Catherine Hardwicke goes from Twilight to Red Riding Hood, going deeper into fairly tale mythology, the power of wolves and the sexuality of adolescence. She's also become hipper about the importance of VFX. 

 

Bill Desowitz: The last time we spoke a year-and-a-half ago at the VES Production Summit, you were still trying to get this greenlit.

Catherine Hardwicke: Oh, exactly, you never know -- it's scary to the last minute.

BD: But you got to work with Jeff Okun as well as your visual effects supervisor.

CH: I know -- he's amazing, I've gotta say. He never said no; he always found some way to get the shot, even the last day, when we picture was actually locked -- there was still one more thing we wanted to do. He's sort of a hero for me.

BD: Did it turn out the way you expected?

CH: Yeah, of course, it's an evolving thing, so you're always making new discoveries. And, especially, visual effects helped save us in a lot of ways. And we did find some interesting ways to fix things or enhance stuff.

BD: More fulfilling than Twilight?

 CH: I loved both projects, but it was fun because we got to create our own world in this one instead of being tied to the real world. I've been trying to do that for a long time.

BD: What inspired the look of Red Riding Hood?

CH: I would say that I looked a lot at the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel. I love their depictions of medieval life that was more wild and free and crazy and the dancing and everything. I also loved going to Burning Man, which was inspiration for the medieval festival. And then, of course, I love woods and scary things and did a lot of my own sketches before we got a production designer on it or anything. You have to do so much artwork to even get the studio excited about making the movie.

BD: What about the evocative red cape?

CH: I guess you try to dream about these things, and you look at all the paintings that have been inspired by Red Riding Hood over the last 500 years, from Gustave Dore etchings to just thrift store paintings of a beautiful girl in a red cape to Chanel commercials, and you see that it's very pervasive and evocative, and means so many things on so many levels: the crimson blood and the idea of sexuality and power, so we had to figure out a way to get that right. And the costume designer, Cindy Evans, got raw silk from India that we ended up using and we had 14 women in Vancouver, I believe, did a sewing circle, embroidering into the cape, so it has a lot of hands on love, in that case.

BD: Tell us about the journey in discovering the look of the werewolf, which was animated by Rhythm & Hues?