Movies Features

Catherine Hardwicke talks Red Riding Hood

By Anne Brodie Mar 14, 2011, 12:58 GMT

Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) is a beautiful young woman torn between two men. She is in love with a brooding outsider Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), but her parents have arranged for her to marry the wealthy Henry (Max Irons). Unwilling to lose each other, Valerie and Peter are planning to run away together when they learn that Valerie’s older sister has been killed by the werewolf that prowls the dark forest surrounding ...more

Catherine Hardwicke set the pace for the Twilight series, directing the initial offering top hordes of besotted fans. The story and Hardwicke’s vision resulted in a runaway success.

The 55 year old Texas filmmaker, who began her career in fine arts, is at it again, bringing her brand of youthful romance and sexuality to a favorite story of darkness, danger and supernatural wolves – the ages old folk tale Red Riding Hood. It has her signature look and feel.

Monsters and Critics spoke with Hardwicke in Toronto.

M&C: A fairy tale, like red Riding Hood, it’s very brief, some versions about 1000 words. That’s the nature of it. How did you come up with ways of extending it?

Hardwicke: Leonardo Di Caprio and his colleagues at Appian Way came up with it. If you take the Brothers Grimm which is the sanitized version there is a woodcutter saving Red Riding Hood instead of Red Riding Hood saving herself? Every fairy-tale is written through the lens of the perspective of the men who wrote it down.

Red Riding Hood is preserved as one of the few fairy tales in which the girl doesn’t get married in the end and live happily ever after in a wealthy castle with her prince. She still is fierce and independent.

The earliest versions 700 years ago, all parts of the world not just the Black Forest in Germany had tales about this going into the woods, facing an ogre, facing a werewolf. You know, werewolves were on trial in 1859 and recorded trial in Germany, People have been mystified with wolves for thousands of years, Native Americans revere theme. There is footage of a wolf killed and wolves at night.

They are an intense animal and you can understand why people attribute supernatural powers to them. So I thought it was kind of cool that they put the werewolf back in Red Riding Hood and kept the stuff and I wanted to increase the grit factor too.

This movie ends the same way the fairy tale ends, going to grandmothers house and confronting the wolf and so that is the whole story. We had to add everything else before that. Bringing back the wolf and the shape shifter created a whole new level where you are suspicious of everybody.

M&C: It’s great that the characters are unconventional, a little outside the traditional formula.

Hardwicke: There the guy she’s going to marry oh, okay, he’s going to be a real jerk. The typical fairy tale bad guy, pompous a**hole and of course the guy turns out to be pretty damn cool and sensitive and great looking in this case! We wanted to make it more difficult, it’s not so easy bad, good, black, white but that is also represented in the original fairy tale Red Riding Hood come sot a fork in the woods she can choose between the pleasure path picking the flowers and getting in touch with her own sensuality or going straight to grandmothers like her mother told her.

She’s a got the two boys, one she feels in her heart and her body and she wants this guy, my soul mate. The other one is the one my mom wants for me, and we kind of modern thing, we all have these choices am I going to be a lawyer, a doctor, or a journalist and follow my heart.

Every day we make those choices do something safe or riskier, roots in the fairy tale and we bumped it up to take the more erotic, sensual route as a fairy tale that you don’t notice when you’re five-years-old, going into the woods with the big, bad wolf and when your 11 or 12 and you notice, the boy “hey! How come the wolf is in bed? What’s the granny tranny?”

M&C: Were you concerned about making it appeal to contemporary viewers?

Hardwicke: I did read the script which had some interesting family situations and secrets and lies. He had a celebration in the script; I turned it into a medieval Burning Man party, in my mind that’s what inspired me. I got Fever Ray a Swedish band I loved, and Karen wrote that really cool song that’s haunting on has an old and new feeling, tribal and pagan.

The way she processes that sound and her voice is very haunting and she draws you in. but she uses modern technology and draws you in and you can’t quite place it. The dance was made to be that way, if you look at the paintings of Brueghel and Bosch that were painted in that time period, yes these people did do these dances, they had certain dances that looked traditional with the hands and certain steps, but they put their own personality to it.

There are paintings of these people going wild, they were radical and fun, I love Burning Man you feel that pagan connection. So I thought there was a lot of it. And The Inquisition, we have homeland security coming in spying on us checking everything were doing, searches everyone’s home. He makes everyone paranoid, we have that too.

We don’t know what our boyfriend or girlfriend is doing in the next room, they might have a whole other identify, you get these people coming up when there’s a serial killer and the people closest to them did not know that they were capable of this.

