Written Interview: David Leslie Johnson (“Red Riding Hood”)
From WGA.org, an interview with Red Riding Hood screenwriter David Leslie Johnson:
When faced with the task of adapting a fairy tale for the screen, many scribes take the fanciful route; Mr. Bluebird sits on their shoulder as they whistle while they write, crafting yet another “happily ever after” to warm audience hearts.
Conversely, while writing Red Riding Hood, writer David Leslie Johnson opted for cannibalism.
When Johnson, who was a longtime assistant to Frank Darabont before scripting the creepy 2009 thriller Orphan, took on the project, he decided to dig up the dirt on Miss Hood. “Prior to the Brothers Grimm, there’s a version of Red Riding Hood where she shows up and the Wolf hasn’t eaten Grandmother — he’s made soup out of her,” explains the writer, pausing for extremely successful dramatic effect. “He gives the bowl of soup to Red Riding Hood and says, ‘You must be tired from your trip. Have some soup.’ And she eats the soup.”
He didn’t exactly expect the scene to make it into the final film. “My whole approach is to try to take it as far as I can take it and someone will always tell me if it’s too much,” says Johnson. But surprising, it’s still in there, albeit it’s slightly nuanced. “There still is a shot of a bubbling cauldron of horrible looking soup, but the decision was, ‘Let’s just not hang our lantern on that. Let’s leave that to the audience’s imagination to wonder if that was her or not.’”
Excerpts from the Q&A:
How did you work backwards, or forward, from the original fairy tale?
The whole reason for telling a Red Riding Hood story is that there’s a familiarity there, a story that you want to keep as intact as possible. There’s not enough there for a feature film, but when I was looking at the story, everyone knows the story, but if you really look at it, there’s a lot you don’t know in this world. I don’t know Red Riding Hood’s name, for instance. She’s not given a name. She’s on her way to Grandmother’s house, but where’s she coming from? There are aspects to the story that, if you think about as a real thing that really happened to real characters, there’s a world to explore. So the idea was to use the fairy tale as an anchor and open up that world a little bit.
The idea was to put the fairy tale at the end and have the movie be the events that came before it.
Were there aspects of the fairy tale that you felt especially compelled to keep?
I wanted to keep as much as possible. That’s why there’s a dream sequence toward the end that incorporates one of the most memorable scenes from the fairy tale that didn’t have a real world place — the wolf dressed up as grandmother — there’s just no way an audience is going to accept that, but you have to have that moment. It was really trying to find places where, if I couldn’t put the exact thing in, I’d either put in a reference to it or something like that. The audience should see these things and know where they came from.
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