Some Personal Notes on Adapting Folk-Fairy Tales to Film

I have made two films of traditional folktales. Hansel and Gretel: An Appalachian Version and Rapunzel, Rapunzel are both live-action adaptations of the Grimm stories. Because of my limited budgets, I had to choose relatively simple tales with few sets or special effects and very small casts. For the same reason, I used American settings for both: a 1930s Depression version of "Hansel and Gretel" and a turn-of-the-century Victorian version of "Rapunzel." I like to think that, in the end, my budget limitations proved advantageous; both films follow the Grimm stories faithfully, and both have stimulated lively positive and negative reactions from critics of children's film.

I began my film career making documentaries. My first major film, The Shakers, about a small American religious community, was broadcast as a PBS special and was generally considered a very successful television documentary. I learned while making it that a television documentary that depends on interviews and narration is, as one would expect, carried by the soundtrack. Without the picture, one could follow most of the content of the film, but without sound the film was virtually meaningless. The film took several years to complete, and by the time it was finished I was tired of the documentary format.

Just before it was completed, my oldest boy, who was about four, got a severe case of croup. My wife and I took him to the hospital, and the doctor put him in an oxygen tent. The hospital policy limited parents' visiting hours to two short periods each day and none at all during the night. He was in the hospital for two days and two nights.

Shortly after he returned home, I began to read him "Hansel and Gretel." I had loved the folk-fairy tales as a child, and I wanted to share with him this story of abandonment so that he would not feel so alone in his experience. The story was an instant success, and I read it over and over. Suddenly one evening it struck me that the story could be made into a film. This film could be done realistically and could be set in the Blue Ridge Mountains where I lived. It was practical because I could use the documentary techniques I already knew, and working close to home would make it less expensive.

It was exciting to discover this old tale in the faces of friends and neighbors and in the scenery and houses near home; the county dogcatcher became Hansel's and Gretel's father, and the ginger-bread house was one built and still lived in by a local hippy. A. student once asked the famous photographer Edward Weston what he should photograph: "Walk around the block," Weston replied. Even in dramatizing fairy tales, it turned out that the challenge lay in imagining the possible significance of the everyday and the close at hand.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel was made several years later, after I had made several more documentaries on American folk subjects and was eager to return to the dramatic format. By this time, the libraries were purchasing Hansel and Gretel, and I thought another folktale adaptation would be popular. Like Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Rapunzel required only a few sets and actors, which could all be found close to home; the local waitress became the pregnant mother of Rapunzel, and the garden of the witch belonged to a turn-of-the-century Virginia estate.

According to Marilyn Iarusso, children's film specialist at the New York Public Library, there have been few adaptations of traditional folktales, and most of these are animations or puppet films; I know of only a handful of folk-fairy tales done in live-action. Few of these have been successful. (Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast is a notable exception.) Other than my two films, there are no live-action fairy tales in the New York Public Library collection that are both faithful to the original tale and successful with children.

My own live-action adaptations have been controversial, partly because of my choice of live-action treatment...