It may be indicative of Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders’ fearlessness – or his newness, this being his feature debut – that, after presenting much-anticipated footage to fans yesterday at WonderCon, he nonchalantly dropped the vivid phrase “dwarf gangbangs” into a discussion about his dark (and yes, likely PG-13) allegorical fairytale actioner. (Now that’s how you get the attention of a certain demographic.) For the record, there are no such scenarios in June's action-packed SWATH, but there were many more revelations and key insights to be had into Sanders’ take on the age-old tale, which stars Twilight’s Kristen Stewart and debuts two months after that other Snow White movie dances into theaters.
Sanders spoke with journalists Saturday at WonderCon, where Stewart made a surprise appearance at the SWATH panel. Herewith, find a Movieline 9 rundown of highlights from his wide-ranging thoughts on ths film, its dark elements, Stewart's non-Twilight career, Tarsem's Mirror, Mirror, and more.
ON MAKING HIS FEATURE DEBUT WITH A BIG-BUDGET STUDIO TENTPOLE
"I couldn’t get a small film, ironically,"said Sanders, who made his name directing shorts and commercials, most notably for Halo 3. "It’s much harder to get a small film off the ground than it is to get a big film off the ground, but the high stakes gamble on the roulette table is that if it doesn’t fall on your color you’re in a small prison in Burbank for the rest of your moviemaking days. Hopefully, that won’t happen."
His first experience in a studio feature gig was, he says, surprisingly hands-off. "It was a high stakes risk both for myself and for the studio, who very kindly wrote a very large check to get it done, and they weren’t there whipping me into line which was great. I was really expecting to be shuttered in but they trusted what we were doing and they let us go, which is all you can really ask for on a shoot with a studio."
As for the once-in-progress big screen adaptation of Halo, which stalled a few years back? "No one called me!"
SANDERS HAS NEVER SEEN TWILIGHT
The director was impressed with Stewart on the strengths of her other films, dating back to Panic Room, and says it's her other work that will help her eventually overcome audience's dominant association of her with Twilight. "I saw her first in Panic Room and I saw her again in Into the Wild," he recalled. "I loved her in The Runaways, I loved her in Welcome to the Rileys. I think she’s going to be incredible in On the Road.
"She’s a great actor and people just go ‘Twilight girl, Twilight girl,’ which is testament to her. She’s kept this interesting pipeline of projects going on the side so she’s not just going to be that girl forevermore. She’s a great actor and she’s made incredibly shrewd decisions for someone who’s half my age. I’d never seen the Twilights so I didn’t really care that much. I met her, I really got on with her, she’s a great actor, she was right for the character. That’s it. It’s as simple as that for me."
ON KRISTEN STEWART VS. BELLA SWAN
Sanders knows his film and his star will be fighting to counteract the specter of Twilight. "I think what I realized is that she’s such a good actor that everyone thinks she’s Bella Swan. They believe that that’s her, and obviously an actor is playing a role – she is nothing like Bella."
"She was there as I was writing stuff, we would have conversations seeing through her eyes, we really worked hard on developing that character together and I was just amazed at her talent. She’s incredibly good at her craft. She’s incredibly instinctive, she’s incredibly intuitive. She will overcome fear like no one I’ve met when it comes to it. She didn’t really want to ride a horse – she had a bad horse-riding accident as a kid – when you’re riding fast on a horse with 200 other soldiers on horses riding behind you, through surf on a beach… that’s terrifying."
THE PREVAILING DARKNESS OF SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN, OR: EVERYBODY HURTS
What Sanders believes grounds his fantasy fairytale is that all of his characters share a common tragic element -- even Charlize Theron's evil queen. "This queen took over a kingdom, she’s someone who’s suffered a lot of loss," he explained. "She lost a family, she lost a tribe. She found her way into this kingdom like a Trojan horse, she moves from kingdom to kingdom hollowing them out from the inside, like a siren who attracts people to her beauty."
That sense of loss trickles down through SWATH, affecting every character's journey. "The dwarfs lost everything; they were down in the mines, they’re noble gold miners who see light in the darkness and that’s why they were always the gold miners. When they came up from the mines the world was black and then they lost all the other people in their race. The Huntsman lost a wife. Snow White lost a kingdom, she lost both her parents and she lost the love of the people. So everyone’s dealing with loss in very different ways."
HOW DOES SWATH COMPARE TO ALICE IN WONDERLAND, OR... GLADIATOR?
Sanders credits SWATH producer Joe Roth for reinvigorating audience's interest in fairytales with his huge blockbuster success, Alice in Wonderland. But while initial marketing materials took a similar tack to the Tim Burton adventure, Sanders points out significant differences in tone and world-building in his film -- and compares it to two Oscar-winning classics.
