Tarsem Singh

How about in the execution from your head to what appears on screen?

That’s what I live for. That would be like saying, “So how do you breathe?” If I could define it I think I might stop breathing. It’s usually very far flung. It’s usually taking an idea and just saying, “Well, this is the entrance of the idea. We meet the queen, she’s kind of using people like pawns but I don’t want it to be chess. So what can we do that’s fun to make?” Then we sit down and somebody says, “Well, they can be playing some sort of a square game, blah blah blah blah blah. They could be playing BattleShip.” Okay, Battleship with the rules of chess but the things are on people’s heads. Okay, that makes sense. That’s kind of how we throw things around because they don’t come to me on paper in that form. It’s just the queen saying certain things and I say, “Here you could put a ball. Here you could put a stylized chess game. Here you could put that.” That’s kind of what I live for.

How did you develop the idea of the mirror world that she enters?

Ooh, tough one. That one went all around because for me, that was the defining thing for the film for me that I just said it can’t be that you just go “Mirror mirror” and then there’s a mirror with the voice of James Earle Jones that tells you what to do. I just said you can’t go there, so what do we do with it? It originally used to be that she had a sister who did all this black and everything and she didn’t. I was okay with that idea too but eventually when it came down that in the mirror, I kind of sold it to myself and to Julia much more along the tone of no matter how evil a person is, no matter what they do, they always have a way of justifying what they do. To a certain extent, some people outsource their evil from themselves. It can be I heard voices, the devil made me do it, blah blah blah blah. So I said take an approach like that and think almost like a shrink that’s telling you, “Go ahead and do the bad things you need to do.” That would be look in the mirror and there’s the idealized you. You’re almost disassociating yourself from what you do so that the evil that you’re going to do, you can’t blame on yourself. So it’s literally a bit of a Freudian approach to it an split the two up and that was as good for me as having a sister that did black magic and the queen being separate. So that actually changed once we were almost on the shoot. We were always questioning what does it look like? And everybody was saying go to just the simplest one. Let her just go and talk to the mirror. I just thought no, the visual answer can’t be that simple. Then literally I embraced it when literally instead of talking to the mirror she goes into the mirror and then arrives in a landscape where she has a monologue with her inner self. Once I sold that to myself and everybody bought it, then it was just a question of designing it but that was the toughest one actually. It took the longest way to get there.

What was the idea of stepmothers that you wanted to include in the movie?

It wasn’t so much my idea but it was the original idea of Snow White before the brothers Grimm. It was always the idea that girls past a certain age should not live in the home with their parents. It’s just not right so the morality tale that came out of that one, was the mother was starting to become evil to Snow White. But when the brothers Grimm came along, sensitive to the storytelling of that period they were the original studio heads. They said, “No, no, no, this is not acceptable to people. Let’s make her stepmother because it’s easier to make her evil then.” I think unfortunately 200 years later, there are so many stepmothers out here and most of them are very nice. So I just think the times have turned. It would’ve been nice because I would have just had to go back instead of making the stepmother evil, it shouldn’t have been a stepmother. But when you kind of define or redefine genre, there’s only so many rules you want to break before it becomes not a recognizable part. You have a queen that’s likeable in this particular instance, that’s enough. You don’t have to make the prince an ugly guy who then becomes charming. He just was a charming guy. Snow White was the purest good girl you could meet. So it was muddying the water and actually taking the stepmother element out, just because it’s so iconicly clear to people, as much as you show an older woman giving an apple to a young girl, anyone will tell you what that is. That’s Snow White and that’s her stepmom so it was just that. It was too ingrained in the psyche to try to change. I was trying to figure out a way to change it but we never did.

It’s been an evil queen for so long that you can’t even change it back to a stepmother.