You don’t know what someone is capable of. So Valerie (Red Riding Hood) is looking at everybody through that lens of paranoia. Which I thought can resonate with a modern audience.

M&C: Do the constant comparisons to Twilight concern you?

Hardwicke: I loved Twilight and had fun doing it and then that bad thing for me was that I was tethered to reality. You had to believe that a vampire would show up in high school and dress at The Gap and we had to follow this very well-known details and this one I got to do something from the imagination, create a village, and create a world, the costumes. The look which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

My background is art, architecture and animation that this was a drill for me to take it to another level visually and thematically it’s a mystery and it’s about paranoia too and the darkness inside but I never got to do that stuff. It was fun!

M&C: Why did you cast Virginia Madsen and Julie Christie as the mother and grandmother?

Hardwicke: Virginia is a friend of mine and I had dinner with her and there was a candle and I looked at her and I had a thought I was eating with Amanda, they look alike. I made her wear brown contacts so she would be a suspect she has blue eyes.

I thought she’d be a great mom for Amanda. When I first got the screenplay, it was one of these grandmothers wagging her fingers, old school boring grandmother. No, no! I wanted her to be kind of wild. She lives in the woods by herself and had to be a badass to do that.

I wanted a sexy, boho granny and Julie came to mind, she’s amazing, ridiculous looking. I talked to her on the phone and said “This granny’s going to wear a dress and be hot” and she said “Okay I’ll do it. But I’m not wearing a nightcap” and I said “Don’t worry, I don’t want you to”.

M&C: Gary Oldman is fantastic as the priest.

Hardwicke: Gary came after this. He wanted to do it and he’s had a long relationship with Warner Brothers, Harry Potter, Batman and the rest and if you look up those movies for example, he throws himself into the craziest supernatural roles and makes it feel really real.

So I thought okay is anybody’s going to get out of a machine and tell us his wife was a werewolf and we didn’t know that and can feel that’s what’s gotten under his skin as he gets obsessive with it, Gary can do anything, I was pretty thrilled he wanted to do it.

M&C: How much time did you put into the look?

Hardwicke: This was one film I got to do something to do visually. The others are visual in away but grounded din reality. When I first moved to Hollywood I thought I was going to get to be creative all the time, they want creativity in Hollywood! I was so naïve; I didn’t know how it really was. And this was the first time.

When I first came to LA, I got a job making miniature trees for Tim Burton for his stop motion things, and I thought I’d get to do something like Tim does, something really imaginative. And this was the first time I really got to be imaginative, In every one of my movies and I’m hard wired, even if it is a realistic movie like, Thirteen where we have no money to make the most interesting fun house with layers so we can look through the window and connect the shots and just try to go as far as I can with whatever the resources are.

But with this one, right now even it seems before you get hired in LA, your movie gets green lit you have to do these huge presentations like I personally did paintings, drawings to try to get the studio to do the movie. They come to you with the script and you have to sell them on their own project. Pretty wild. You get your hands involved in it and I was very involved as coming in with images, paintings everything. We have a book that’s how my drawings and other artists’ drawings.

M&C: The fight scenes between the wolf and the soldiers are interesting. You’ve done fight scenes in a supernatural world before but here its people taking on a supernatural being. What was it like?

Hardwicke: That was fun; at least we had an invisible wolf. We tried to train a wolf to do that but he wouldn’t co-operate. They don’t care about films, wolves. It was wild wondering how I could figure out how the wolf pack would be. I literally ordered a costume for $69 off the internet and I had a kid wear it and tried to run around and be a wolf a stunt guy tried to be the wolf and sometimes I played the wolf off the actors, they were laughing, they were in too good a mood but it was supposed to be scary.

So I got in there and yelled at them super intense and ferocious and I did scare them I think. Andy Chun our stunt director on Twilight and on this, he does everything Hong Kong Style! We have no budget and I want it to be big $42M movie, that’s the budget of a romantic comedy and look what we had in it.

CGI characters, set extensions, horses, everything every costume and the village is made… and he was like “We do it Hong King Style!!!” So I thought we’d just push it to the limit. On the DVD you’ll see the really crazy crew rehearsals and everyone in the crew was playing the parts. How do you choreograph this, we shot it all digitally, put it all together and though how can we make it better? Do we even need that beat, that was boring, that was repetitive? Rhythm and Hues made the wolf.

We all wanted to make it kick ass and mean and unpredictable so we looked at crazy animal footage, animals cornered in bad situations, and rodeos, animals that are trapped. How do you make it this ferocious this beast that has been unleashed?