What form will the wonder.land visuals take?
It’s a really interesting thing to be working on, because everybody has done a Wonderland. We did a lot of research looking at all the different visual approaches and it’s just extraordinary. Some of my favourites are the ones that Dali did – his caterpillar, dreaming of the butterfly, was a particular inspiration – and the Jan Švankmajer film, because it’s so incredibly terrifying. There’s a very difficult balance between making something of our own but that is still absolutely recognisable as Wonderland.

What’s unique about your version?
For me, the split between the real world and wonder.land has become very much a cityscape versus a natural-world depiction. The wonder.land is the garden we’re exploring as a strange biological landscape. We’re looking at patterns of networks and shapes and textures that speak to you as biological things without you necessarily being able to identify what they are, such as single-celled organisms and amoeba and the structures in coral reefs. We’re trying to build a world that is both biological and also part of the digital world. The other thing is working with Katrina Lindsay, the costume designer and Rae Smith, the set designer, to create creatures that can exist simultaneously in a projected world and onstage. So we’ll have some characters which can hopefully walk across stage flicking between the two worlds.

For your version of the Cheshire Cat, did you look at Louis Wain, painter of terrifying felines?
We did! They start as quite boring pictures and turn into something really amazing and abstract. The cat is such an inscrutable character; you’re never quite sure whether he’s a source for good or evil. But we also look at the cat as a kind of godlike creature, who is omnipresent and inhabits whatever environment we seem to be in.

Did any existing computer games particularly inspire you?
The Stanley Parable was a game that’s always inspired me, because it’s so theatrical and it takes a reflective look at the action of gaming. Also there’s so many Alice in Wonderland games – we found at least half a dozen. Particularly the Alice in the asylum who’s having serious problems in her straitjacket. We were trying to build worlds which don’t make physical sense but can work in a computer game. So we were looking a lot at a game called Monument Valley. That was a great reference – it’s very fairytale, very Alice in Wonderland, and clearly Escher-inspired, with lots of impossible mathematical shapes.

Will you be making any technological innovations?
We’ll be using quite a lot of motion-capture, which is quite new and novel in a theatrical environment, if not in a film-making one. Because there are going to be moments where the actor onstage interacts with a projected character, we’re going to have a motion-capture suit in the rehearsal room and have the scene played out between the two actors. At the other end of the spectrum, we’re building the real world as a scale model out of cardboard and paint and analogue, real-world things, which we’ll then be filming and projecting as the backdrop. So there’s a mixture between the analogue and the digital approaches, which willhopefully make those two worlds feel very distinct.

• wonder.land is at Palace theatre, Manchester, 29 June-12 July. Box office: 0844 871 7654. Then transfers to the National theatre, London in November.