Alice in wonderland

Vogue, December 1966²⁸⁰

I believe it was Lillian Hellman who first put me up to doing Alice. Sitting on the edge of a New York cocktail din we somehow got around to children’s books and agreed that Alice was a rich, sombre book full of special promise as a film. It had been done before, but they had always missed the point. They had been too jokey, or else too literal. And certainly they had always come unstuck by trying to recreate the style of Tenniel’s original illustrations.

Alice is an inward sort of work, more of a mood than a story, so that before it could be turned into a film we had to discover some new key with which to unlock its hidden feeling. Tenniel’s drawings are fastened to the printed page. They belong to the world of ink and type and just refuse to translate into photography. All those animal heads and playing cards look fine on the printed page. On celluloid they look like awkward pantomime drag. So we had to go deeper into the text, under the scratchy texture of the print, to find some commanding image which would provide a picture, as inevitable for celluloid as Tenniel’s illustrations were for paper.

What was Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) about? What is the strange, secret command of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)? Nostalgia and remorse, of course. Like so many Victorians, Dodgson was hung up on the romantic agony of childhood. The Victorians looked on infancy as a period of perilous wonder, when the world was experienced with such keen intensity that growing up seemed like a fall and a betrayal. And yet they seemed to do everything they could to smother this primal intensity of childhood. Instead of listening to these witnesses of innocence, they silenced them, taught them elaborate manners, and reminded them of their bounden duty to be seen and not heard.

Perhaps the adults were frightened and, long before Freud, knew the anarchic vigour of the child. Whatever the reason, they were two-faced about youth, secretly longing for the very condition which they took so many efforts to stifle and restrain. They were caught in a cleft stick between the incompatible claims of duty and sensibility. They knew very well that in growing up they must sacrifice the glory and the freshness of the dream. And yet they realized, too, that only by doing this, by ignoring the splendour in the grass, could they apply themselves to work, to duty, and to substantial public accomplishment.

For above all, the Victorians were prodigious workers with an almost obsessional sense of the dignity of labour. The world pressed down on them with a burden of serious obligation, and anything which interfered with the discharge of this obligation seemed like a frivolous intrusion. Life was short enough without having to waste time on the petty sensitivities of childhood.

Yet the Victorians knew, or suspected at least, the damage they were doing by hurrying on to maturity like this. Deep down, in moments of sentiment and remorse, they realized that infant sensibility was more than a frivolous luxury – a core of precious spiritual vitality without which life was a meaningless drudge. It is significant that when John Stuart Mill fell into a depression in early manhood, he was comforted not by work, but by the poems of Wordsworth.

Alice is another Victorian’s quest for consolation in childhood. Both books are about the pains of growing up. In Wonderland and Looking-Glass, a sombre punctilious child reaches hesitantly toward her own seniority, realizing as she does so the terrible penalties of the adult state. Right at the start of Wonderland she feels herself growing bigger, only to feel with an awful shock that by doing so she can no longer get down the passageway and out to the garden with its cool fountains and bright flowers.

The journey which Alice then makes takes her deeper and deeper into the mesh of adult obligation – into a world where punctuality is the cardinal virtue and where disobedience is punished by having your head off. And the story converges on an occasion which is surely the epitome of adult responsibility: a trial. At the end it is not the Knave who suffers but Alice herself, who is finally accused of having grown too big.

Everyone Alice meets on the way to this climax represents one of the different penalties of growing up. One after the other, the characters seem to be punished or pained by their maturity. The Queen is infuriated, the King is browbeaten. The Caterpillar is a fossilized pedant and the Duchess a bibulous old frump, prompted by morals and mottos.

Even the congenial characters are bowed down with pathos and remorse. The Gryphon and Mock Turtle sink into senility with a few tattered reminiscences of their school days to comfort them in their shallow grief. The Hatter lives on riddles; the Dormouse snoozes into his dotage. The whole book is a panorama of corruption and decay.

The animal heads and playing cards are just camouflage. All the characters in the book are real, and the papier-mâché disguises with which Carroll covers them all up do nothing to hide the indolent despair.

Once this was clear, the way to make the film fell neatly and inevitably into place. No snouts, no whiskers, no carnival masks. Everyone could be just as he was. And Alice herself? Not the pretty sweetling of popular fancy. I advertised for a solemn, sallow child, priggish and curiously plain. I knew exactly what she would be like when I found her. Still, haughty and indifferent, with a high smooth brow, long neck and a great head of Sphinx hair.

