While the film does not redeem Cruella’s later evolution into pure villainy, it does provide a backstory that makes sense, and one which Gillespie was happy to talk about with Den of Geek.
Den of Geek: How did you envision this when it was first presented to you?
Craig Gillespie: It’s interesting. [Disney president of production] Sean Bailey called me and he said, “Hey, what do you think about Cruella with Emma Stone set in 1970s punk London?” That trifecta for me, I was like, “That sounds amazing.”
Then I got the script, and it was beautifully written and it was a great sort of journey with all of these milestones and turns, but tonally, it didn’t have the… For me, I have this sensibility that I love being in this dance between humor and drama. That was the place that I feel like I can really excel. So that’s what I was looking for and I needed to bring to it.
Visually I had a very quick response, just from that headline that Sean Bailey had given me, and I was already doing a deep dive into that era with photographs of the time at King’s Road and Notting Hill, and the squatters and just the club scene. It’s just such an incredibly rich backdrop to work with. So I was compiling that, and the show was going to this very sort of gritty, dark, authentic place, and very quickly I just fed that to every production head as they came along. So visually, I got that, and I just needed to make sure we could get it attitudinally, like in the script with the characters and the music.
One of the things with these sorts of origin stories is the idea that we know what happens to the character down the line. So what’s the key for you to getting around that and creating a story that’s still compelling?
