Paradise Hills tells the fascinating story of a young woman named Uma (Emma Roberts) who finds herself trapped in a mysterious finishing school for rebellious girls. Behind the glossy exterior lie a few deep dark secrets, which director Alice Waddington helped bring to light in an exclusive interview with Screen Rant.
The movie, which opened in theaters on October 25 and will be available digitally in November, marks Waddington’s first feature-length film. But she already proved her genre prowess in Disco Inferno, which won acclaim at several international film festivals in 2015. The director shared the origin of her passion for science fiction, the surprising inspirations behind Paradise Hills itself, and the contributions that her stellar cast made to the creation of their characters.
What inspired the specific aesthetic of Paradise Hills, which felt like a cross between colonial and punk rock?
You have a lot of hands-on experience in filmmaking, from photography to writing and directing. How did your background in those different areas help you have a more 360 view of Paradise Hills?
Alice Waddington: The intention behind the aesthetic was primarily retelling fairy tales; that’s kind of a topic throughout the story. We also had the notion of taking classic horror and science fiction narratives that have been pretty masculine and retelling them.
So, for example, we have The Prisoner and Logan’s Run as references, but we sort of pass them through the filter of more feminist, softer historical films, such as Daughters of the Dust. Our production design team, led by Laia Colet, was very female. Actually, more than 60% of the team was made up of women. And because it’s such a feminine view on genre film, that was important to us.
One of the greatest challenges of the film was essentially taking in real locations and inventing or making up a world from scratch using them. We had film crews in Barcelona and the Canary Islands, and we used this mixture of brutalism with retro-futuristic 1960s and 1970s style. Then we also have modernism, which is specifically a Barcelona style. We kind of mix and match all of that; it’s a very millennial combination that was about what made sense narratively. As far as nods to pre-existing things go, we have everything in mind, from My Fair Lady to modern video games such as Final Fantasy.
We were also very self-conscious about the meaning of the corsetry in the film. What do these 14th to 19th century corsets mean when it comes to the progression or repression of women? Also, it’s about the references to mental institutions for women in the mid-20th century. Because, at the end of the day, this is a film about personal freedom, and I wanted to direct the sets and costumes in the same way that I direct the actors or actresses.
I know that you wrote the original treatment for Paradise Hills. How much did it evolve from treatment to screenplay?
Alice Waddington: I didn’t have the privilege of going to film school, but I did go to a public university where I studied advertising. That was the closest local thing to my dream back then.
But it really started at home, because my parents were both cinephiles and my mom was a big science fiction fan. She was the first person who showed me Blade Runner and Metropolis; she was the first person I watched A Clockwork Orange with. When I was younger, we would watch movies together and comment. So, that was kind of the first part of my film school.
The second part was really working on set from 16 years of age to 20. The first film that I worked on was called Ander, and it went to the Berlinale. It was a small, local crew and it was my way of realizing that you could make a film with your friends in your hometown, and it could have international repercussions. I guess that was part of what piqued my curiosity back in the day.
Nacho Vigalondo, who I had been working with for costume and production design, encouraged me to make my first short in 2015. I did, and it went to international film festivals. I was very lucky that way. My experience in advertising really showed me how to pitch myself, how to pitch projects, and also my concept artist experience when I was younger.
You’ve mentioned that you were inspired by shōjo manga, which I can see in the theme of creating the perfect woman or otherwise holding women to a societal standard. What are some manga or anime that specifically inspired the story?
Alice Waddington: It changed a ton. The original was mostly about a social network that connected well-off men and women – “highers,” in our story today – with poorer “lowers.” It was promoted as a class mobility thing, but it of course hit something much darker.
You can see how that’s connected to Paradise Hills as it is right now. With it being a purely entertaining film, there are still elements of class warfare. If you look for them, you will find them. For example, the lowers still get pretty much ignored by the highers in the story, and there’s representatives from both social statuses in the film.
Markus, Uma’s love, is a lower and he’s also sort of pitched class mobility by the residents. It’s this old parable of love, that if you make enough money you will seduce the woman of your dreams. But Uma is pretty much against that. Also, you have Yu, played by Awkwafina. She’s a lower originally, and her aunt and uncle have a factory and they want her to inherit it. But she doesn’t want it.
I was fascinated by the names of characters in Paradise Hills. Uma, for example, contains a lot of the keywords for her character arc when compared to the Hindu goddess she’s named after. What was your thought process for that?
Alice Waddington: A direct homage in Paradise Hills is to the Clamp collective [which is an all-female Japanese manga artist group]. Clamp made this comic called Tokyo Babylon, and there is a backstory for one of the characters that is essentially about how the cherry trees get their color.
There is a really sinister, dark story they make up for how they were originally white, but because of the blood of lovers buried underneath, they turn pink. That inspired a certain moment of the film that shall not be revealed.
There’s another one by Clamp, which is called Chobits. For people who don’t know, Chobits is essentially about men that look for perfect partner. But they’re not looking for a partner that’s real; they’re going to create a perfect woman for themselves – to the point that it’s an artificial human.
