Marvelous Maleficent

Since her introduction, Maleficent has been Disney's all-time most popular villain. Now she returns in this live-action version of the classic story-and there's a lot about her we never knew.

Maleficent explores the untold story of Disney's most iconic villain from the classic Sleeping Beauty and the elements of her betrayal that ultimately turn her pure heart to stone. Driven by revenge and a fierce desire to protect the moors over which she presides, Maleficent cruelly places an irrevocable curse upon the human king's new-born infant, Aurora. As the child grows, Aurora is caught in the middle of the seething conflict between the forest kingdom she has grown to love and the human kingdom that holds her legacy. Maleficent realises that Aurora may hold the key to peace in the land and is forced to take drastic actions that will change both worlds forever.

"I loved Maleficent when I was a little girl," says Jolie, "she was my favourite Disney character. I was afraid of her and I loved her." This duality intrigued producer Joe Roth as well. "This movie is about a character we've only known as hard hearted and our story answers the question 'Why?' I'd like audiences to feel like they've entered a world they've never seen before with Maleficent and I hope they come away feeling like no one is beyond redemption."

A Disney creation

The character Maleficent was a Disney creation first introduced in their 1959 animated feature Sleeping Beauty. But the story of the princess who falls under a spell of eternal sleep has been told since the beginning of fairy-tale time.

The story of Sleeping Beauty evolved-under different titles-over approximately 400 years (1000 if we count some overlapping elements from medieval times). The early written origins of the story can be traced from the French novel Perceforest (author unknown) written in 1527 to a tale by Italian storyteller Giambattista Basile (1636) called Sun, Moon & Talia from a collection entitled The Tale of Tales, which is generally accepted as the first collection of fairy tales ever printed.

In 1697, a version of the story, The Beauty Asleep in the Woods, was published by Charles Perrault in his book, The Tales of Mother Goose. The Brothers Grimm borrowed heavily from this version in writing their own 1812 story of a beautiful princess awakened from a spell-induced slumber, Little Briar Rose.

The origins of Maleficent as a female personification of evil are less clear. Basile's story casts a queen as the jealous, vengeful villainess but she was married to the king and not an independent outsider who inflicts a curse on the royal family. The villainess was changed to a wicked fairy by Perrault, whose version was closest to Disney's. Perrault also introduced the element of a handsome prince whose kiss could break the spell.

The film took 10 years to make

So it fell to 20th-century writers and animators, and actress Eleanor Audley, to invent Maleficent for Disney's classic Sleeping Beauty. The film took 10 years to make and cost USD6 million. It was the most expensive movie the studio had produced to that point in time. Maleficent remains both the favourite and the most feared character in Disney's gallery of infamy.

Producer Joe Roth made a bold choice by placing first-time-director Robert Stromberg at the helm of such a big movie. "Rob Stromberg had just finished working with me on Oz The Great and Powerful," says Roth. "I knew his production design work from having won Oscars for Avatar and Alice in Wonderland."

Stromberg was undaunted by the challenges of a big-name actress and a big budget in his directorial debut. "I started as an artist-from doing pencil drawings as a kid to doing matte paintings to art directing and production designing," says the director. "I think as an artist you're always looking for the biggest canvas you can find and this was yet another big canvas to conquer. I thought it was intriguing to take on something that was bigger than anything I had already done. And this came at the right time when I was looking for the next challenge in my career."

A bit more grounded in reality

Stromberg came to the production with a clear idea of how the film should be visually presented. "What I wanted on this film was not only to have an element of fantasy and a surreal quality, but I wanted Maleficent to be a bit more grounded in reality," relates Stromberg. "In some of my previous films, I've taken the surreal elements and made them the strongest points. In Maleficent we've taken the opposite approach: we started with real and augmented after the fact. So I think it's a new look."

"It was important to me as a director to retain enough of the elements of Sleeping Beauty so that people who are fans of the original won't be disappointed when they see this," explains Robert Stromberg. "I felt it was important that people not only see this classic character realised in a new light, but also see the genesis of some of those story elements that they remember from the original film."

Screenwriter Linda Woolverton began her process of discovering the secret life of Maleficent by watching Disney's animated Sleeping Beauty. "After watching the movie, I came up with some ideas that revealed more about her character," Woolverton explains. "I created a past for her that leads to the singular moment in which she curses the baby Aurora and then takes us past that moment from Maleficent's point of view through the ending of the film. But it's a reinvention; it's not just a retelling of the same story."

In addition to the challenge of reinventing a fairy tale that has been a staple of every child born in the last 50 years, Woolverton had to honour both the iconic character that Disney created and the talented actress stepping into the role. "The character really is fantastic and once we had Angelina Jolie, my task was to seamlessly meld the two into one to recreate a classic, but wholly unique Maleficent," says the writer.

A great experience

When movie-goers sit in their seats to watch Maleficent, Angelina Jolie expects that they will have a great experience. "Everybody involved is hoping to bring audiences the feeling that we've respected the classic film and if they loved the classic, we've tried to bring them what they've remembered and loved about this story," says Jolie. "But we've tried to enhance it and also make it beautiful and touching.

"We hope that audiences care about the characters, Aurora and Maleficent and Stefan and everybody involved; whether they love them or hate them at moments, that somehow they deeply know them and they're deep, good characters. But we also hope to bring a real world that they've never seen before and also action sequences and everything audiences want in a film," concludes Jolie.

Five readers can win a Maleficent colour-changing tumbler and a notebook. Go to www.writingstudio.co.za/page1037.html.