She is her stepmother. In the original one she kills the evil queen really badly. You really can’t go back to those pages because people’s appetites change. Certain things that they’re okay to read in literature, they can’t see visually or it’d be too graphic for them. You just adapt to the times. The queen dies a really horrible death. I think they boiled some shoes they put inside a furnace and she has to dance until she dies. You show that, even in animation it wouldn’t be acceptable, forget about real film. It’s just that certain things people are okay to read, but if you show it to them they wouldn’t. Like most people are okay to eat lamb, but if you show them a lamb being killed and they balk at the idea.

That’s sort of like The Hunger Games, a very graphic book but a PG-13 movie.

They would just lose the audience. They must’ve done something smart because it seems to be working for a very large group of people. I haven’t seen the film. I intend to tonight.

Was shooting the Bollywood song like doing a music video?

No, for me it was very much an integral part of the film. It’s just one of those things that once we did it, I had that specific song in mind. I had it exactly that as an ending. Unfortunately specifically the parents, specifically the dads would not accept it. They just said, “No, this is a fairy tale, it doesn’t go there.” They didn’t have the license in their culture to allow that in. I tried moving it here, I tried to make it look like people used to sing and dance before and they wouldn’t have it. In the end, the numbers just the way the studio was showing it to me was so much more. The children loved it. They just said the problem is they come with parents and if the parents don’t talk to each other and say, “It’s a good movie,” it won’t work and it’s only harming us. So we took it out. And in the end, when the international people saw it, they said, “In our culture it works” because the song is not part of the titles, it’s part of the movie internationally. They’ve taken it out in America an at the last second I went to the studio and I said, “Listen, I gave you everything you asked for. This is so much part of my DNA. Can you put it in the titles?” At the last second we tried to find a pause, and in that pause I put the photographs of what the dwarves now do, which a friend of mine shot over the weekend, and they allowed me to put the song in the titles because that seems to be to a certain extent more palatable to an American audience. In the titles you can break certain rules.

What part of the film would it be in in the international version?

It’s about three minutes before it ends. Everybody turns to look at Snow White and nobody knows what she’s going to do. Is she sad, is she this? She just morosely walks into the center of it and breaks into a song and says it’s all right. Then everybody’s amazed by her because they have not danced for 10 years and they start dancing with her.

Did you want to include that because you’re Indian or just a fan of those movies?

No, I haven’t seen an Indian movie for 30 years. I’ve seen one actually. So it wasn’t that. I just like the spirit. The thing is you kind of make certain rules. With animation songs are probably more acceptable. Then you have musicals and then you have nonmusicals. There seems to be a rule for people and it just doesn’t look like there was enough appetite for it out there. I just wanted to do it because I just really as a kid this was a song that I’d heard a really kitschy Iranian version of it by a woman called Googoosh who was the original Lady Gaga in the ‘70s in Iran. I just said, “I’ve got to get this song and have Snow White sing it.” Google her and look at the song. She got it from another girl called Nina Hart who sang it in the middle of a Milos Forman film [Taking Off] on the titles. Check out those two version and they could not be more far away than what I wanted but they are brilliant.

I’ve probably seen more Bollywood movies than you and I’ve only seen a few.

No, I’ve seen hundreds but they’re all before 1979.

Do you recommend any?

Yeah, see Disco Dancer. See Sholay, the original one.

Did Snow White have to become a fighting warrior in your version?

She didn’t have to. That’s the only piece of wardrobe that me and Eiko [Ishioka] felt we didn’t really get correct because she was always supposed to end up in the Prince’s clothes but they didn’t fit her and blah blah so we kind of ended up making this in between. It was about empowering a girl as opposed to a princess sitting there waiting for the prince to come and get you. It made sense that basically she would start raiding with them but in a Robin Hood fashion as opposed to what they wanted which is just to be rich.

You pointed out that nobody says this is a poison apple but we know. There seems to be an epidemic of overexplaining in movies. Can we get back to visual understanding?

