Earlier today, we brought you a sneak peek at SyFy’s upcoming miniseries “Alice.”
The two-night event, debuting Sunday December 6, takes the original vision of Lewis Caroll’s classic stories about Alice in Wonderland and gives them a “techno-twist” writer and director Nick Willing tells SyFy Wire.
“In the landscape of the new Wonderland, you’ll see towering skyscrapers and buildings actually built out of cards. “The look of the film, we’ve got this kind of exciting, funky twist to the look, but retro modern,” Willing says. “The first thing that tickled my fancy was the idea of imagining Wonderland as it is today, 150 years on from the original. [Alice's Adventures] in Wonderland was written 150 years ago, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be delicious to imagine that world, in the way that we have evolved, also changed? How would it be today? Perhaps we’d have similar characters, but wouldn’t they be different? And wouldn’t they have similar quests?’”
Willing went to say that he wanted to give some interesting twists on some of the familiar elements his Alice encounters through the looking glass. In the books, Alice plays croquet while riding a flamingo. In the show, a Flamingo is Wonderland’s chosen brand of jet-propelled vehicle.
“I translated that into a flying-machine flamingo that she has to sit on and manipulate its pink neck to make it fly,” Willing said. “It sort of looks like a Vespa, a cross between a jet ski or Vespa, but that flies. That was very delicious.”
In this new vision of Wonderland, Alice (played by Caterina Scorsone) discover the Queen of Hearts (played by Kathy Bates) is harvesting emotions from humans beings into a liquid form for consumption by various Wonderland natives.
“What I was interested in was [the idea of] being able to manufacture your emotions,” Willing said. “One of the things I fear may happen to us is that we swap genuine emotions for something that is given to us. We cry at the television commercial and think that those tears are genuine. I was fascinated with, not so much in how these things could be addictive, but how we are slowly constructing a world where we swap genuine emotions or something which is manufactured cheaply. Wonderland seemed to be a good place to set that in because the Queen of Hearts has that kind of personality in the book.”
“Alice” debuts Sunday at 9 p.m. on SyFy with the second installment airing on Monday, December 7.
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