Teenage horror has been absent for a moment, but it’s coming back in a big way. One of the films set to pave the way is Alice Waddington’s Paradise Hills. This film is as gorgeous as it is unsettling. And as a young woman who loves horror and sci-fi, it was a movie experience that I fell in love with immediately.
What is important about Paradise Hills is that it is a horror sci-fi film directed by and starring a diverse group of women. Most of these, including the director, are young. The fact is that horror and science fiction rarely caters to young women as an audience. We have had to connect to male characters, or in many cases, female characters created by men. So, the fact that Paradise Hills feels like a true adventure for women resonates with me. It will resonate with any woman who has wanted a character to see themselves in as well.
To me, it was obvious that the creators put a lot of care into this film. You can tell as you watch that they had a vision in mind and did everything they could to execute it. It left me desperate to dive into the details with the director. Thankfully, with Paradise Hills now in theaters and coming to Digital and On Demand on November 1st, I got to do just that in this interview with Alice Waddington.
The first thing that I wanted to talk to you about was the first thing I noticed, which were the gorgeous sets. All of the flora, it was just beautiful. Was most of that location choice, or was it set design?
Alice Waddington: One of the greatest challenges of this film really was the fact that we were dealing with creating a new world from scratch, based on the locations. So, the shooting was primarily done in Spain. Production designer Leia Colet had to work with a number of references and had to combine them into something coherent.
What she wanted was something futuristic, brutalistic, modernist, with some Middle Eastern influences. We did use a mix of real locations and sets. The truth is that most of the places that people assume are digitally generated is actually a real set, and vice-versa. Meaning that, for example, the only digital sets are the opening credits—the ballroom scene, of course—and the scenes that were shot near the sea.
Would you also like me to talk a bit about the costumes?
Yes! Absolutely. The costumes were incredible.
Alice Waddington: In a certain sense, our costume designer, Alberto Valcárcel (who is also Spanish), liked to say that the costumes were also part of the sets in a way. So, there are motifs in the set design that repeat in the costumes. For example, the idea or the notion of the gilded cage, if you will, you have the caged sleeves that the girls are wearing. That repeats in the tables in which the girls eat at night. And regarding the overall costume design, Alberto, of course, had a lot of his own influences. From Alexander McQueen all the way to monolithically feminine 1960s films like My Fair Lady.
You have the 14th to 19th-century influences in the case of the Duchess. The guests at the ball in the opening have more of a steampunk style. So, again, nothing was really forbidden. It was a very millennial visual language of “let’s mix whatever is effective for the narrative.” I’m also a very big fan of directing sets and costumes the way that I direct actors. So, I would say something like, “I want this to be infantilizing,” or, “I want this to be oppressive.”
I also was interested in knowing about the casting. I know that this is a Spanish production, so I wanted to know about the choice of having an all English-speaking cast.
Alice Waddington: Of course. Well, I’m Spanish, I was born in Spain. And while I didn’t get to go to film school, all of my filmmaking references have always been anglophile, or Hispanic but anglophile. I have a very deep love for 1960s Hammer horror films, for example, as well as 1970s horror science fiction films.
Really, I just tried to use logic in thinking about the setting. This is an international institution that is set at sea. Thus, the most international language for everyone to speak with each other in would be English. Of course, the origins of the actors themselves are diverse. Danielle Macdonald is Australian, Eiza [González] is Mexican, and Awkwafina is Chinese American and her character is meant to be Chinese. So, they do come from different places in the world. But this is a sort of alternate future in which something historically went wrong. The setting is ambiguous in that sense; we don’t know how we got to that point.
But, my parents are both cinephiles. My dad was in a film club at university when he was younger and would bring home these French and English films. So I guess I have an emotional link to that.
The first time I saw Blade Runner, my mom and I watched it together. The first time that I saw A Clockwork Orange was with her when I was a bit older. It was all kind of a family affair, as far as loving and discussing film. And since I didn’t go to film school, all of those influences really helped me as I started to make shorts.
I wanted to tell you that, as a queer woman, I really found a lot of joy watching the film. I wasn’t entirely prepared for it, so I was really excited when it became part of the story. Would you want Paradise Hills to be labeled as an LGBTQ movie?
Alice Waddington: Paradise Hills is a commercial film; it’s a film to be enjoyed and it’s a film about personal expression. I think it’s time that we expand the definition of what a “crowd-pleaser” is to include everyone, no matter how they choose to live their lives, or in the case of LGBTQ people, the way that they’re born.
The girls at Paradise Hills are there for different reasons. Some of them are there because they have a physical so-called imperfection. For some of them, it’s mental. Some of them are LGBTQ people that don’t wish to become straight. I just wanted to include a range of life perspectives and a range of personal situations. And I thought it would be hypocritical, in a sense, to not touch on something as important and beautiful as human sexuality. With that said, it’s a small part of the film, but it is important to me. It’s very important to me that it was there.
Another thing that really struck me was how much the film kept me guessing, especially the character of the duchess. Her ending felt like an explosion. I was wondering if her character arc was influenced by anything in particular?
Alice Waddington: You know, one of the interesting things about fairy tale structure is that we think we know it. So it was important for us to take this more traditional structure and subvert it. So, we do get two first acts that are very warm. The institution itself is supposed to be a place of healing and solace. And then you realize that all of these messages—of how important it is to be yourself and finding people who love you for who you are instead of changing for them—start to feed into the third act. Here, these more traditional fairytale structures start to rot away and kind of darken.
So, the third act does pick up speed because it is the adventure part of the film. I made the film to be a story about princesses who save themselves. I made it for my 12 or 13-year-old self who loved Lord of the Rings and loved The Neverending Story [laughs], but could never see herself in those narratives. So, it was important for me to change our princesses into adventurers. And for that, we needed to change the third act into a completely different story.
Yes! I really love that. I also really wanted to ask you about the commentary on poverty here. There’s a lot of social commentary under the surface, and I wanted to hear your thoughts on it.
Alice Waddington: The film is purely for enjoyment, essentially, but there are some parts of it that you will find a message if you look for it. It’s not necessarily in your face, but it’s there. As you know, there are two social classes in the film. There are highers, who are basically very well-off, and the lowers, who are poorer people. There are representations for people in both groups.
Uma’s lover is a lower, who is offered this upgrade by leaving the people he loved behind. Then we have Yu’s character, whose parents are lowers, but is sent to live with family members who are highers. So, there is definitely a social conscience to this film, which, I think, is very important since these are basic concerns that teenage people have. It would be not as interesting if we were to ignore them.
I know you’re strapped for time, so I wanted to ask you just one last question. What are you hoping that people feel coming out of this film?
Alice Waddington: Aside from myself, I did make this film for my younger cousins. They are between 12 and 15 years of age, and I see that we as adults have put in their hands a world that is continually telling them that they’re not beautiful enough, popular enough, perfect enough.
This was my way of telling them that image-based social networks are trying to define their worth in a way that is unhealthy and in a way that is not themselves. They should not change the little things that make them different because those are things that actually make them special. They’re the things that make them human.
And I also wanted our audience to come out of the film wanting to become as brave as the characters in our story because together, we can defeat monsters.
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Paradise Hills is now in theaters and will come to Digital and On Demand on November 1st.
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