At an event celebrating films that embody independence and originality, it was fitting that Lionsgate’s Precious, the brutally powerful film, based on a book deemed “unadaptable” by the mainstream entertainment industry, garnered top honors for the night.  Producers Lee Daniels, Gary Magness and Sarah Siegal-Magness took home the Best Picture Award, with Daniels also being honored as Best Director.  For writing the film that he deemed, “a life-changing opportunity’” Screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher won Best First Screenplay.  Top acting honors for Best Female Lead went to breakout actress Gabourey Sidibe, while Sidibe’s dramatic foil in the film, Mo’Nique, took Best Supporting Female.

For help embodying the role of Mary Jones, the abused and abusive mother of the title character, Mo’Nique credited the “Special Wardrobe” Mo’Nique and Sidibe “found” in the closet of executive producer, Lisa Cortés. “It allowed Mary Jones to come to life even more,” said Mo’Nique.  “If you put those things on – that cat suit, the wigs and big heavy clothes – that’s how you begin to feel.”

Crazy Heart Best Actor winner, Jeff Bridges, in accepting his award acknowledged distributor Fox Searchlight. “I’ve been at this a pretty long time and I have never run into a distributor that has given so much support for a project as they have.” In fretting about who he may have forgotten to thank, Bridges added, “One of the wonderful things about making movies is, it is such a collaborative art form.  There are so many people responsible for this award – the makeup person, the other actors… they are all part of this.”  The film, produced by T. Bone Burnett, Judy Cairo, Rob Carliner and director Scott Cooper, also garnered the prestigious award for Best First Feature.

Craft honors at the ceremony went to Focus Features’ A Serious Man. Roger Deakins, who has regularly collaborated with the Coen brothers, received The Best Cinematography Award.  For this carefully crafted film, Deakins perfectly captured the 1960’s world created by the detailed production, costume, hair and makeup designs.  Also recognized were the film’s casting directors, Ellen Chenoweth and Rachel Tanner – along with directors Joel Coen and Ethan Coen and ensemble cast members, Richard Kind, Sari Lennick, Jessica McManus, Fred Melamed, Michael Stuhlbarg and Aaron Wolff ­­. They received the third annual Robert Altman Award presented for casting and ensemble acting.  When questioned about whether any of the cast members kept their vintage costumes, Lennick joked, “Truth be told, the sixties were not kind to human sweat. That must have been a very stinky time. I couldn’t wait to remove my polyester.”

Fox Searchlight’s (500) Days of Summer scribes Scott Neustadler and Michael H. Weber won Best Screenplay.  Woody Harrelson took Best Supporting Actor honors for his dynamic role in Oscilloscope Laboratories’ The Messenger.

Sony Picture Classics‘ An Education, by dogma-style director Lone Sherfig, garnered Best Foreign Film honors.  Writer/Director/Producer Lynn Shelton returned for a Spirit Award a second year in a row, this time receiving the John Cassavetes Award (best feature under $500,000) for Magnolia Picture’s Humpday. Best Documentary was awarded to Abramaorama Films’ Anvil!  The Story of Anvil, directed by Sacha Gervasi.

In support of the independent film community, the Spirit Awards has three awards that honor emerging filmmakers with $25,000 unrestricted grants.  Kyle Patrick Alvarez, director of Easier with Practice, received the 17th annual Acura Someone to Watch Award honoring a talented filmmaker of singular vision.  Bill Ross and Turner Ross, directors of 45365, received the 16th annual Chaz and Roger Ebert Truer than Fiction Award for non-fiction feature directors. Karin Chen, producer of The Exploding Girl and Santa Mesa, received the 14th annual Piaget Producers Award for producers who, despite highly limited resources, demonstrate the creativity, tenacity and vision to produce quality independent films.

The 2010 ELLE/Garnier Directing Fellowship, with a $10,000 production grant, went to Film Independent Fellow Jennifer Arnold (2005 Directors Lab) who won with her film, A Small Act, scheduled to air this summer on HBO.

