A statement from Frank Beddor
Why I Create
Every passion has an origin.
Mine begins with my grandmother Alice.
Her favorite book was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which meant it became my mother’s favorite book and, when I was eleven, I was told it would be mine too.
I opened it expecting an adventure and came away with questions. I wanted to make sense of the nonsense. I wanted to know what happened to Alice after she woke up. Most of all, I refused to believe Wonderland was a dream.
I didn’t know it then, but that instinct—to question the story I’d been given—would become a pattern in my life.
I’ve always been drawn to the unexpected way into a story. I want to turn it over. Look behind it. Ask why it was necessary in the first place. What truth might be hiding inside it? What did history leave out? What does the Looking Glass reflect back at us—our desires, our fears, our subjective truths, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are?
The Looking Glass Wars became the largest expression of that curiosity. I’ve lived with Wonderland for more than twenty-five years, and our relationship has changed many times along the way.
It has been my child, my lover, my father—and sometimes my ghost.
But Wonderland is part of a larger belief that has guided me as a storyteller: imagination isn’t an escape from reality. It’s one of the ways we engage with it.
Every film begins as an idea. Every book begins with a blank page. Every invention begins with someone seeing something that doesn’t exist yet.
Imagination changes reality.
I’m still curious about what we might discover when we look at a familiar story from another angle.