In this WGA.org interview with screenwriter Linda Woolverton, you can see just how easy it is to come up with a brilliant story concept:

Linda Woolverton, the screenwriter behind the new Alice in Wonderland film, is the low-key kind – agreeable, modest and not the type to prattle on or self-aggrandize. But be clear, despite her unassuming nature, there is an audacity to this new script. It is not simply an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s singular children’s masterpieces Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but a freestyle reimagination and expansion of them.

The basic idea for the film, which stars Burton’s long-time man-muse Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and winsome newcomer Mia Wasikowska as Alice, sprang from the Beauty and the Beast writer’s random pondering. “The script was based around a question,” she explains. “I just wondered one day, what if Alice was older and went back?”

It was nothing more than Woolverton musing in her spare time, but when she was asked if she had any fantasy script ideas, it quickly became successful pitch to Disney with Tim Burton attaching as director.”

What if Alice was older and went back? Again those critical brainstorming words: “What if?” Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Where did that initial question – what if Alice was older and went back? – come from to spawn this script?

Photo: © 2010 Disney Enterprises Mia Wasikowska in Alice in Wonderland.

My own head, musings and so forth. It had kinda been in my head [so when] the producers [Jennifer and Suzanne Todd and Joe Roth] asked me if I had any ideas for a large fantasy movie, I said, “Yeah, I kinda do.”

It happens in a time in this girl’s life when she’s facing imminent choices about life and who she’s going to be. The adventure down the rabbit hole is a chance to find that inner strength she lost when she lost her father and to realize that this dream she’d always thought she had was actually a memory.

She slays the jabberwocky and her own personal demons.

Her revisiting Wonderland validates it as real just as she’s also moving into adulthood and leaving it behind. Did you mean to play that sort of dual journey?

Yes I did. The leaving it behind was really important – leaving the childhood behind but also facing the unknown, facing the world, going out into the world, which is represented by her further adventures with the trading company, which is a metaphor for life. All of that is true.

This is a classical Jungian transformation story. Need more proof?

How did you deal with the source material?

I used it tonally, and I definitely took the characters from both the books. I was really influenced by the Jabberwocky.

Which is great.

It’s got that dark feel. It’s a boy in the poem. I just made it Alice. It sparked everything for me. I launched from that. How can this Victorian girl get to a place where she can put on that armor and face that monster?

Alice sort of becomes Joan of Arc.

Yeah, her own personal Joan of Arc.

Can’t wait to break down the stories character archetypes! Here’s the trailer:

What did you think of Alice in Wonderland?