GALLERY: Tarsem on Eiko Ishioka and the Fairytale Look of Mirror Mirror

“I knew it was going to be a visual film, but one thing I liked about it was I knew it wasn’t going to be a damsel in distress film.”

“The Queen is somebody who no matter how gorgeous you are, you don’t look as good as you used to. This is a person who is threatened by that not only because she wants to be beautiful forever but she wants to be powerful forever. And if the Prince comes in looking for a woman, she has to use her beauty. So now she wants vanity and the vanity comes into play.”

“I said, ‘I don’t want it to look like real chess, but everybody to the Queen is just a pawn.’ Take the game, but don’t have a king, and a queen, and everything because that will become like chess. What would you like to do with a hat?”

“Nico [Soultanakis], who’s married to Eiko and was always my direct contact in talking to her, just said, ‘You know what? Boats. Boats on people’s head.’ And I said, ‘Don’t even think of another option.’”

“When they go to the forest, it’s not scary or gory, because this is a family movie, but it’s completely monochromatic and the snow is not something that anybody ever reacts to. Nobody feels cold, they can walk around naked out here and it’s completely like in the middle of summer. That’s why everything had to be controlled; we didn’t want to shoot in any locations. They were telling me they were having a problem, we could shoot it cheaper outside, but I said no – I don’t know how to shoot it if a single shot is shot outside. So everything had to be designed and shot inside.”

“The first visual thing I wanted to crack was the forest – not the castle, not anything, but so much of this happens in a forest and the forest in stylized contemporary cinema right now is owned by basically Tim Burton. He has these gnarly trees and he lights them beautifully and it’s so wonderfully done, but I said, ‘How do I take it away from that?’ It was a big hiccup that I had, but within a week when the forest got cracked, I knew the movie would happen in no time in my head.”

“Let’s go with that, let’s start with a forest that is completely black and white and in it the only interspersed color is the wardrobe of the people who come in. Then I started looking at Ivan the Terrible, the Eisenstein movie, and I said, okay – that’s very interesting for what the sets looked like. I talked to Eiko about it and said let’s not go completely Russian, either.”

“I remember a Tarkovsky movie called My Name is Ivan (AKA Ivan’s Childhood), there was a scene in which an officer kisses a girl, but it’s all full of snow and you see no color. It’s a black and white movie, there’s no color, and he had these strips of silver birch trees – snow on the ground, and white on top because of bad weather. And I thought, if this was in color, you’d have exactly the same look – you would have white for the snow, white silver birch trees, and just the people, their clothes are the only things that would stand out.”

“The next person that came to mind was Gaudi – combine Gaudi architecture and the colorful plates that he has, which is every color that you can almost in a Moorish, playful sense. You have it in basically the castle, and in the clothes of people.”

“It started with Tarkovsky meets Gaudi meets Eisenstein, and then all the colorful stuff with Eiko was left open. This is a person who’s powerful, this is a person who’s pure good – there isn’t a mean bone in Snow White. And then you leave it.”

“My style generally lends itself to 3-D because it’s always composed, like Tim Burton – tableau-y.”

“The original [Disney dwarf names] — we couldn’t legally go there. When we were making the costumes we didn’t have the time; the names of the dwarfs weren’t written, the characters weren’t written. We had to go and start making designs on them so I told her to just think of these guys as bandits; I want them to fight coolly, and to fight coolly, they need to become big.”

“For Eiko, the only way she could distinguish one from the other was the hats. She designed seven hats, and they were perfect. So literally she designed a common theme for them, which was oak and bark, and waited until two weeks until we started and I gave her the brief and she just got it done.”

“I just said, ‘Make stilts, but make them bandits’ and she made these things like trousers but dreamed them up to look like an accordion. I said, ‘That’s perfect.’ When they’re big it looks like the accordion becomes big and they can go on stilts, when they’re small they just look like somehow the thing just went down.”

“Everybody’s wardrobe was made and then the dwarfs showed up and I started working with them, because we didn’t have the names and we didn’t have the characters. They didn’t have the names, we just knew there were seven dwarfs. So when I got them there we started working together, talking together, and slowly we started to come up with the characters. We only had four names; Chuckles was the last guy to get a name. Originally there was some farty kind of joke, Smelly or something, and he didn’t want that. So when we were there he said, ‘Oh, I can do this laugh!’ And everybody said, ‘That’s not a laugh, that’s a chuckle.’ And he became Chuckles in two seconds.”

“‘There’s a costume ball, and the Queen would make sure that everybody was dressed in cream and off-white – nobody has color except her. She will come like a male peacock.’”

“When I said ‘male peacock,’ Eiko took it literally and dressed her in red. For everyone else she made wonderful costumes, but no color. In all the other scenes they’re all wearing colors but not in that costume ball, because the Queen had to stand out.”

“There was one of my favorite things that Eiko did. She made another suit and put the ears on him, and if you look at the ears, that’s my favorite of what I call ‘an Eiko touch’ – if you look at the ears on the inside they are white, but at the bottom is red and that red slowly fades off to the top, to the white. And it’s just things like that she would do where I would say, yeah, he’s a bunny, move on. But her color choices in that, adding a little bit of red at the bottom of the ear, that kind of stuff you can never brief out, it comes – it came — instinctually to her. [Pause] It’s hard to talk about her in the third person, but I’ll try. It just came instinctually to her, always.”

“The scene was a bit longer originally but we had to cut it down; it was supposed to be a costume ball that Snow White couldn’t go to, but then Baker Margaret sees that it’s a costume ball and sees that somebody’s serving food on these swan vases, so she takes this vase and the next time you see Snow White, Snow White’s got the vase on her head.”

“In the original one which is a ten-minute story, all you get is ‘Who’s the fairest of them all?’ and that’s all the Queen is interested in. Here, you can almost think of her as this powerful, frigid person. She’d do anything for that. All those acts of seduction for her will be an act. All she wants to do is stay powerful forever. Those kinds of briefs, I gave to Eiko.”

“What I would tell her, she would come at it from such a tangent that you never had to tell her ‘Think different.’ You had to take her and conform her. Whereas most people you’d have to say, ‘Think a little bit outside,’ with her whatever she thought was so outside you had to rein it in, and that was always easier.”

“Eiko’s kind of like me, unfortunately – she has only two gears, full speed or off, and I just knew that she wanted to work. When we went in we were just really trying to protect her, trying to say things like ‘Okay, I’m happy with it – just a little bit of variation’ but you could not stop Eiko; every little change that you made, she would make ten variations of that and show them to you. She just worked herself like she always did.”

“The thing with Eiko that I loved was you never had to use the cliché term that directors are always scared of using, which is ‘Think outside the box.’ Eiko never knew what the box was.”