Catherine Hardwicke at a "Red Riding Hood" book signing + new interview

From a book signing for Red Riding Hood yesterday in Toronto at Indigo Manulife Centre.

 

Red Riding Hood director Catherine Hardwicke at the Windsor Arms Hotel this week, in Toronto to promote the new film.

From The Star:

First thing’s first: Grandma had to go.

When Catherine Hardwicke started to craft the kind of movie she wanted to make with Red Riding Hood, opening Friday, she ditched the creaky granny the script called for. She approached legendary British beauty Julie Christie to play a “fun and sexy . . . badass” gran who makes the famous red-hooded cloak for Amanda Seyfried’s feisty Valerie.

“I loved the first draft (by screenwriter David Johnson) but it had the old grandmother teaching the girls how to sew and I was like, ‘No, that’s not how grandmothers are anymore. No actress is going to want to play that,’” Hardwicke said during a chat with the Star while on a stop in Toronto this week to promote the movie.

“And that’s not how that grandmother would have been,” Hardwicke adds. Her version wears a form-fitting gown and has waist-length blond dreadlocks spilling from twisted scarves.

“She lives out in the woods alone. She had to be a badass. She’s gotta be fun, she’s gotta be sexy with her dreads.”

Slender and petite in a tight cobalt blue mini-dress and buckled biker boots, her long blond hair framing a trio of necklaces — including a gold wolf tooth in homage to her movie — the Texas-born 55-year-old clearly has some badass in her as well.

She’s a rare breed in Hollywood, a successful female movie director who has forged her own path. She helmed the first Twilight movie, a blockbuster that made almost $400 million worldwide, but walked away from the chance to direct the sequel, New Moon, when she felt the script wasn’t ready and the studio was rushing production.

She’s proud of what she achieved with Twilight, breaking new ground for women directors and for young female audiences, making a movie targeted for them.

“Obviously, after Twilight was successful, suddenly that changes the landscape . . . you could make something that wasn’t just all about boys and blowing up buildings,” Hardwicke observes. “I think that helped open people’s minds that other movies could be made.”

Hardwicke is clearly serving that same audience with Red Riding Hood, which takes the children’s fairy tale to a teen-friendly, yet much darker place. It starts as a Gothic romance and evolves into a murder mystery as the villagers try to figure out the human identity of the murderous werewolf terrorizing them on full-moon rampages.

As Hardwicke considered the way she wanted her movie to look, she immediately focused on the image of Valerie’s flowing red cape, the only scarlet used in the movie. And Hardwicke fought to use it to its most dramatic, getting a second helicopter-shot scene in the movie where Valerie is seen far below, walking along a snowy mountain ridge, a vivid-red, seven-metre-long red cape billowing behind her.

“I had to convince (the studio) to let me just to do this and I was saying it would be the coolest thing,” says Hardwicke excitedly. “It was such a gorgeous day and I was in the helicopter with the pilot and the cameraman and we were flying through that mist and looking down at these mountains. It was amazing, a sublime day.”

In contrast to the great sweep of Valerie’s cloak is the walled town where the terrified villagers try to keep themselves safe from the werewolf that has stalked them for 20 years. The wooden houses are on stilts where ladders can be pulled up and shutters locked. There are spikes everywhere, even on the trees. Hardwicke calls it “the architecture of paranoia.”

Hardwicke was also inspired by her surroundings, shooting Red Riding Hood in Vancouver and amid British Columbia’s spectacular mountains, where she found the calibre of the crews as impressive as the scenery.

“Vancouver is such a beautiful city and just like Toronto . . . the crews are just great. They really have a can-do spirit. Everything I asked for or tried to make happen, the Canadian crew tried to figure out how to make it happen, even though we didn’t have a big budget ($42 million). I just loved that. We were all in it together.”

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Via: chardwickefans