This year’s milestone ceremony moved from the usual Saturday-before-the-Oscars daytime event on the beach in Santa Monica to a Friday night gala held on March 5 at L.A. Live’s event deck in downtown Los Angeles. Comedian Eddie Izzard was Master of Ceremonies and Ben Stiller served as Honorary Chair.  The star-studded evening included celebrity presenters and guests Pierce Brosnan, Robert Duvall, Jody Foster, Ethan Hawke, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, David Spade and John Waters, among others.  The event was produced by Film Independent, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to championing independent film and supporting the unique visions of a community of diverse and innovative artists.

The 82nd Academy Awards’ Foreign Language Film nominees couldn’t be more diverse and interesting. At the Foreign Language Nominees Symposium held at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, March 6, the honored filmmakers of Adjami – Israel, The Milk of Sorrow (La Teta Asustada) – Peru, A Prophet (Un Prophete) – France, The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) – Argentina, and The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band) – Germany, gathered for a panel discussion.

This is the first year two films from South America (The Milk of Sorrows and The Secret in Their Eyes) have been nominated in the category in the same year. In fact, this is the first year Peru has had a film competing in this category at all. Claudia Llosa, who wrote and directed The Milk of Sorrows expressed her amazement over the recognition her film has received. This is her second feature and she remarked that she was just glad she was able to turn her vision into a film. “Imagine asking your producers to raise money about a girl with a potato in her vagina,” she addressed the audience with a wide grin. The Milk of Sorrows is the story of a girl who is haunted by fear and protects herself from being violated by the creative use of a potato. It is ultimately a story of healing and restoration.

The filmmakers of Adjami, Yaron Shani and Scandar Copti, a Jew and a Palestinian, respectively, were just as surprised at being nominated. They never thought they would be bestowed with such an honor; they just set out to make a film. “You do films because you have a story to tell,” Shani said. Adjami is a crime drama featuring the varied and conflicting views of Jews, Muslims and Christians. Neither Shani or Copti had directed a feature before Adjami. They had never worked together until this film. It took 11 years to make and was shot in chronological order with all inexperienced actors. There was only one professional actor and she ended up as an extra in the final cut of the film.

Michael Haneke, the filmmaker of The White Ribbon echoed the same sentiment, “You make films not to win prizes but to communicate.” The German drama communicates beautifully in black-and-white. Haneke added that none of his producers were receptive to the idea of shooting in black-and-white initially. “But I’m a stubborn individual so I got my way,” the director explained. He made a brilliant choice because The White Ribbon has already taken top honors from the American Society of Cinematographers. It is also nominated for the best cinematography Oscar.

A Prophet, by Jacques Audiard has already swept the French Cesar Awards, winning nine Cesars, including including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor. A Prophet is a crime  film that reviewers have called The Anti-Scarface. “We did not want to write about a character we had no interest in,” Audiard said, explaining that he wanted to create a multi-dimensional character that was not so easy to judge. The film’s realism is seen everywhere, even in the fine details. “The extras, almost all of them had prison experience,” Audiard added.

Juan Jose Campanella the writer and director of The Secret in Their Eyes took a different approach. He used professional actors almost exclusively. “There’s so much craft and technique,” he said about shooting a film. The poignant thriller features a remarkable 5 minute shot of a chase sequence.

The clips shown of the nominated films at the symposium are deeply evocative of emotion: a group of men trying to come to a settlement over a death in Adjami, a man walking a girl home in The Milk of Sorrow, a young man trying to adjust to the shocking realities of his new prison life in A Prophet, a police investigator so deeply moved by a man’s abiding love for his murdered wife that he tries to reopen the unsolved case in The Secret in Their Eyes, and a man launching a search for his missing son in The White Ribbon, are all poignant images focused on people and relationships. So maybe there is something the nominees have in common after all.

Over 40 years ago, an unexpected weekend of film history was made, and no one on earth could have predicted it. Unbelievably, it almost didn’t even happen. On Aug. 15, 1969, 400,000 people descended on Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York for three days of peace, love and music. In its time, the Woodstock festival would become legend, but not before the public was able to share the experience by viewing the film, released on March 25, 1970.

Associate producer Dale Bell now looks back on the film, which has its 40th anniversary this month and is now on DVD in a special collection from Warner Home Video.

Below the Line: How long did you have to organize the production of the Woodstock film?

