Snow White: A Tale of Terror

Hollywood presents a dichotomy of fairytale and horror. Every day we see real life examples of excess and rehab. On the one hand you have Disney, on the other, Lindsay Lohan. Although a fantasy, my upcoming adaptation of Snow White will hardly be a fairytale. It’s much more about despair than anything else. I wrote the screenplay last winter, a dark and dismal winter unlike any I remember. Perhaps it was inspired by the hopelessness I felt when a project I was attached to direct, starring Anne Heche and Vivica A. Fox, ended up falling through on me. One year of work and lots of goodwill down the drain. “Shit happens,” as they say. It was an important lesson for me to learn and in many ways I feel like that experience will make me a better filmmaker.

Back in ‘95 Hollywood returned to the dark roots of the original Grimm fairytale in a film starring Sigourney Weaver. Not a bad flick. My adaptation is born of “the despair of possibility.” As Kierkegaard described it, “In possibility everything is possible. Hence in possibility one can go astray in all possible ways, but essentially in two. One form is the wishful yearning form; the other is the melancholy fantastic—on the one hand hope; on the other fear or anguished dread. Fairy tales and legends so often relate that a knight suddenly perceives a rare bird, which he continues to run after, since at the beginning it seemed as if it were so very near—but then it flies off again, until at last night falls, and he has become separated from his companions, being unable to find his way in the wilderness where he now is.”

The “melancholy fantastic” is where I have once again found hope.