Nick Willing

And you have a sense that that was kind of a witch's spell that was going to change your fortune.

And now I look at that picture of the swineherd and I think she is trying to change her own circumstance because her father had just died.

He had abandoned her in a sense, just like the swineherd princess.

And her husband, the prince, had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and was very ill.

So he was kind of out of the picture.

So she was on her own, you see.

So she's making a picture.

That's what I would call the secret.

It is a story, and a story we all know by Hans Christian Andersen, but it's also a picture of

about her circumstance and how she's going to use the circumstance of the princess to impact on her situation.

There's a chair, the Alice in Wonderland chair.

I made a film of Alice in Wonderland in 1998 for Universal Pictures and NBC.

We shot it at Shepparton.

And when we were finished, you know, they smash up everything that you, all the sets were

We had seven stages.

In those days, you made things properly.

It was before sort of computer graphics.

And one of the things we had is we made an oversized chair for the tea party for Alice to sit in, so that it would look a bit more like the Tenniel drawing, you know, the famous Tenniel of grumpy Alice sitting in that oversized armchair.

And I gave that armchair to mum.

and it's appeared in lots of pictures, and that's one of the pictures.