world and will do anything to get what she wants. I related to everything she felt – although,” she insisted, “I really do love my mother.”
The 15-year-old was recommended to producer Frank Beddor and responded to the script with a hand-written letter about how much she understood Ellie. Impressed with the young actor’s commitment, Beddor flew her out to L.A. for an audition with himself and director Michael Steinberg. She blew them away. Her performance in the film was so strong that Beddor put the unknown actor’s picture on the poster and her name above the title. “I treated her like a star because I believe she would become one,” remembered Beddor. He was right. Stiles would go on to star in iconic teen films like 10 Things I Hate About You and Save the Last Dance, spar with Matt Damon in the Jason Bourne franchise, and was nominated for a Golden Globe and Emmy for her performance in Season 5 of Dexter.
Patrick Muldoon – Lawson Smith
Melrose Place heartthrob Patrick Muldoon joined Wicked right after finishing his work in the Paul Verhoeven cult classic Starship Troopers. Muldoon steals scenes as the sexy psycho neighbor, Lawson. Muldoon made an “out there” character more accessible with his comedic take, likeability, and star quality. Muldoon initially passed on the role but agreed to come to the set to talk about the part after the filmmakers addressed his concerns. “He liked our ideas and we hired him that day,” said Beddor.
“His life is pretty much over,” said Muldoon about his character, “His wife and kid leave him at the beginning of the movie and he’s completely lost. When his adulterous sex partner next door is murdered – it pushes him past the edge…I liked playing a guy with absolutely nothing to lose.” On Lawson and Ellie’s connection, Muldoon pointed to the trauma both experience in the film, “Both of their worlds have totally collapsed, so they’re like the two lost souls of Casa Del Norte.” The former Days of Our Lives star continued his eclectic career after Wicked, working with Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, Val Kilmer, Ed Asner, and Liam Hemsworth. Most recently, he was seen alongside Liam Neeson and Diane Kruger in Neil Jordan’s neo-noir crime thriller Marlowe.
William R. Moses – Ben Christianson
Father doesn’t always know best in this suburban-Gothic spin on Lolita. William R. Moses plays Ben, the stressed and crumbling patriarch who has some serious boundary issues. “I think the relationship between Ellie and Ben starts as a strongly bonded father and daughter in a dysfunctional family and that dysfunction just totally takes over,” said Moses. ”The father starts with a basis of good intention and then because of his own character weaknesses devolves into his lowest self. Pressure and guilt completely destroy him and he makes the most destructive choices possible.”
Director Michael Steinberg said Moses’ performance was the “cornerstone” of the film. “This movie is always trying to play two tones together: one is the tragic disintegration of a family with the father at the epicenter, and the other is this absurdly comedic story of what happens when your world gets blown apart and you’re powerless to stop it from getting worse and worse and worse.” Aside from Wicked, Moses appeared in 140 episodes of the prime-time soap Falcon Crest and played in Mystic Pizza starring Julia Roberts. He has had guest spots on dozens of TV series including Mad Men, Homeland, and How to Get Away with Murder. Since 2022, he has had a recurring role on the long-running soap General Hospital.
Michael Parks – Detective Boland
Owner of over 140 film and television credits during a 50-year career, Michael Parks portrays the laconic Detective Boland in a “delicious, stylized performance” that evokes 1950s noir. Boland brings a Bogart-esque cynicism to Casa Del Norte, continuously suspicious of everyone in the seemingly idyllic community.
Parks said he enjoyed playing the grizzled investigator, describing him as “a man apart from the turmoil. It gives you a different point of view, less conflict in your direction…Boland’s not a voyeur, but he has an objective point of view and gets to look at all the other characters…” Parks, who passed away in 2017, had a long and varied career including playing Adam in John Huston’s The Bible: In the Beginning… and a disaffected, wandering biker in the NBC series Then Came Bronson. Parks experienced a career resurgence in the early 2000s, most notably working with Quentin Tarantino on the Kill Bill films and Django Unchained. He is the subject of a documentary produced by filmmaker Kevin Smith titled Long Lonesome Highway.
