Alice in Wonderland Movie Part 1

In "Alice in Wonderland," actress Anne Hathaway floats across the screen as the White Queen with a pearly grin that becomes a tad bit unnerving. Her grin is almost like a cross between the Good Witch Glinda and "The Stepford Wives."

Anyone who can mix magic potions with the cheeriness that she does; while using some pretty vile ingredients, like amputated fingers, is pretty disturbing. As it turns out, her character was modeled after real-life inspiration according to director Tim Burton.

"There's this very beautiful cooking show host in England named Nigella Lawson and I quietly had her as my image for this character," Burton said, referring to the comely author and television personality sometimes referred to as the "queen of food porn."

Burton had previously said that the Red Queen has a little bit of Leona Helmsley in her. "She's really beautiful and she does all this cooking, but then there's this glint in her eye and when you see it you go, 'Oh, whoa, she's like really ... nuts.' I mean in a good way. Well, maybe. I don't know," says Burton about Lawson.

The plot of "Alice" is the mission of Wonderland's strange inhabitants to return their kingdom's throne to the White Queen -- a mission that call for a champion who may or may not be Alice. The White Queen sits in exile while her jarring sister, the Red Queen, rules over the land.

The strained relationship between the two sisters was a fascinating one to Burton.

"With a lot of people I've known, when it comes to sisters, there's this perception that there's the nice one and the bad one," Burton said. "But then, that nice one, there's also undercurrents there and things going back and forth between the two. She can stay up sharpening knives all night, but she's still the nice one."

Burton described the script written by Linda Woolverton and the nature of Lewis Carroll's cast of characters as those that blur the line between good and evil more than most children's tales.

"The interesting thing I think was to have them connected, and neither is quite what you expect," Burton said. "What Linda did with that was great. It helps with the thing that really sets Alice apart from so many other types of kids literature, which is the fact that everybody is a little bit off. Even if somebody is good, there's something wrong with them. Everyone is a bit twisted somehow. The White Queen is no exception."