Seven hundred kids answered the advertisement and for three months I riffled through an album of bouncing, bonny Mods. It seems that every girl in England sees herself as Alice, or at least some jolly sweet version of her. Half of them came in as holiday snaps, knee-deep in estuary water, with a bronzed brute of a father about to throw some coiled rope out of the background. But the real Alice, my little white whale, was elsewhere.

Then my Alice turned up. Just as I’d imagined her. She was the only child I interviewed out of the 700 who applied. She had no wish to become an actress, but her mother thought that a summer stint like this would do her good – bring her out a bit. She was too much with her books and a bout of jolly acting might bring some roses to her cheeks.281

She was the reincarnation of Alice. In scene after scene she met the distinguished cast with the same indifferent courtesy with which in the story Alice meets everyone. Oddly enough this child required the least direction of all. Her nature supplied everything that needed to be done. She cruises through the film with prissy hauteur.

Not once did this girl do what I feared any child actress might have done. She never emoted, and best of all she never showed any surprise. She just spoke her lines and carried herself straight. As a dreamer, after all, Alice is the landlord of her estate and the characters are her tenants. She must come on like a stuffed Infanta, cold and gorgeous.

The film is very elaborate in its setting. This is not strictly true to the nature of dreams, most of which are rather slipshod about the details of décor. Dreams are only intermittently elaborate in visual detail. But I wanted to recreate, in addition to a dream, that bursting, fatal ripeness of Pre-Raphaelite surrealism.

I wanted the child to move through a world where every detail threatened to blossom with some dreadful vision. Grass blades, dewdrops, bricks, silk brocade, violets and lace. The awful pristine imminence of physical things. So in one set, for the trial, my designer, a magpie genius called Julia Trevelyan Oman, loaded the scene with 4,000 movable props.

It seems that the film contains the entire visual contents of the child’s mind. Every object and surface she has ever seen and forgotten looms up with fatal clarity. We ransacked the Tate Gallery for all this. Pictures by Millais, Holman Hunt, Calderon, and Arthur Hughes were digested and assimilated into the décor. Everything to help recreate the nauseating intensity of the Pre-Raphaelite vision.

And then we prayed for heat. We petitioned for that special, syrupy English summer heat when insects play cellos in the grass and oak trees stand stock still on their own doilies of midsummer shadow. Because that’s the sort of afternoon when Alice fell to drowsing. We wanted pollen and midges, long drugged silences and the flash of sunlight off a laurel leaf.

Tall order for an English summer, but we got it all. Except for the drugged silences. We didn’t get too many of those. American bombers saw to that. Short of going to Ireland there seemed to be no hope of escaping the Strategic Air Command. Even at 38,000 feet a Boeing cuts across the Pre-Raphaelite scene with shattering irrelevance. But we steered a course between the flights, and only once does an aero-engine intrude. We pass it off as a hornet.

We toured three months looking for the right locations. As the summer opened we took off each day into the secret hinterland of rural England. It was ten years since I had been in the depths like this and I had forgotten how mysteriously rural much of England still was.

We took a wide sweep in each of the four quadrants of the compass. And I realized how different each one was – like a different temperament or humour, almost. There was the dry sedgy East: Tennyson country, with huge upholstered skies, cold marshes, and flights of honking swans. And the West, mythical and sleepy, drowsing under swathes of poppy-milk mist. And the Western rivers, too: sleek green and oily, like small Limpopos.

This odyssey through England put me right in the mood for filming. Alice is saturated in an intense feeling for the English countryside. It’s quite clear that Carroll understood the awful apocalyptic mystery of English nature – its terrible, damp, mossy fecundity, with hobbits and angels ripening like dragonfly larvae in the ooze.

If you stand for a moment quite silent, in an English orchard, say in Gloucestershire, on a hot afternoon in July, you can hear the Alice fauna creeping among the grass stems. That’s why I filled the movie with dwarfs and midgets. I wanted the best human counterparts for all those jewelled regiments of vermin that crawl down at ankle level in the English grass. And we dressed the dwarfs and midgets all à la Velázquez so as to get Empire of Habsburg insects.

We filmed in the midst of all this for about nine weeks. We forgot where we had come from, and when the end came someone suggested that we just carry on – no film in the camera, sham takes and all – sinking deeper and deeper into the somnolent magic of Alice’s last summer as a child.