Catherine Hardwicke Talks Red Riding Hood

On the influences behind the film

I’m not so much of a person top go back and look at other movies as much, like when I did 13, I didn’t look at other teenage movies,  I looked at a couple of Martin Scorsese and Cassavetti’s to get that gritty reality, so actually in this movie I looked more at paintings, I looked more at paintings of Hieronymus Bosch,  from that time period, and try to find the spirit of the people, and the dance sequence you see in there, and The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Bruegel and other painters of that time.

On the music and dancing in the film

Strangely enough, if you look at the paintings of Breugel and Bosch from that time period, from the fourteen hundreds, I studied those two for the dance, they are wild. This is before the Victorian age, this is when people actually had spirit and life and kind of cut loose. Burning Man, which has roots in medieval festivals was, in a way, the inspiration, but it’s old/new, it’s circling back. And the Swedish band that did the music, Fever Ray, used  all the beautiful old instruments, the Hurdy Gurdy, all the things that were pictured in Bosch’s garden of earthly delights, they were recorded, and then processed again in the music.

On why she chose to make Red Riding Hood

Well, let’s see, Leonardo DiCaprio’s company came up with this idea, and as has been reported,  I had a several other projects I was trying to get made: Hamlet, I tried to get on the fighter (I couldn’t even get an interview for that), but this is the one the studio said, ‘yeah, let’s make it’ finally, so then you get excited about it, and think, ‘how could I make a whole world? A magical fairytale world?’, and just start building it, and turning it into something.

Check out the entire article here.