NewEnglandFilm.com

A mother pats her little girl on the head. She adjusts her little red hood and sends her off to Grandma’s house. You know the rest. Or do you?

Writer and director Ben Hillman’s musical short film "Little Red Jiving Hood" has all the elements of the classic fairy tale with a few adjustments… like a chorus of trees, ninjas, and a satellite dish atop Grandma’s roof.

In a recent interview, Hillman, who was presented with the 2005 Black Maria Film and Video Festival award, examined the film with the wit and astuteness one would expect from a director who dressed the Big Bad Wolf in Converses.

Andrea Maxwell: What is the advantage to musical film as opposed to straight storytelling? 

Ben Hillman: The advantage of musical film is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. It doesn’t even pretend.  Films that deal with gritty real life are great but that’s not what I do.

AM: You were awarded the 2005 Black Maria Film and Video Festival award for the film.  Have you received other awards? What was significant for you about this particular award?

Hillman: I was thrilled to get this award — especially since it was an Audience Award. That’s who the film is for. "Little Red Jiving Hood" has just started to be submitted to festivals so hopefully there will be more.

AM: Who would your ideal audience be? That is, if you could put anyone into a room and have them watch this, who would it be?

Hillman: I have seen this film screened before audiences with ages ranging from 3-80. I am very happy to say that people of all ages enjoyed it. One of my most thrilling moments was when my cinematographer’s 3-year-old said, "That’s not Grandma! That’s the Big Bad Wolf!" and I thought, "The film works!"

AM: How do you treat working with children differently than working with adults?

Hillman: Working with children is exactly the same as working with adults except that adults don’t usually run around the stage like wild animals when you ask them to stand in front of the camera. The favorite activities of our young stars were running laps around the set, throwing around a disc shaped piece of foam rubber which they named the "Poopie Pizza," or lying on the floor in front of the camera refusing to move. And sometimes we got a little acting out of them. But after about two hours we would reach Chernobyl — a total meltdown — and we’re done for the day. So in other words it takes a little longer.

AM: How did you cast this film?

Hillman: This was a budget-driven movie (my wallet), so I looked around for cheap labor and found out that my wife and daughter would give me a reasonable rate. My daughter (Maizy Hillman) played Little Red Jiving Hood and my wife (Amy Rudnick) played Mrs. Jiving Hood. I was actually thrilled to see how good they were on camera. And my wife didn’t lie on the floor refusing to move so she was a dream to work with. The Wolf (Luke Ban) was the son of a Japanese sculptor friend (Dai Ban, who also plays the Hunter) so I got to throw some Japanese shtick into the story as well. The Grandma (Leah Fischer) was the real life grandma of the Wolf. She happens to be an authentic Yiddish mama so she just played herself. The voices for this piece (this is all lip synch) were fantastic: the composer Donald Sosin, his wife Joanna Seaton — a professional singer — and her student Olivia Novik.

AM: Someone said that songs should be in musicals when the characters can’t think of any other way to express themselves. When do you know to put a song in?

Hillman: There should be a song at every possible moment. The whole notion of a musical is so ridiculous that you might as well make the movie as ridiculous as is humanly possible.

AM: How much did "Little Red Jiving Hood" change from beginning concept to completion?

Hillman: Actually it was a home movie gone out of control. It started with small ambitions, but when I got hold of Richard Sands the cinematographer — and an expert in shooting green screen — I realized that this production was going to a much higher level than I originally thought. And then there were a lot of professional friends of mine who pitched in and made it even better.

AM: How long did it take to create "Little Red Jiving Hood?" 

Hillman: I had done a short film called "The Snowfairy" with my wife and daughter where I shot my daughter on green screen in a fairy outfit and made her fly all over a wintry landscape with her mother chasing her, trying to get her to come down. This worked out very nicely and took about two weeks. So I thought about doing something a little more elaborate that would take a little longer (about 40 times longer, as it turned out.) Then I met the composer Donald Sosin and we decided to do a musical which we both love so dearly. (Donald is famous not only as a composer but as a silent film accompanist.) So what kind of film to do? I have a little girl and the Berkshires has many beautiful old trees so that led naturally to the idea of making a musical fairy tale starring a little girl. As it turned out, my original idea of shooting entirely in the woods would have been a logistical disaster. But we got hold of a stage and used a virtual forest instead, using photographs of trees in a 2 1/2 D computer environment. This was even better since it gave the whole piece a surreal quality.

AM: Though a well-known story, there are several versions of Little Red Riding Hood.

Hillman: Yes, I read an old German version where the last thing that happens is the wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood. The End. No Hunter. No nothing. It was brutal. Also, there is a beautiful black and white film version starring Christina Ricci which comes from another old version of the story which is much more overtly erotic. And there is a whole book on the subject by Catherine Orenstein called "Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale."

AM: What are your influences as a filmmaker?

Hillman: The major influence for this movie was my beloved Betty Boop. Dark, funny, sexy, mysterious cartoons, all set to a bopping beat.

AM: The film starts off with an eerie piano and realistic animals in a creepy forest. So how did the humor come about?

Hillman: The forest was supposed to be sweet strange and mysterious, not exactly creepy. Fairy tales originate so deep in our DNA, so I was trying to evoke those primeval forest origins, and then bust the whole thing wide open with a song and dance.

AM: Were the funny bits written into the script?

Hillman: The feel of the piece was conceived all at once: mystery and comedy and mystery again.

AM: What takes longer: the computer generated portions or the real-life filming?

Hillman: The filming is infinitely shorter than the computer work in this type of film. Compositing took roughly an hour a second to combine all the elements, create camera moves, and get each shot right.

AM: Which do you like more? (Assuming your actors aren’t lying on the floor refusing to move.)

Hillman: I like both. But in the future I would like a budget to hire a lot more compositors so it doesn’t take so long.

AM: Do you plan on doing other fairy tales?

Hillman: I have a proposal out to do a series of musical fairy tales. We’ll see if anyone bites. But my dream is to do a feature musical. It’s all written and storyboarded and ready to go: "Bomb Squad" — a musical about the gang who made the Atomic Bomb. Send funding please. http://www.bombsquadmovie.com. 

AM: The music and the film fit so well together. Did Donald Sosin have the score completed before you filmed or did they happen simultaneously?

Hillman: The incredible Donald improvised most of the music in one morning music session. The rest was tweaking which of course took another year or so. I took the rough track we recorded that morning, shot some rough footage and made a rough cut of the film based on that. Then we recorded the real voices and shot the real footage against the finished vocal tracks. After that was orchestration. The lip synching was done both by altering the timing of the audio tracks and by retiming the picture to fit the audio. Thanks to the computer, you can actually do that pretty effectively. The final sound went to Dan Edelstein and Steve Schwartz who work for Miramax in New York. They did the final synch, sound design and effects. Then a full 5.1 surround mix was created by John Davis of Dackl. Being a musical, the sound is at least as important as the picture, if not more so. I was thrilled with the result.

AM: What was the lesson behind "Little Red Jiving Hood?"

Hillman: The lesson behind "Little Red Jiving Hood" is that you should always listen to singing trees and that all Grandmas speak Yiddish.

AM: And that all little girls should be bilingual?

Hillman: There are so many lessons to be learned from this film that it is really a substitute for a graduate degree in philosophy in and of itself. Why pay all that money to a university?