Dale Bell: In addition to assembling the personnel, I arranged to rent, borrow or steal the 15 cameras, dozens of magazines, lenses, and accessories on a budget of $23,000 – $16,000 of which was raw stock – and did so in five days.  Sunday we organized it, and Monday, I put it together, working three phones.  Sometime on the Friday when the festival began, we heard that Warner Bros. would finance the [completion of] the film; they had already secured the rights months earlier.  For better or worse, we knew that we were married to Warner Bros. even though by the Monday after [the festival], we were being besieged by a batch of other studios, all of which had turned it down.

BTL: How big was your film crew for such a huge production?

Bell: Roughly 60-70 people worked in the trenches over the three-day affair. The editing consumed another 100 people on and off in the course of August 1969 to the end of March 1970.  In September 1969, we were editing three eight-hour shifts in New York. Thus, we were doing three normal days in each 24-hour period.  That went on until the end of October when the synching of dailies occurred. On Dec. 7, 1969, we got to California, and we again began to work almost around the clock to get the opticals and the soundtrack together. The optical houses that we engaged were working seven days a week, 24-hours a day to make this huge four-hour optical. No one had ever done anything like that before – taking all of our 16mm footage and blowing it up to 35mm anamorphic.

BTL: What was it like to make a film amidst a sea of humanity?

Bell: It made the film shoot extremely difficult. There was no food, very little water, no accommodations.  I rented a hotel that nobody ever got to. You couldn’t move. You were absolutely exhausted. We would get B-12 shots to boost our energy. People were sleeping on plywood over mud underneath the stage. People were working in mud to their ankles loading magazines. Finally, on Saturday, we began to get food from the promoters who began to appreciate that the pathway to economic salvation lay with the camera crew.

BTL: How did Martin Scorsese get involved in Woodstock?

Bell: Since Michael Wadleigh [Woodstock's director], Thelma Schoonmaker [Scorsese's longtime editor] and Marty were all out of NYU, there was a real group camaraderie, so when the film came together, we felt that Marty could be very advantageous. He would say, “the way to become a director is call yourself a director.” When we went to California in December of 1969 [to finish editing the film], Marty was not among the 17 people we took. But Marty went on from there to get a recommendation to do another film, which led to his connection to Hollywood. Then he made Mean Streets, and I was his assistant director on that film.

BTL: How do you see the film’s place in history?

Bell: In the first place, untold millions of people have seen the movie. Had we not made it, there would not be a representative symbol of the festival for people to discuss. There might have been some news coverage, essays and newspaper articles, and perhaps a record. Eventually there would have been books. The film we did was as representative of the entire experience as was possible to do under the circumstances. It represented the culmination of what had been going on in the sixties. It became a cultural icon.

BTL: That said, do you think the film has an impact even today?

Bell: Woodstock preserved an emotion that had been so diffuse up to that point in the sixties. It was a collective sensibility for people who might have felt they were outcast. It gave them a presence, brought them together. The original festival, as we captured it on film, gave our generation a reason for being. For young people today looking for their own Woodstock, they’ll have to find their own reason for being. As to its impact today, it continues to be a communications tool between generations, some who were at Woodstock, others who were in Vietnam at the same time. College kids can now talk with their parents about Woodstock the movie.

BTL: How do you personally account for the experience at this point?

Bell: It was very simply an enormous high point in my life.  I put Woodstock together in five days.   If I can do that, I can do almost anything else. The thing that I really love is the people. Woodstock gave me a chance to meet an extraordinary group of ingenious, funny, weird, competent, impassioned group of people that I count as my closest friends today. To have put all of these people together gives me a great sense of achievement.

Perelman’s holding company, MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings Inc., has reached an agreement in principle with a group of creditors — including Cerberus Capital Management, the former owner of Chrysler — for the billionaire investor to give up his controlling stake in the camera maker that has been a fixture on movie sets for decades, according to people familiar with the matter.

The financial restructuring would cut Panavision’s debt by $140 million and give it an additional $40 million in new financing. After the deal, Perelman would no longer have any equity in the company.

“This will ultimately benefit Panavision by reducing its debt load and providing fresh capital for growth,” said a person close to the situation who requested anonymity.

Panavision had been seeking to refinance $285 million in loans that mature in March 2011 in the face of a severe slowdown in camera and equipment rentals for feature films and commercials.

Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Panavision’s corporate debt rating last September, citing “weak liquidity” and concerns about the state of its core camera business. The restructuring would extend the maturity on the loans to 2014.

Perelman, best known for his controlling stake in cosmetics giant Revlon Inc., took control of the company in 1998 in a complex deal that saddled Panavision with nearly $500 million in debt.

Three years later, the financier attempted to have another company he controlled, M&F Worldwide Corp., buy his 83% stake. But minority M&F stockholders opposed the move, fearing that it would dilute the value of their shares.

Like prop houses and other companies in the Hollywood supply chain, Panavision has been hammered by the sharp drop in production that began during the 2008 Hollywood writers strike and the subsequent standoff between the major studios and the Screen Actors Guild. Then just as Hollywood began to regroup after the strike, the recession hit, leading studios to make fewer movies and advertisers to cut back on making commercials, slackening demand for filmmaking equipment.

People close to Panavision say camera and lens orders for feature films, which account for most of the company’s revenue, fell about 15% last year. The company’s annual revenue for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2009, was about $260 million, according to Moody’s. The privately held company does not disclose its finances, but one person with knowledge of the company’s finances said it still generated an operating profit.

Panavision, which employs 1,200 people, including 300 in Woodland Hills, manufactures cameras, lenses and accessories, but it doesn’t sell them. Instead, the company leases them to studios as well as film and TV production companies through a network of distributors.

Although Panavision remains the market leader, it faces mounting competition from upstart rivals such as Red Digital Cinema, a company that makes low-cost digital cameras.

The pressure to improve results has led to a series of management shake-ups.

Last year, Perelman ousted Bob Beitcher, who had been chief executive since 2003, after the two sparred over how to turn the business around.

Beitcher, in turn, was succeeded by Billy Campbell, a former president of Discovery Networks. But Campbell was on the job for just a couple of months before Perelman replaced him in June with the current CEO, William C. Bevins, a longtime associate of Perelman’s.

A former chief financial officer for Turner Broadcasting System Inc., Bevins also previously ran New World Communications Group Inc. and Marvel Entertainment Group Inc.

Bevins is expected to remain at the helm of the company.

Perelman’s Hollywood holdings also include Deluxe Entertainment Services Group Inc., a provider of production and post-production services, which is not affected by the financial restructuring.

richard.verrier@

latimes.com

Barney Burman, Mindy Hall and Joel Harlow took home the Oscar for best achievement in makeup for Star Trek

In the recent round of talk show appearances by actors from the new version of Alice in Wonderland, many of the performers discussed their lengthy stints “getting into costume.”  This is both a travesty and at the same time not surprising.  While costumes have been heralded by cinema onlookers for decades, makeup has only recently been given the respect is has long deserved, both by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and by people who work in movie making alike.

Historically, makeup has only been treated as a marginalized side craft in movie making.  Honorary awards were given sporadically to exceptional makeups in films including The Mummy, created by Jack Pierce in 1932, The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, created by William Tuttle in 1964, and Planet of the Apes, created by John Chambers in 1968.  Unthinkably, an official Oscar for makeup did not exist until 1982 when the first award was given for Rick Baker’s stunning work in 1981’s An American Werewolf in London.

This year, three wildly divergent films were noted by the Academy with an Oscar nomination, drawn from a large field of potential candidates.  In what has become tradition of late, the Academy presents these three films at the Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Symposium – as those two crafts are often intertwined and whose craftspeople belong to the same union, Local 706.

At the March 6 event, elegantly hosted by Leonard Engelman at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater, the outstanding nuances of this craft presented makeup as a truly artistic endeavor as intricate as cinematography, editing, music, or any one of a number of particular jobs within the overall field of motion picture creation.