"[Alice in Wonderland] was very hallucinogenic and very CG-based, very otherworldly. Ours is very realistic. It’s really a big kind of swashbuckling knights in armor kind of movie, basically. We’ve lots of castles on hilltops and horse battles and shattering black armies, it’s kind of a medieval fairytale, with the kind of scale of the films that people love, like Gladiator or Lawrence of Arabia. It’s got those big sweeping vistas. It’s a big and imaginative world."
ON KRISTEN STEWART AND THE TRICK TO AN ENGLISH ACCENT
Given the film's medieval setting, the non-British cast had to adopt appropriate period and regional accents, hence the recent big reveal of Stewart's English affect. Sanders explained: "If you’re amongst the forest and there are knights in armor looking chivalrous behind you and then Snow White says, ‘Is that, like, my castle?’ it kind of goes pffft. So it was important that she wasn’t Californian. It just felt that to fit into the world, all the characters have accents from that part of the world – Chris Hemsworth is Scottish, and Kristen is very kind of royal English, like me."
Stewart's accent training was extensive, but Sanders approves. "She was really great at it and she did the work. It’s not easy – it’s easy to do an accent for a few minutes, but to be able to do it without thinking about it so you can concentrate on the performance is very hard, and she worked with one of the best British dialect coaches. It’s all ‘A-E-I-O-U’ and it’s hours of work, and she did the work so that she was flawless and didn’t need to worry about it and get on with the performance."
KRISTEN STEWART, WARRIOR PRINCESS?
Though she wields a broadsword and wears armor, Stewart's Snow White is no expert killer. "She wears a suit of armor but she’s not suddenly Bruce Lee’s adopted sister. She is wearing armor for protection and she has to kill a queen, she’s not beheading people. She doesn’t suddenly acquire these skills where she’s something that she isn’t. It’s very instinctual, it’s defensive. She knows she has to kill someone and that is abhorrent to her; that sword lies very uneasy in her hand."
That realistic take on Snow White's reluctant warrior nature may have been in part influenced by Stewart's first visit to weapons training. "When we first went to the stunt farm the stunt coordinator said, ‘This is Linda, and she’s going to show you how Snow White fights,’" remembered Sanders, miming expert sword twirling, "and me and Kristen were just like, ‘Uh-uh.’ I put that sword in her hand as I would put it in any of your hands, if I told you somebody was going to come through that door who had done something terrible to you and you have to kill them, I’m sure you’d fucking give them a good run for their money and that’s how she fights. She’s no ninja or samurai, it’s purely reactive."
ON HAVING 8 DWARFS AND THE LATENT SEXUAL UNDERTONES OF THE MYTHOLOGICAL BEINGS
There's no big reason behind bumping Snow White's fabled seven dwarfs into a rounded octet, played by British actors Ian McShane, Johnny Harris, Bob Hoskins, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, Brendan Gleeson, Ray Winstone, and Nick Frost. "It wasn’t like, ‘We’ve got to have 8 dwarves!’ It was like, ‘Fuck it, let’s have 8 dwarves.’ The Snow White story or Snow Drop story, they just had dwarfs. We weren’t trying to be Disney, we just wanted one more."
But what of the original sexual meaning within fairytale dwarf lore, according to Sanders? "The dwarfs really, mythologically, are latent sexuality," he explained. "They’re half-men, so they’re about sexual awakening."
That said, while Sanders is conscious of the meaning in the iconography he's playing with, his SWATH doesn't necessarily tap into every allegorical element of the fable. "There are no dwarf gangbangs," he joked. "It’s really about another group of people who have lost everything because of the reign and they have been touched by Snow White and decide that they will fight for their pride alongside her. They’re very instigative in taking her kingdom back with her."
BUT WHAT ABOUT TARSEM AND MIRROR, MIRROR?
Asked how he felt about the fact that another Snow White movie is coming out in the same season as his film, Sanders remained diplomatic. "Ah, Tarsem, Tarsem… We used to be represented at the same company so I know of Tarsem, and it’s definitely a big veering from what he does normally – it’s comedy, which is something that Tarsem’s not known for."
"I think we’re both getting a lot more publicity because both films are out there," he said. "They’re very different and I think there’s room for both of them. Look, I hope we both succeed and I hope people want to see two versions. People love to go, ‘Oh, Hollywood’s making two movies about the same thing, they’re so dumb,’ so everyone talks about it and actually I think it helps the awareness of the project.
That said, will he be checking out the competition, which debuts almost exactly two months prior to SWATH? "I don’t know -- if you see a hooded man in the back of the theater…"
Snow White and the Huntsman is in theaters June 1. Read more from WonderCon 2012 here.