You won’t get that argument out of me. I get criticized for it all the time and I’m like, “Hey, if you can tell it visually, don’t talk about it.” You don’t have to build it up at all. You go to anybody and if you’re doing Superman, you just show this guy flying, somebody shows him a rock and he can’t fly anymore, you understand that’s kryptonite. It’s ingrained into the psyche of most people so you don’t have to have a scene where she says, “Give me that poison, blah blah blah.” You don’t need any of that. It’s wonderful when you see that with children, when they’re just getting happy for the movie ending when that comes in, they just have the air sucked out of them and they’re almost mouthing, “Don’t take the apple.” I was just thinking, “We didn’t even set up the apple.” They got it in two seconds.

I was just worried you’d forget about the apple because you already take out the part where the prince kisses her back to life.

Well, we kind of had that and we thought we know where the source material comes from, why not have fun with it? I had a much bigger scene originally that I was pushing for but it just required so much more time that it didn’t work.

What was your scene?

My thing was that she would eat the apple, like she would become disguised and Snow White would eat the apple. Now this is the original tale and I had always loved that idea, that she would eat the apple and then when she would die, everybody would tell him kiss her. He kisses her and she doesn’t wake up. Then everybody looks at him really suspiciously that maybe they weren’t in love. Maybe he doesn’t love her and Snow White’s dead. Then they pick her up and when they’re taking her away, one of the dwarves, the clumsy one trips and she falls and the apple was just stuck in her throat and comes out. So she gets up, everybody’s shocked that she didn’t even die, she turns and looks at the prince and thinks, “Oh my God, he kissed me back to life so he must love me” and she hugs him and he just tells the dwarves to shut up, I’ll take the credit for it. Then they continue singing and dancing, but it was just another step that I think for a kiddie movie, this was about the time limit. We couldn’t take it there.

You’d said you only wanted to do three visual movies and now you have four, but why would you only want to have four visual movies?

No, back to back. I think I will do more of them and I will do probably a lot more but I think now if I do one more, two more of this, best case scenario for me would be not a bad place to be. I’d just end up with Tim Burton’s rejects, in that area which is if it ain’t weird don’t give it to him. So I just have to mix it up. At least this one wasn’t an R-rated film so I said okay, now it’s good to go into that territory and then I’ll wait and think if there’s something that I can do because most people only know me from my work in films. I say no, I do the most conservative ads you can think of and I do really straight storytelling stories. I just haven’t done them yet for cinema so people think this is all I want to do. If I don’t mix it up now, it’s not a box I’ll be able to step out of. If I don’t mix it up now, I’ll probably be doing only visual films.

What’s an example of a straight storytelling type movie?

Any Haneke movie, any Kieslowski film, most Polanski films. Just straight drama that doesn’t rely on the fantastic or on composition or on the grace of the image.

Something that focuses on the actors?

Actors, story, script. That’s not particularly right now what I’ve done which is everybody’s very much a pawn on what the film looks like.

What is your next film?

Hopefully if it happens, in the next week we will know, but it’s a small film about a drone attack. It would look like almost three different wars, from the people who are flying the video planes that they’re flying on monitors they’re flying from Vegas and the bombing is happening over a village in Africa that they’re trying to stop some terrorists on, the politics involved in basically giving the go ahead for a project like that. It feels like three different things but it’s the same war and you have such a different perspective on what the result is. For some people it’s going to be like something coming from the sky and wiping you out. For others it’s like a really tense video game and the politics is politics.

What is that called?

Eye in the Sky. I’ll know within a week if that’s happening. I hope it is.

Do you have any cast attached?

No, basically there are so many characters in this it’s going to be an ensemble which is usually easier because one great role or two great roles, you get an actor and you’re off in running. This is the film.

Do you still do commercials and music videos?

I do commercials a lot. I did very few music videos. I just did them right out of school and then my musical taste unfortunately goes for music that probably doesn’t really have an outlet. It’s much more folk and classical. They don’t really have any music videos for those. It was never really a job. I did music videos because I loved them and then just moved on, and I love doing advertising because I love telling short tales and learning new toys every day.

So you won’t be doing a video for an LMFAO song?

I don’t know who they are, I’m so out of contemporary music.

They sing a song called “Sexy an I Know It.”

Well, that sounds good to me.

Mirror Mirror is now playing.