Even though it’s a manga for young girls, there’s so many interesting layers that are sociological and run so deep, that I was really fascinated by it. I love manga so much, because it doesn’t underestimate the intelligence of its audience. And it doesn’t believe that just because they are telling a story for young girls, or young people that like to read female-led stories, they need to simplify or water down the realistic components.
The girls each have to conform to their culture or industry’s set of rules in the film. Did you have those specific countries or positions in mind to explore, or did that come out of the casting process?
Alice Waddington: If you look, you will find. We had quite a list for each of them. I remember specifically that I wanted Yu’s name to be something that almost felt like a personalize attack. Like, “This could be you.” But also, we were looking at the meanings of each name in each language.
Amarna [Eiza Gonzalez] is a direct homage to a dear friend who has experienced a lot of public pressure in Spain, and who is a feminist activist whose work I consider to be really interesting.
Uma had to do with Hindu mythology in a sense, but it also was interesting to me that it was connected to the name Yu. In Spanish, if you change a letter it sounds like “una,” meaning the female version of one. So, we were kind of playing around with the notion of the chosen one in fantasy and science fiction being a male.
With Chloe [Danielle Macdonald], we were looking for a name that would indicate the South because she’s such a southern character. She had to have a very pretty name because her parents want her to be pretty in a normative way, but she has her own way to be beautiful.
It was also interesting to me that The Duchess [Milla Jovovich] has no name, because she has had her identity stolen over and over again. She doesn’t know who she is anymore, so she gets her identity from telling other young women what to do and what to be.
Alice Waddington: I would say that it really came down to what actresses were interesting to me. I knew that I wanted to make an inclusive film, culturally and racially speaking. And I knew that the back stories were going to be connected to their race, as you mentioned. We were trying to run away from the clichés, but there’s certain topics that we wanted to tackle.
Of course, Eiza Gonzalez had this deep connection to Amarna’s backstory, because she was a teen idol in Mexico, and she had to conform to the norm herself. She had to change her creative style a number of times to feed what people wanted her to make for a teenage audience.
I knew that I wanted a southern character because I wanted that opposition between the south of the US and the north, represented by Uma. Like a city girl versus a country girl, and what are the different pressures. I wanted to represent the different concerns in the same country; concerns with married life, concerns with socialization and how they were directly reflected in these girls.
Were there any moments while where an actress showed you exactly why they had been cast as a particular character?
Uma and Amarna end up having almost the central relationship in the film, given the different explorations of their feelings. What message did you want to send through their storyline?
Alice Waddington: Of course. I feel like each one of them has a moment like that. The moment I knew Emma was perfect, for example, was when I saw her do Uma’s waking up scene for the first time. She has this combination of a fairy tale heroine and unwilling princess and the very brave characteristics of someone that you can tell is going to be defining her own future.
I also think that she is pretty vulnerable in this film, which I really value. It’s a level of transparency and trust that I really appreciate. Every single one of her romantic scenes, she tried new things – or even just the opening scene in which she sings for the first time in years, sitting on the shoulders of two guys that are lifting her up. It’s a leap of confidence to think that’s going to look good and she’s going to look good doing it.
In the case of Eiza, it was just a very generous streak of letting us film her doing these longing gazes that we could use in different parts of the story. She would be like, “Okay, let’s shoot some moments for Uma and Amarna,” and she was right. She wrote many lines that people remember from the film, and she really expanded her role in that way.
With Awkwafina, it was just seeing her doing dramatic scenes. This was before The Farewell. There’s no reason why, because she is a genius, but she was nervous to do the dramatic scenes – especially as she was going to go on to make that film. Her dramatic scenes were a great discovery for me.
Danielle was the opposite. I knew she could do dramatic scenes, but the surprise was seeing her do the action scenes. I didn’t know she could do such kickass action scenes; she really threw herself into them.
Finally, your next film is called Scarlet, and it’s coming out on Netflix. Can you tell me a little bit about what we should expect from it?
Alice Waddington: When we wrote the scenes, all we wanted to do is pay homage to the sincerity and feelings of our teenage years. If you listen to conversations – I have cousins that are 12 or 13 years old, and if you listen to them – they’re straightforward in a way that can be very disarming.
We spend a bunch of years trying to create a sort of shelter from honesty. I don’t think that’s necessarily a healthy thing to do. I just wanted to tell them that their feelings are a work in progress. Their feelings as they’re forming their identity are valid and necessary; you need to find out who you are, and you’re not going to wake up one day with your full identity intact. This search is part of it, and I just wanted to not infantilize or invalidate any of those sensations.
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Alice Waddington: My next project, Scarlet, is a historical queer film. It’s produced by Michael Costigan, who produced Brokeback Mountain, and it’s written by Kristen SaBerre. She’s a wonderful African American writer from New Orleans, and I’m really looking forward to it. It has genre elements as well.
And another one, I can’t really speak much about, but it’s a television project based on a series of fantasy novels that I hope will be announced by the end of the year.