Vittorio Sodano (makeup effects) and Aldo Signoretti (hairstylist) were responsible for aging the youthful actors for Il Divo

First up was Il Divo, an Italian production featuring character and age makeups, one specialty of makeup artists throughout the decades going back to the earliest films.  In fact, age makeup mastery is often one of the most awarded types of skills for makeup artists, especially in the Academy Awards, including last year’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Greg Cannom), Amadeus (Dick Smith), and a host of films whose work was not awarded due to the lack of an official Oscar category (an example of a glaring omission would be Bob Schiffer’s beautiful work in Birdman of Alcatraz).  In Il Divo, the age makeups were apparently created with the use of old age stipple in favor of prosthetic appliances in many stages, both of which are popular techniques for aging a character.  From Italy, Vittorio Sodano (makeup effects) and Aldo Signoretti (hairstylist) were responsible for Il Divo, with Signoretti commenting to the symposium audience how a lengthy testing period was necessary to properly age the actors in progressive stages.  According to one longtime makeup and hairstyling expert, Sodano also used “very large, extremely thin silicone appliances that wrapped around the face on the main male character, Andreotti.  His wife, played by Anna Bonaiuto, wore the fewest appliances – only one piece.  There was stretch stipple used on others, but they also had bald caps, foam caps with hair punched in and many other subtle things that were undetectable to the untrained eye.” As evidenced by Il Divo’s photo display, many of these age makeups were striking in their appearance and transformation of the youthful actors into believable middle and old-age characters.

Joel Harlow created the makeup for Eric Bana’s Romulan character Nero for Star Trek

Next was Star Trek, director JJ Abrams’ energetic re-imagining of the 44-year-old science-fiction franchise as a wholly new feature film.  Featuring a range of makeup work, including Vulcans and Romulans created by Joel Harlow, aliens designed and created by Barney Burman, and an entire principal cast supervised by makeup department head Mindy Hall, Star Trek – the eventual Oscar winner – required the talents of all three of the recipients to realize the enormous project.  Hall, who has previously department headed other non-science-fiction projects, spoke of the need to approach each character as an individual makeup, whether or not he or she was realized with prosthetics.  Additionally, Hall detailed the time-consuming process of creating eyebrows for her Vulcans by shaving the actors’ actual eyebrows and painstakingly hand-laying new Vulcan eyebrows one hair at a time.  She often collaborated on Vulcans with Harlow, who later added that he created the Romulan characters with large prosthetic headpieces that covered the actors’ foreheads and cheeks which had to be carefully painted and often applied without the benefit of previously lifecasting his actors.  Harlow also created and applied ears for his Vulcan and Romulan characters, breathing new life into the designs originally conceived for the 1960s TV show.

Barney Burman’s Aliens

A third-generation legacy, Burman, whose grandfather, Ellis, Sr., uncle, Sonny, father, Tom, and brother Rob, all trained in creating prosthetics, was tasked with numerous alien manifestations.  Working with a large crew in his Los Angeles-area lab, he took lifecasts of actors, sculpted alien makeups, made molds of the clay sculptures, and fabricated appliances in silicone, one of several materials that prosthetic artists utilize, including foam latex, gelatin, and others.  Certainly, Star Trek was a complex, massive, and classic project for which to create makeup characters, but it is the combined abilities of Hall, Harlow, Burman and their extensive crews which brought the film its richly deserved Oscar.

Makeup and hair designer Jenny Shircore and hairstylist Jon Henry Gordon were responsible for the Oscar nominated hair and makeup for The Young Victoria

Unfortunately, the representatives of the third film, The Young Victoria, were stuck in a travel delay and did not partake in the onstage presentations or interviews about their work in the period film.  Yet, they finally arrived in the post-event reception and spoke about the lengthy process of changing contemporary actors into those from the early 19^th century.  Makeup and hair designer Jenny Shircore mentioned the hours needed to do so with Emily Blunt as the title character while hairstylist Jon Henry Gordon noted that he has been specializing in period hair work since an uncredited turn on 1997’s Titanic.

With extensive insight into this most hands-on of crafts in cinema, the symposium merely contained one major flaw: it only takes place once a year, whereas regularly-held seminars about this crucial aspect of the business would illuminate the machinations of makeup artistry for not only fans and enthusiasts of movies but also for the denizens of people who work inside the business as well.



Supervisors Sean Phillips and Carey Villegas Go Down the Rabbit Hole

Alice in Wonderland

It’s not every film that’s big enough to warrant three separate visual effects supervisors, but Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Disney’s revisiting of material they last brought to screen in 1950’s-era animation, apparently nibbled the cake that said “Eat Me,” and became that big.

