Director Catherine Hardwicke on "Red Riding Hood"

Catherine Hardwicke started out as a production designer on such films as Tank Girl and Three Kings before she became a director -- she got the idea for her writing/directing debut Thirteen when actress Nikki Reed, a friend's daughter, went through some tough times as she was doing design on Antitrust. Since then, Hardwicke's helmed Lords of Dogtown, the first Twilight film, and now Red Riding Hood, starring Amanda Seyfried as the titular character. The director talks about the twisted turns she took with her version of the classic fairy tale, and how chocolate got her actors in a frenzy.

Q: What attracted you to this project?

A: Before I was a director, I was an architect, an artist, an animator, so one of the things that I was excited about was I could finally create a whole world, a special, unique world. For instance, it's about the woods, and there are woodsmen there, so that's what the houses are built of, so I wanted an architecture that added to the paranoia of the village. Lookout towers. Sharp pointed ends. All of that gives you a paranoia that's baked into the DNA of the buildings. And in case anyone wonders, there was a beetle infestation, so those trees had to be cut down anyway. It was ecologically sound.

Q: But you wanted this version to be darker ... closer to the spirit of the original fairy tale?

A: That's the thing about fairy tales -- they are actually about confronting your dark side, your dark impulses. You admit them, you work through them, and then you get to live happily ever after. That's why these stories have traction and meaning. And the versions we hear over time, those are sanitized.

Q: Right, because in some versions of Rotkäppchen, there is cannibalism -- she eats her grandmother and drinks her blood, without knowing it. In other versions, she throws her clothes into the fire and gets into bed with the wolf... and there is implied sex or rape.

A: So our challenge was to take this tale that we've all heard since we were little, and put messy bits back in. The sanitized version has a message of "don't talk to strangers," but this was darker than that. And it can mean different things at different ages.

Q: This is also a coming-of-age story, and a mystery...

A: There's a mystery built in that someone in the village is a werewolf and has a double identity, and the stakes get higher and more secrets are unraveled. The day it starts, Valerie and her true love find out that her parents want her to marry someone else, but before they can run away together, her sister is murdered. For the first time in 20 years, the wolf has killed a human. And you start wondering what is going on with this town? You're trying to figure out why she was murdered, and how has this person been hiding this secret? And then a witch hunter, a werewolf hunter [played by Gary Oldman] comes in and tries to get at the bottom of it, and reveal the wolf. 

Q: What was the inspiration for the town's festival? That dance?

A: I've been to Burning Man, and I thought that harkened back to medieval times, pagan times, so we came up with a style of dance that could be old and new at the same time. And we looking at paintings from the time, and we thought there was a sense of abandonment, so it was a license to make it a sexy, fun pagan ritual. We just went for it.

Q: So with all this abandonment, how did you get your cast to focus?

A: You know, I did say "focus" a lot. One of the things I did at the end of the day was the final frenzy, to get the last shot. I told them we'd go more than they'd ever done, bigger than they'd ever down, and then I'd pass around a chocolate bar, and everyone had a little bite. And that's how you get the last big shot of the day, when time is running out, and you have to focus.

Three Kings airs on Current TV on Friday, March 11 at 7:30 pm ET/4:30 pm PT.