Movies

New Releases • A-D • E-H • I-P • Q-Z • Articles • Festivals • Interviews • Dark Knight • Indiana Jones • MCU

Alice in Wonderland: Muchness
Interview with Linda Woolverton
Article provided by Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment

"Sometimes I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
—Alice, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

It began, as many great adventures do, with a "what if"—what if, screenwriter Linda Woolverton mused, Alice grew up and returned to Wonderland?

From that spark a cinematic phenomenon caught fire. Woolverton's re-envisioning of the classic tale is now Disney's latest big-screen triumph, directed by Tim Burton, and Lewis Carroll's iconic words about believing in the impossible have been transformed into an exuberant battle cry for anyone staring down a Jabberwocky.

19-year-old Alice Kingsleigh, played by Mia Wasikowska, chafes under the conventions and expectations imposed by Victorian society; she daydreams about men wearing dresses and women wearing trousers, and wonders what it would be like to fly.

"I did a lot of research on the ethics and mores of how young women were expected to behave, and had Alice behave not that way," Woolverton explains. "She doesn't wear stockings. She doesn't like them. I don't like them either. The Victorian era was perfect because it was easy to shock."

But Alice is stopped. "She doesn't know who she is. Other people have determined her path, and presented her with some options. She looks at the options, and she hesitates."

"At a certain age, girls in society are pressured to be a certain way," Woolverton continues. "They step back from being the smartest one in the class; they start wanting to be attractive to boys. I always wanted to address this issue in my work."

"You're not the same as you were before... you've lost your muchness," the Mad Hatter, played by Johnny Depp, tells Alice.

"Having lost her muchness is having lost knowing who she is," Woolverton says. "If you look at the Alice in the books, she's intrepid, she's not afraid, not daunted; she's very different from the Alice we meet at the beginning of the movie.

Woolverton drew on Carroll's famous poem "Jabberwocky" for inspiration, making it about Alice and deftly causing the poem's "he" to refer to "she." In the film's climatic scene, as Alice advances on the Jabberwocky, she counts off six impossible things to herself: "There's a potion that can make you shrink; a cake that can make you grow; animals can talk; cats can disappear; there's a place called Wonderland; and I can slay the Jabberwocky." "Counting off is the process of working up to achieve her goal. I get chills every time I see it, read it; when I wrote it," Woolverton confesses.

Does Woolverton have her own personal list of six impossible things to believe before breakfast? She laughs.

"This movie is slaying my own personal Jabberwocky," she admits. "The fact that's it's been embraced by the world is something I can check off the list. But the challenges are always out there—there's always a Jabberwocky, it's always changing, which makes you constantly good—always striving, always working. My next Jabberwocky is to do it again."

Does believing in six impossible things before breakfast have a particular relevance for Woolverton as a mother?

"My whole MO with my daughter was to raise her to believe that she can do anything, be anything, accomplish anything she wants. Everything I've ever written is for my daughter. There are characters in my work that are her. Alice is for her. She's 18 now—but she doesn't need it. She's very strong and confident."

"This is my dream," declares Alice. "I'll decide where it goes from here. I make the path." It's the purest expression of what it means to be a protagonist—in a movie, and in life. "Alice, at last," says Absalom the caterpillar, as she makes the choice to fight the Jabberwocky.

But isn't this what life is about? Aren't we all dreaming six impossible things before breakfast?

That your child, who is still in bed, will get up in time to catch the carpool to school ten minutes from now.
That you will finish that project, no matter how many dishes are stacked up in the sink.
That you will not only survive whatever life tosses at you, you will thrive.
That women can be the protagonist of their own story.
That "he" can mean "she."
That, as with Alice at the end of the movie, shipping off to some far port to learn the merchant trading business, the end of one adventure means the beginning of another. Hello, Absalom, now transformed into a butterfly. Hello, wisdom. Hello to our children and ourselves.

Woolverton agrees. "We're on the verge of women ruling the world, if we raise our daughters to believe in themselves."