SDCC: Burton wants Alice to be a ‘story’

Speaking to reporters at San Diego Comic-Con yesterday, Tim Burton said that he wanted his version of Alice In Wonderland to be a continuous narrative as opposed to flashy sequences. Burton also revealed that he hasn’t come across an adaptation of the Lewis Carroll story that he has fully enjoyed yet.

“It was always a series with a girl wandering around from one crazy character to another,” said the director. “I never felt any emotional connection, so it was an attempt to give it some framework and emotional grounding that I [had] never seen in any version before. The real challenge,” he continued, “was to try and make Alice a story, and not a series of events.” Burton previously revealed that he first read Carroll’s yarn as a child, and that a good proportion of the film’s events will be based around his other related works that appear inside the original story. “A lot of it is based on the Jabberwocky, that’s in one of the stories. That’s not a big part of the story, but we’re just using elements of all the books because that’s just the nature. They don’t follow a specific structure.” The Jabberwocky, for the uninitiated, is a famous nonsense poem that appeared in Through The Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There in 1871.

Burton also revealed that he is still planning on directing Dark Shadows as his next film. Alice In Wonderland stars Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter and Mia Wasikowska. The film is scheduled for release on 5 March 2010.