Telling a story that’s been told before is a tricky thing. Telling a story that’s been told over and over again for centuries is even trickier.
In Osgood Perkins’ new horrifying fairy tale Gretel and Hansel, the filmmaker – who is famous for his pronounced, arch aesthetics and compositions – had to pick and choose which famous elements of the story would make it onto the big screen, and which he would subvert for his own purposes.
The image that typically springs to mind when people discuss Hansel and Gretel, of course, is the gingerbread house that a wicked witch uses to lure hungry children to their doom. In a new interview with Bloody-Disgusting, Perkins explains why he had no interest in making a house out of food; but he did consciously decide that witches should still wear pointy hats.
“For me it’s like this,” Perkins laughs. “It’s a combination of wanting to be vanguard or progressive or visionary, or whatever the word that sounds the least full of shit is. Like wanting to be in some way exemplary, and so to try to bring things into a fresh, chic context is in one hand.”
“And on the other hand I feel like the only way to really get there is to acknowledge where we come from, and to acknowledge all the beautiful work that’s been done before that we’re, in a sense, trying to build on. So whenever I can reference a classic feeling or a classicism or a classic posture or a classic look, I like to try to hint it in there,” Perkins explains.
“So [the pointy hat] comes from my affinity and affection for The Wizard of Oz. There’s actually a couple of Easter Eggs in the movie that bring us into that,” Perkins teases.” Of course it’s an MGM movie, I wanted to honor [that]. It’s honoring your forefathers, right? It’s like honoring your ancestors. And the ancestor of this movie, probably the closest ancestor, is The Wizard of Oz.”
Although Perkins stuck with the iconic garb of cinema’s most infamous Wicked Witch, he didn’t want her house to be made of candy. But that doesn’t mean her house, a pointed and architecturally odd dwelling that seems larger on the inside than it looks on the out, isn’t magical.
“Yeah, it’s definitely one of those structural anomalies, like so many things should be in fantasy or fairy tale or even horror,” Perkins considers. “One thinks of Mark Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves and things like that, where there’s this quality of spaces being in some way warped, or certainly warped by our perception, which I think is something that people feel in their lives when they go visit someplace where they’d been only as a child, and they there and they say, ‘Wow, I thought this place was huge when I was here. It’s tiny!’ Like that kind of a quality.”
“I wanted to inject that sort of childish feeling of, is this place big? Is this place little? Is it scary? Is it beautiful? Is it old? Is it modern? So that was the feeling. Where it comes from I don’t know,” Perkins adds.
“At a certain point, very early in the process of thinking about the movie and starting to daydream about the design, the triangle became sort of the shape for the movie, and I found that to be useful in all the moviemaking that I’ve done, is that you find a touchstone, whatever it is. In The Blackcoat’s Daughter it was the color, there’s kind of a… I call it “secret blue,” and there’s sort of a blue color in The Blackcoat’s Daughter that is in the places in the purpose where it is,” Perkins recalls.
“In this, the triangle felt to me like a representation of the occult. It felt like representation of the three-pointed relationship of the source material and the movie, it’s more or less a three character piece. And so it just sort of came, it just made its way in and then everything became triangular,” Perkins explains.
Still, as a filmmaker telling a fairy tale story the audience has heard and probably even seen before, he knew he had certain responsibilities to tackle specific visual touchstones. After all, we’re all expecting them.
“I felt like there were a few places where, I call them ‘hinges,’ there were hinges in the movie, hinges in the story, hinges in the narrative, where I felt like the audience is going to say, ‘What is that? What is the witch like? What does the house look like?’” Perkins explains.
“There are certain expectational moments for the audience that I wanted to make sure, when we got to them, it wasn’t ‘Oh god, it’s a house made out of food. Oh god it’s a witch that’s old and bent.’ Like, I wanted to make sure that at those hinges we were tracking and cutting a new path towards something fresher,” Perkins adds.
“So yes, there was never the impulse to make the place out of food. I don’t know. To be honest with you, I wouldn’t have known how to make that elegant,” Perkins confesses. “I would haven’t known how to make that even appealing, in a way. It’s just all of a sudden, that aspect seems like it didn’t fit what we were doing.”
You can see what Osgood Perkins has done with Gretel and Hansel in theaters this weekend.