news.com.au- No one knew it at the time, but Anne Hathaway’s second child, Jack, was on set of The Witches – a secret pregnancy she hadn’t yet revealed.
While baby Jack may have been indirectly in the production, it doesn’t mean Hathaway is going to let him or his older brother Jonathan, 4, see The Witches any time soon.
“My children must never see this movie. My children must never see it,” Hathaway told news.com.au. “They can see it when they’re 30, anything before then, no, I don’t think so.”
An understandable reaction given the hair-raising visage Hathaway dons in Robert Zemeckis’ movie adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches.
As the Grand High Witch, Hathaway turns into a monster with an extreme Glasgow smile, sharp eat-em-up teeth, no hair and a child-hating philosophy that would terrify any kid – but especially her kids.
“I just think it’s too complicated,” she explained. “They’re still at such an impressionable age and they don’t actually – especially Jack – know what I do for living. You know?
“They don’t understand that there are such things called actors and that their mummy is one of them. So, I think just introducing the whole demonic, huge, horrible smile would just be a step too far at this age.”
Zemeckis’ take on Dahl’s classic 1983 book is the second movie adaptation following the Jim Henson-produced 1990 version starring Anjelica Huston in the role Hathaway now plays.
While the 1990 version didn’t perform well at the box office at the time, in the intervening 30 years, the film has gained a cult following, largely thanks to Huston’s perfectly calibrated performance as the haughty and fearsome witch leader.
Hathaway said following Huston’s footsteps didn’t give her trepidation but an “awareness that the part had already been performed perfectly”.
“You couldn’t ask for any more than what Anjelica Huston did, but I decided that in the last 30 years, there have been four Jokers, six Batman and I don’t know how many Jack Ryans and James Bonds.
“We can do it, we can let multiple people interpret the same role and accept it. I think we actually haven’t the opportunity to watch women do it, it’s usually been guys that get that opportunity.”
She said she didn’t want to imitate Huston – “I didn’t want to give an ersatz Anjelica Huston” – and that she knew they would have to go in a completely different direction.
“We have to make it our own,” Hathaway said.
“It has to fit in Robert Zemeckis’ world, which meant leaning into the humour of it all, being inspired by Who Framed Roger Rabbit and all that cartoonishness. And it meant leaning into the diva of it, which was Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her. I really let Bob’s film history and his vision for this movie guide me.”
Perhaps the biggest change Zemeckis and his co-screenwriters Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro made to The Witches was to shift the story to the US.
Dahl’s book about a young boy and his grandma versus a cabal of evil witches was set primarily in England with parts in Norway.
Now, the story is centred on an African American boy (Jahzir Kadeem Bruno, with Chris Rock narrating as the older version) and his Alabama grandma, played by Octavia Spencer.
Spencer, an Oscar winner for her role in The Help, was born and raised in Alabama and thought it was “amazing” The Witches was reworked to its new setting.
“I thought it was great to have that diversity in the story. It was a wonderful to have a warm, Southern-cooking grandma juxtaposed to the cold, wealthy Grand High Witch who was hatched in Norway.”
Spencer also loved the details of the production design was “top-notch” singling the awe she had for grandma’s house, and the resonance of the space with her own childhood.
“Everything about it was just amazingly thought up and executed. Everything in the kitchen – the pots, the table, everything. The eye for detail was there, it was beautifully done.”
Spencer said she was excited to be asked to play the grandma and not one of the witches – “I’m not a fan of all the prosthetics, I did that once, I’m not a fan of all that stuff on my face” – and The Witches was her favourite Dahl book when she was younger (Hathaway’s was James and the Giant Peach).
“I thought it was titillating to be scared,” Spencer said. “To read something that was so transcendent that in your imagination, you were able to conjure up these witches and the scenarios and the world he created.
“It was deliciously fun and very scary.”
The Witches is playing now in cinemas
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