Vanessa Zima – Inger Christianson
Then ten-year-old Vanessa Zima portrayed Ellie’s younger sister, Inger, who by the film’s end evolves from an innocent child to a potential killer in the Christianson family cycle of self-destruction. “She has this mix of vulnerability and sweetness,” said producer Frank Beddor, “…and yet there’s something else going on, you can sense a darker place which made her an ideal choice.”
Zima’s talent was on full display in her portrayal of Inger and the young actor enjoyed the more dramatic requirements of her role. “I thought it was fun to cry at the funeral and then to almost fall into the grave,” she said impishly. Zima was hardly a rookie when she showed up on set, having been nominated for a Young Artist Award for playing Peter Fonda’s granddaughter in Ulee’s Gold. She also appeared in the 1995 adaptation of The Baby-Sitters Club books alongside Julia Stiles’ future 10 Things I Hate About You co-star Larisa Oleynik.
Linda Hart – Mrs. Potter
Linda Hart portrays the neighborhood watchdog, Mrs. Potter, who entices Detective Boland with her soulful rendition of “I Honestly Love You” at Ben and Lena’s wedding. Director Michael Steinberg wrote Hart a letter pleading for her to consider the role and she blew the filmmakers away with her musical talent. “As soon as she started singing I panicked…” joked Beddor, “…this way too good for what the character Mrs. Potter was supposedly capable of. Only later did I learn that Linda together her Grammy-award-winning family, “The Harts,” had done 14 albums.” Other highlights of Hart’s music career have included an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and opening gigs for Hank Williams, Jr. and The Oak Ridge Boys. She has appeared on Broadway in shows such as Anything Goes, Hairspray, and Catch Me If You Can. Film and television appearances have included Get Shorty, Tin Cup, and Desperate Housewives.
Chelsea Field – Karen Christianson
As mom and murder victim, Chelsea Field brought real sympathy to the part of Karen. Field says, ”Even though she’s cheating with the neighbor, I think you understand where Ellie’s mother’s frustrations come from when you see the lack of communication between her and her husband. And also, Ellie is a major force to contend with! Karen’s not the ideal mom but neither is she the mom from hell. That would be too easy.”
Field launched her acting career off the heels of ten years as a professional dancer. With roles ranging from parts in large-scale action movies to heart-warming family films, she has starred in Flipper opposite Elijah Wood and The Last Boyscout with Bruce Willis, and recently had a recurring role in NCIS: New Orleans.
Louise Myrback – Lena In her first film role in the United States, Swedish stage actress Louise Myrback portrayed Lena, the Christianson au pair who falls for, and eventually marries, Ben. But Lena has to contend with Ellie, who presents herself as a rival for Ben’s affections. “It was very important to Lena that Ellie not manipulate her,” said Myrback, “She knows that if she doesn’t succeed in having power over the daughter, she’s not going to have a chance with the father, because she can see that Ellie has a tremendous amount of power over Ben.”
The Director
Michael Steinberg
Michael Steinberg was baptized as a film lover at age 8 after his father took him to see Bonnie and Clyde in their native Rapid City, South Dakota. After gaining recognition with his UCLA student short, Nightwatch, Steinberg teamed with his film school friend Neal Jiminez to direct the drama The Waterdance for Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator, The Walking Dead). The film was a festival darling, winning the IFP Spirit Award for “Best First Feature” and the “Audience Award” at Sundance. His next two features, Bodies, Rest, & Motion and Sleep With Me were both selected for the “Un Certain Regard” sections at the 1993 and 1994 editions of the Cannes Film Festivals.
In approaching Wicked, Steinberg wanted it to be both entertaining and thought-provoking. “What’s interesting is that it ends up feeling real because it’s all grounded in deep-rooted truths about human nature,” said Steinberg. “We wanted people to have fun with Wicked but be disturbed by it too. To get under their skin.”
