Creating the world that has become the Syfy event "Alice" required walking a tight line between a literary classic and a new, 21st century story.

Nick Willing, who both writes and directs "Alice," found himself on a journey through his own Wonderland, discovering things about himself that no other project had exposed before.

"I found myself in this story more than any other thing I've written," Willing recently told reporters, including Airlock Alpha. "I used parts of myself that I've never used before, if you know what I mean. But one of the driving factors in writing it was in truing to make it as psychological as possible."

The book, Willing said, is simply about a girl who falls into her unconscious. And although the story was written in 1860, the concepts themselves were very much ahead of their time.

"It was an incredibly modern and exciting ... idea to have because the unconscious is still something that was being discovered, if you will, then," Willing said. "If we accept that the unconscious is a place in my dreams where we can work out problems that we have in our lives, then let us make this world or events incredibly psychological and helpful to [Alice] in discovering what she needs to discover in order to flourish and become [a] full and complete person."

Probably the biggest mind game in the book was that of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.

"I always thought Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum as torturous of her," Willing said. "I felt that they were like, you know, nasty little school boys who wants to pull the wings off flies and torture little girls. And that's the opportunity they got for Alice."

The twins show up in the Syfy production, but literally as torturers, putting Alice through some amazing mind games that will have even the viewer questioning reality."

Once the story was done, the next difficult thing was finding Alice. Willing auditioned some 500 actresses for the role throughout the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Among all those talented actresses, Willing found Caterina Scorsone, who was once a recurring actress in the "Goosebumps" series and recently had a guest spot in the ABC series "Castle."

"I read the script in one sitting, and it's quite a long script," Scorsone said. "But it was a page-turner. And I just couldn't believe it. It just came off the page so easily. You could kind of really imagine yourself having the adventures just reading it. So that was great."

That script will finally come to the Syfy screen Dec. 6 in a two-night event, but once the story was written and the star was found, the work wasn't quite finished. Now Willing and his crew had to create their own Wonderland, and make it different from any incarnation seen before.

"It was really getting the design concept right, a look a the film, getting the tone of the film both visually, you know, in costume and in the set," Willing said. "The first thing that tickled my fancy was the idea of imagining Wonderland as it is today: 150 years on from the original. And I thought, 'Wouldn't it be delicious to imagine a world in the way that we have evolved [and] also changed? And how would it be today?"

Some of the ideas were that Wonderland would have similar characters, but ones who were different from the original story, and who had grown in their own right.

The Queen of Hearts only grew to be more power hungry and insane, more or less, which both seemed perfect for actress Kathy Bates.

"Kathy Bates was literally my first choice for the role of the Queen of Hearts," Willing said. "She is, to me, one of the most spectacular actresses in the world and I don't know anyone better to play a vicious character with a huge heart."

When Bates was sent the script, Willing received an immediate yes.

"One of the things that we tried to do in our story is find in deep famous characters very three-dimensional, emotional personalities," Willing said. "And the character of the Queen of Hearts in our film is quite a complex person with very complex goals. And so [Bates] was greatly attracted to that."

"Alice" airs Dec. 6 and Dec. 7 beginning at 9 p.m. ET on Syfy.