By Scott Roxborough. Europe Bureau Chief. That worm inside her eats her up, both metaphorically and physically. The rest of us are the ugly stepsister, struggling to fit into the shoe. What version of Cinderella did you grow up on? I grew up in a house in the north of Norway, where the road ends at the horizon, with no other children around, a very isolated place. And my parents were all about books. Before that, it was all about books. But in Norway, there is this tradition of watching a Czech version film version of Cinderella every Christmas.
I really love the Eastern European fairy tale cinema from that time. That has its own charm, but I was always taken by this style. I also had a book, which I now understand made a very big impact on me, the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, one of the first books I read as a child.
Where did the idea come from to flip the script of the story and tell Cinderella from the perspective of the ugly stepsister? So she slips on the slipper, which fits perfectly, and she runs out. The prince lifts her up on the horse like she weighs nothing, and then they start riding. Then she looks down and the shoe is full of blood. I am the Stepsister. I cut off my toes to fit the shoe. Not just because I wear [size 11] shoes myself, but because I also long to fit into this idealized form of womanhood.
But there is only one Cinderella. I knew from that moment this was going to be my first feature. Interestingly in your film, although you change the point of view, you still stick quite close to the events of the fairy tale. The Brothers Grimm one describes the sisters as beautiful on the outside and ugly on the inside, which I still think is very interesting.
Disney added the idea of linking beauty and kindness on one side and physical and inner ugliness on the other. You had that in fairy tales before, with witches and their big noses, but Disney really makes it obvious. But Cinderella is a fairy tale, so there is no original version. It was really important for me to make the stepsister a three-dimensional character, not just an archetype. I thought: What if we met the real person behind this archetype?