The original supe, now senior supervisor, was Ken Ralston, of Star Wars, Star Trek and Forrest Gump fame. “Ken initially had the job,” reports Sean Phillips, “but realized such a large show in such a short amount of time” would be nearly impossible to pull off.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Visual effects technology may have improved since those Star Wars/Trek days, but films like Alice are also created almost entirely in post now, so Ralston brought in reinforcements. Thus Phillips – who had known Ralston from two previous Bob Zemeckis outings, Beowulf and Polar Express – found himself brought in to oversee much of the considerable rendering, along with Carey Villegas, who supervised on Hancock, and oversaw visual effects plate work for films like I Am Legend and Spiderman 3.

The plate credits were important, since Phillips notes, Villegas was brought in to oversee “more of the live-action compositing.”

Alice in Wonderland

Villegas said he’d never “had that experience before,” decidedly not referring to compositing, but rather, being on a multi-supervised visual effects staff, aside from working with in-house supervisors at different vendors.

Ralston, he says, was the visionary, overseeing the whole, especially “in terms of getting shots,” which was important, since “95% of the movie” was done in a “full greenscreen environment.”

And while there were 40 days of actual shooting versus just over a year of postproduction, some of the rendering needed to be done in advance in a previs, rough-draft kind of way, since Burton wielded two monitors on set – one with the live greenscreen shooting as it was happening, and the other to see that character composited into the Wonderland environment that would be surrounding him.

Sean Phillips

Of course, sometimes the character was the thing in need of a good composite. Villegas recounts ‘the director wanted to bridge the gap between live-action and CG characters, making animated characters more lifelike, and amping up the “caricature level of live actors.” For  example Helena Bonham Carter’s turn as the ultra-brachycephalic Red Queen, or perhaps both Tweedledum and dee.

For the latter characters, Phillips reports that “animators worked with Tweedle’s head, blending the nose, eyes (and other features) of the actor’s face.” The actor in question is Matt Lucas, looking a bit like Uncle Fester in The Addams Family, or at least a young Fester – who’s been cloned.

Phillips adds that Lucas had a double he was playing off of in a lot of scenes, but later, elements from his own face were digitized into whichever Tweedle was “the other.”

Carey Villegas

But Phillips mostly focused not on eyes and noses, but full-scale created environments, citing the “rabbit hole sequence”, the “Underland Garden,” and pretty much “all CG until the tea party.”

But in keeping with Burton’s edict to meld the digital and the fleshly, he also had a lot of “CG cloth work,” saying that “anytime Alice shrunk or grew, he didn’t want her clothing to come along with (her).”  In other words, in the name of what might be called “fantastic realism,” Burton dispensed with the old convention of having inanimate objects grow or shrink with their biological counterparts. Get this man a job directing a Hulk installment!

In addition to creating Wonderland above and Underland below, there was the matter of delivering all that digital eye candy in a full three dimensions, as was intended by producer and director alike, long before Avatar was a twinkle in the Academy’s – or box office’s – eye.

The difference here was that the decision had always been to go from two to three dimensions in post.

Burton “didn’t shoot with stereo cameras,” Phillips confirms. They were using a 4k Dalsa Evolution for the Red Queen scenes, among others, but it was flying solo, with the idea to “dimensionalize after the fact.”

Among the things helping it work was a magnet tool within the Maya software they were using that “projects an image onto geometry” that’s extrapolated from the original 2D image.

As Phillips looks back on the process – “the most creative I’ve ever had a chance to work on” – he said “in practice, it worked pretty well.”

Villegas notes that to make the process work, they had to “capture as much depth information on set as possible. So in addition to the aforementioned Dalsa set-up, and a Panavision Genesis for the main “filming,” he oversaw an array of smaller Sony HD cameras that were on set capturing that info.

They’d then project that image on the geometry of the characters, the challenges of eye-line matching made even tougher with the literal 3D mapping out that came in post.

In post, Villegas describes two separate pipelines, doing “compositing on its pass,” then “3D on its pass,” using both to double check and fine tune the sequences and shots.

Since they successfully pulled it off, creating a 3D film without a “huge technical process,” that could get in the way of what he describes as a spontaneous feel on the set, Villegas also allows that the finished product, with its extra dimension “adds another storytelling dimension. It’s here to stay.”

As, apparently, is Alice’s journey, nearly 150 years after first being chronicled by Lewis Carroll.