The Crew
Frank Beddor – Producer
Frank Beddor had scaled the heights of professional skiing (as a two-time freestyle world champion) in his early 20s before arriving in L.A. as an actor and film producer. On a chairlift during the 1998 Sundance Film Festival pitched an outrageous comedy feature he had acquired to Fox executive Dylan Sellers. That project was There’s Something About Mary, which grossed over $350 million, was nominated for two Golden Globes, and is on AFI’s list of “Greatest American Comedies”.
He was first attracted to Wicked, originally titled The Second Wife, due to the character of Ellie, the relationships, the absurdities of the situations, the potential for black comedy, and bending the mystery genre. Since Wicked, Beddor wrote The Looking Glass Wars series, which became a New York Times bestseller and a sensation in the U.K. in 2004. He went on to create the Hatter M, series (six graphic novels depicting the journey of Alyss’s faithful bodyguard, Hatter Madigan) to sate the appetite of his fans and readers. To cross-pollinate the LGW’s universe of content, he also produced original songs, audiobooks, card games, video games, an apparel line, and a proposal for a theatrical musical. Currently, he hosts the All Things Alice podcast and is in pre-production on the near future sci-fi tale The Juliet at Warner Bros, working alongside Oscar-winning producer Chuck Roven (Oppenheimer, The Dark Knight trilogy) of Atlas Entertainment.
Eric Weiss – Screenwriter
A native of Framingham, Massachusetts, and alum of the American Film Institute, Eric Weiss experienced both resistance and curiosity when shopping his Electra-in-the-suburbs thriller. “When I wrote Wicked people thought I was nuts,” he recalled, “Just completely crazed. I think I would get meetings just because people wanted to meet me.” Producer Frank Beddor and director Michael Steinberg loved the script and worked with Weiss to enhance the mystery elements of the project before production.
Weiss has also penned the black comedy indie Bongwater, also released in 1998,starring Luke Wilson, Brittany Murphy, and Jack Black. His next project was the 2001 military satire Buffalo Soldiers, adapted from the novel of the same name by Robert O’Connor. The film, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Ed Harris, was nominated for six British Independent Film Awards and won Best Screenplay at the Evening Standard British Film Awards.
Bernd Heinl – Director of Photography
Bernd Heinl had previously worked with Steinberg on the 1993 drama Bodies, Rest & Motion. He used the lighting and the camera angles to convey the changing tone of the film: “Early in the story, we used more fill and bounce light and shot with wide angles, but after the mother died we shot everything a bit closer and went a little more direct, so that there would be more contrast. We also kept the walls darker so they would seem moody and threatening.”
To avoid slipping into the pure horror mode, Heinl said, “We didn’t use light shafts or distorted lenses or too many crazy angles because we wanted to keep the characters more human. Also, colors in horror films are often over the top and our background colors were enough, so I barely put gels on any of the lights. We kept the faces and skin tone neutral in the foreground and played with color in the background.”
Dominic Watkins – Production Designer
Wicked was not only Julia Stiles’ breakout role, it also proved to be the breakthrough for production designer Dominic Watkins. In the 26 years since Wicked took Sundance by storm, Watkins has built a glittering career defining the look of major blockbusters such as Bad Boys II, The Bourne Supremacy, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and Snow White and the Huntsman.
For Wicked, Watkins chose colors that had a dual personality: “In the kitchen, for instance, we used a peachy-orange color to convey warmth and normality, but depending on how we lit it, it could equally go towards red and have more violent connotations. We also put a lot of thought into what Ellie’s bedroom should be like because that was the only space she owned and decorated, and it was quite a contrast from the rest of the spaces. We used a wallpaper with a black base to create an oppressive atmosphere so that when you came out of the room, there was a sense of relief.”
Watkins said one of his points of departure was in researching the gated community. “I guess the planners view them as oases,” said Watkins, “but I think of them as something more like quicksand. What people look for is safety and seclusion but what they end up with is sterility and soullessness. And since so much of the outcome of the story has to do with the environment and the frustrations of the people within it, the setting was very important.”
