Five Film Facts: 'Snow White & the Huntsman'

Remember Walt Disney’s very first fairy tale, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” (1937)? Remember the plucky little dwarves? And the Heigh-ho-ing? And the happy little birds? Well scrap that vision firmly from your mind, because “Snow White and the Huntsman,” which opens this weekend, is not your Uncle Walt’s Snow White. First time director Rupert Sanders’s vision is a definitively darker, impressively more epic version of the enchanted tale originally told by the Brothers Grimm. While we know that Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, and Charlize Theron are fair bets to make box office gold, here are five facts about the film you might know.

Horse Play
Kristen Stewart endured cliff jumping, fight training and cold, wet English countryside filming conditions for the role of Snow White, but all of that seemed like child’s play compared with the more equine parts of the job. Stewart literally had to get back in the saddle again: “I had to get back on a horse. I’d fallen off when I was nine, and I really hurt myself. Not that that was such a traumatizing experience, it just changed the dynamic completely. And Snow White just rides her butt off in this movie. I knew that I didn’t want to fake it, and I was terrified. It was that last hurdle I had to jump over.”

A Sizzle Reel is Worth a Thousand Words
Before working on SWATH, director Rupert Sanders was a widely respected advertising director. And while he wouldn’t be the first adman to make his way into features, he’s certainly got to be one of the first to get a $170 million dollar budget for his debut feature. To land his epic first job, Sanders pitched his would-be employers, like any good adman would. He put together a visionary “sizzle reel,” a short video that pieces together the story with telling images. When Hemsworth was asked why he chose to do the film, he explains that part of the reason was the influence of Sanders’s reel: “Rupert had shot this trailer for the movie, to pitch it when he was first trying to direct it. He shot it in about two days on no budget. And the thing looked like he had spent millions of dollars and six months to shoot. So I thought if he could do that with that amount of time, imagine what he could on a real size budget and timeline.”

Snow White II: The High School Years
Before the marquees had been updated for this weekend’s release, a sequel was already in the works. More than a month ago, Universal approached screenwriting veteran David Koepp (“Jurassic Park” 1993, “Spider-man” 2002) to discuss penning the sequel. Reportedly, the studio hopes to revolve the sequel around the Huntsman, and to start shooting in time to make sure it is Rupert Sanders’s next film. Huntsman Hemsworth has some ideas as to which direction he’d like to see the film take: “Snow White goes off to high school. Has the debutante ball. All the things she missed out on cause she was locked up. A couple of birthday parties. Get her driver’s license,” says Hemsworth, with tongue firmly in cheek.

Haute-Couture Queen
For costuming, SWATH employed one of the best in the business, three-time Academy Award-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood (“Alice in Wonderland” 2010, ”Memoirs of a Geisha” 2005, “Chicago” 2002). Hundreds of costumes were required for the film, including 12 major costumes just for Theron’s Queen Ravenna, all of which required hundreds of hours of labor. “There’s a collar made of Stag Beetle horns. There’s actually a dress made of beetle wings in her wardrobe. There’s a wedding dress for her, which is at the beginning of the movie, that has a huge collar made out of really fine, almost skeletal type bones. She also has a cape made of cock feathers that have been carved and sculpted into a shape on a cape. I call it her transforming cape because she becomes birds when she wears it. So all in all she’s quite the haute-couture sort of queen, but with an aged, rotting edge to her,” says Atwood.

A Little Bit of Movie Magic
If you thought you’d be seeing Sneezy, Dopey, Sleepy and the rest of the seven dwarves, you’ve gone to the wrong theater. That’s not to say there aren’t dwarves involved, but these dwarves are grizzled acting veterans -- including Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone, Nick Frost, and Brian Gleeson -- none of whom are dwarves at all. The production team used lots of little tricks to get around that fact, including framing, wider shots, shorter doubles, masks, and CG-ing the actor’s faces onto little people’s bodies.