Interview with Screenwriter David Johnson

Question: How did you get involved with this project? Did they come to you about doing it?

DAVID LESLIE JOHNSON: Yeah. I had worked with the Appian Way production company before with Orphan, a couple years ago. We had a great time on it and were trying to find something else. They came to me with the idea that they wanted to do a Little Red Riding Hood project and basically threw out the idea of adapting the fairy tale. That’s how it came about.

In taking on a story that’s so well known by so many people for generations, were there things that you knew you would have to include and things you knew needed to be cut?

JOHNSON: Yeah, for sure. I wanted to include as much of the fairy tale as possible, for that reason. Everybody knows it and the story’s power comes from its familiarity, so I definitely wanted it to feel like Red Riding Hood. I wanted to keep the fairy tale intact, as much as possible. That’s why it comes at the end and everything else is the events that lead up to the story we know. There were parts of the fairy tale that just could not fit in with the narrative we had. It just couldn’t be done. So, we included the dream sequence towards the end to hit all those beats that people are expecting to see. 

When you’re dealing with a story that’s not very long in page count, is it freeing to have so much creative space, or is it daunting because you have to figure out how to fill in the story?

JOHNSON: It’s both, at the same time. It was definitely daunting, at first, because I had the thought of, “How does this become a feature film?” But then, once I sat down with the story and started asking myself, “What don’t we know about Red Riding Hood?,” I realized that you don’t even know her name. If you start fleshing it out, she’s going to grandmother’s house, but she’s obviously coming from somewhere. We know she has a mother. It was just about back-tracking from there. And then, the other aspect that helped flesh it out a little bit was just looking at the themes of the story. The wolf takes the short path, and she takes the other path. It’s all about making choices, and that’s where the love triangle came about. It was illustrating with characters the idea of making a choice. Those guys represent two different paths she could take. Both the theme and the story helped blow out the world a little bit. 

Check out the entire interview here. 

Video Interviews from the Premiere

Gary Oldman & Adrian Holmes

Amanda Seyfried & Virginia Madsen

Shiloh Fernandez

Max Irons & Michael Shanks

Catherine Hardwicke & David Johnson

Interview with the Director, Writer, and Stars of Red Riding Hood

Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Max Irons, Shiloh Fernandez, Director Catherine Hardwicke, and Writer David Leslie Johnson Red Riding Hood Press Conference

Gary, when you play these men possessed, do you ever have to rein yourself in - or can you go over the top and be an actor possessed?

Gary Oldman: "Well, I hope I’m not an actor possessed. And if I were, then I have Catherine here to rein me in. I mean, it depends what you’re playing. This is a fairy tale, albeit a dark twist on an already dark tale, but it is a fantasy so you can push the limits a bit in something like this. I mean, I think Solomon is...I viewed him as very sort of Shakespearean."

Amanda, did the love triangle or the darker version of the tale attract you?

Amanda Seyfried: "Actually, the thing that attracted me to this movie was, I actually didn’t read the script before I met Catherine. She had crazy visuals to show me, so I thought how difficult it is to make this old timeless tale into a full length movie, and she had these great ideas. Then I met with Leonardo DiCaprio and that was it."

How did Leonardo DiCaprio get involved as a producer?

Gary Oldman: "It was his idea. I believe so. It was Leonardo’s idea. I think he was looking for something for his company and was sitting down with Lukas Haas and said, 'Hey, what about Red Riding Hood? We haven’t done that.' One of the few we haven’t done."

Then David starts writing?

David Leslie Johnson: "Yeah, they come to me then after they have the idea and sort of pitched me, 'We want to do Red Riding Hood?' I’d worked with them before on Orphan so we were looking for something to work again together on. That’s how I came on."

Read the entire interview here.

'Red Riding Hood': From Fairy Tale to Scary Tale

The Little Red Riding Hood of our collective imaginations is usually carrying a basket, but what she's really got is baggage — the kind of socio-sexual-psychological baggage that has kept certain fairy tales and myths alive from one end of the media forest (oral tradition) to the other (iPads).

As a movie star, Red hasn't had quite the career of Cinderella, say, or Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, even though her story possesses the same, sometimes amorphous elements that speak to our primal fears. In fact, her tale has a little something for everyone: Innocence. Courage. Violence. Seduction. And, of course, cross-dressing.

"Yes, but what she doesn't have is a Prince Charming," said David Leslie Johnson, screenwriter of the new and rather adult "Red Riding Hood," which opens Friday. "She doesn't have a match, and I think it's the reason Disney never tackled this one. It has some sort of dangerous undertones to it."

What Hardwicke's version of "Red Riding Hood" also does, in addition to injecting adolescent sexuality into a fairy tale, is reposition the female heroine in the archetypal story. Johnson recently wrote the screenplay for next year's "Clash of the Titans" sequel ("Wrath of the Titans") and said the contrast between the male-centric Greek myth and female fairy tales was one of the more curious aspects in the evolution of these classic narratives. In his research, Johnson found versions of "Hood" in which the girl wasn't saved by a woodcutter, but escaped by her own wits; in another, the women of the village rescued Red Riding Hood by spreading their washing across a stream and letting her flee across. It was interesting, he said, to go back and see how the women were, often, just as heroic as the men.

"We're all familiar with the male-driven myths of ancient Greeks," he said, "and how they're built up as these big heroes in our minds. For some reason, the female-driven tales have been relegated to the world of children's stories.

"Men were essentially the ones writing them down," he said with a laugh, "and telling us what was important."

Check out the entire article here.

Catherine Hardwicke, David Johnson, and Sarah Blakley-Cartwright Discuss Red Riding Hood Novel

Director, Screenwriter, and Author discuss how everything intertwines, how the story evolves, and how icebergs fit into the whole thing. 

Check out both clips from Entertainment Weekly here. The interview is also available with the enhanced e-book edition.

Both the book and e-book are now available. You can find a link to the amazon listing on the sidebar.