Sara Jane Slotnick – Costume Designer
Costume Designer Sara Jane Slotnick is known for her ability to authentically outfit offbeat characters. In choosing Ellie’s wardrobe, she said that she “wanted everything she put on to have a sense that it was completely unique to her.” Ellie’s baby blue leather coat was a key piece of clothing that defined her character, with Slotnick describing it as “her protection against the world – her security blanket.”
Since working on Wicked, Slotnick has worked on a wide range of projects including Nick Cassavetes’ Alpha Dog, the 2000 blockbuster Charlie’s Angels, Oscar-nominated films Loving and Blonde, and the Patty Jenkins limited series I Am the Night. Her most recent projects include an adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot from It writer Gary Dauberman and the AMC crime drama series Parish starring Giancarlo Esposito.
The Music
Cliff Martinez – Composer
Former Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer and member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cliff Martinez has helped define pop culture both on stage and in the recording studio. Martinez’s debut as a composer was Steven Soderbergh’s Palme d’Or winner Sex, Lies, and Videotape. This was the first of 11 collaborations with Soderbergh, including Traffic and Contagion. Other notable projects include Drive, Spring Breakers, and The Neon Demon, for which he was named Best Composer at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.
From our recent blog on the Wicked soundtrack: “Martinez’s haunting and evocative compositions perfectly complement the dark and twisted narrative, immersing viewers in a world of moral ambiguity and psychological tension. With his trademark blend of electronic and orchestral elements, Martinez creates a sonic landscape that mirrors the inner turmoil and moral decay of the characters, enhancing the film’s suspense and intrigue.”
Songs
Wicked’s soundtrack perfectly reflects Ellie’s angst and rage with an energetic collection of late 90s alt-rock interspersed with a couple of classic love songs, emulating the film’s blended tone. Artists featured include Julian Hatfield, Kittie, Snake River Conspiracy, The Cranes, Switchblade Symphony, Jack Off Jill, Dusty Springfield, and Olivia-Newton John.
To further explore the music of Wicked, check out our recent blog analyzing each song featured in the film.
Trailers
Reviews
Wicked has been praised for its boldness, style, and Stiles’ powerful performance. In his review for the Sundance program John Cooper called Wicked “an exhilarating hybrid that continuously surprises and amuses.” Writing for Variety, Glenn Lovell wrote that the film is “chockablock with nods to Lynch and early De Palma” and “a stylish, dandy nail biter.” While Father Geek wrote for Ain’t It Cool News that Wicked is “a gem of the macabre” and a “perfectly realized slick little flick.”
Other rave reviews for Wicked:
“Wicked is delightfully derivative: its style, lighting, subject, and especially its penchant for cold distant camera work are so Hitchcockian … ” – James Digiovanna, Tucson Weekly
“Julia Stiles is destined for greatness” – Brendan Peterson, Film/Tape World
“Great Movie! A surprising thriller of a “Wicked” little family in a gated community” – Jake Weien, Flagstaff LIVE
“Visually sophisticated and darkly humorous” – Alison MacDonald, Austin American Statesman
” … Stiles’ performance is so stunning” – David Pfister, Interview Magazine
“Wicked is a dark sleek film with a hell bent breakthrough performance by Stiles who is destined to grab an audience’s attention” – Jose Martinez, SOMA Magazine
” … the most stylish suburban thriller in years.” – David Schwartz, World Cinema
“Wicked’s production values are top notch. The movie dances lightly on a tightrope that stretches from melodrama to farce” – The Georgia Straight – Vancouver
“Wicked is one of those movies that sucks you into its twisted realm so subtly you don’t realize how far your mind has been bent until you leave the theater. ” – Sandy Gow, Vancouver International Film Festival
“Stile’s smoldering performance in Wicked, earned her a starring role in the upcoming 10 Things I Hate About You.” – Michael Hogan, Vanity Fair
Where to Watch
You can watch Julie Stiles’ breakthrough performance in Wicked on the following streaming platforms: Amazon, YouTube, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, Plex, and Tubi.
