Maleficent
Director
Heartland Film: Truly Moving Picture Award (Winner) | BAFTA Kids Vote for Feature Film and Best Feature Film (Nominee) | Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards: Rondo Statuette for Best Film: (Nominee)
As an Oscar-winning art and production designer, Robert steps behind the camera as a director for the first time on Maleficent in 2014.
Maleficent is a dark fantasy adventure film starring Angelina Jolie as the title character, Maleficent. Loosely inspired by Charles Perrault's original fairy tale, the film is a live-action retelling of Walt Disney's 1959 animated film Sleeping Beauty, and portrays the story from the perspective of the eponymous antagonist, Maleficent, depicting her conflicted relationship with the king and princess of a corrupt kingdom.
Maleficent takes us to a place where the audience can see where this character came from, but with a bit of humor added in. The Disney version of a fairy tale is a very simple thing – light meets dark, the princess meets prince, happily ever after. There is a lot of darkness and a lot of light in the movie. There are also fairy tale elements, but from a different approach. There’s a little bit of something for everybody.
“...having a director (Robert Stromberg) coming from the world of production design really helped pull me into the fairy tale world. The film is beautiful but also has a sexy, dark edge because the story is coming from the point of view of a villain.”
Directorial Debut
Robert was not daunted by the challenges of working with a big-name actress like Angelina Jolie or a big budget in his directorial debut. He started out as an artist—from doing pencil drawings as a kid to doing matte paintings to art directing and production designing. As an artist, you’re always looking for the biggest canvas you can find, and this was yet another big canvas for Robert to conquer. He thought it was intriguing to take on something that was bigger than anything he had already done. And this came at the right time when he was looking for the next challenge in his career.
“It was very clear to me that Robert was born to be a director, and he really wanted to be a director. If he can provide the distinct visual style he brought to ‘Avatar,’ ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Oz The Great and Powerful,’ I think it’s a good marriage.”
“As a director, it was important to me to have enough of the elements of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ so that people wouldn’t be disappointed when they saw this movie. It was also important to me that those fans of the original classic would also see the genesis of some of the things they saw in the original film.
Not only did I want to have an element of fantasy and a surreal quality – but I also wanted ‘Maleficent’ to be a bit more grounded in reality. In some of my previous films, I’ve taken the surreal elements and made them the strongest points. In ‘Maleficent’ we’ve taken the opposite approach: we started with real and augmented after the fact, so I think it’s a completely new look.
I want people to step back into their own lives and, hopefully, they may have learned something about the definition of what they consider love to be. If that happens just one time, I will be happy because that was the intent.”
Behind-the-Scenes Magic
Robert, whose visual artistry as a production designer is world acclaimed, turned over his vision for Maleficent to his production design team, who were tasked with bringing the worlds to life. Robert was quite specific in his wants; to create this world that’s familiar to us, but has this fantastical element to it. You’ve seen it all before, whether in a storybook or in a beautiful forest glade – but there’s something magical and different about it.
“We’ve gotten amazing performances from actors who have to imagine the world they’re in—and even the size of the bodies they’re inhabiting. The pixies are a good example. For part of the movie, they are actually just two-and-a-half feet tall and they fly around. But we have these wonderful actresses bringing their humor and personalities to the roles and I can be sitting there watching them perform and completely forget they’re saying their lines dangling at the end of a wire, wearing outfits that look like space suits with all these painted dots on their faces.”
