To make a multi-thread Christmas classic once is a misfortune – to make one twice starts to look like carelessness… We sat down with Richard Curtis to talk That Christmas, and the surprising influences on Love Actually…
In late April – the most festive month of the year, some say – Locksmith Animation was in a state of calm. The Ron’s Gone Wrong studio’s latest film, That Christmas, was in the proverbial can; as the name suggests, it wasn’t due to go before an audience for another six months.
Based on a trio of children’s books by Richard Curtis and illustrator Rebecca Cobb, How To Train Your Dragon alum Simon Otto’s film version was taking its writer back to familiar territory. Not just a new Christmas film, but a multi-thread one, from the man who penned the most-successful example of the genre in Love Actually just over two decades ago.
Surrounded by concept art, illustrations and the quiet hum of an office which had finished all its homework in good time, we sat down with Mr Christmas himself, Richard Curtis, to chat about his new film – and some of his old ones, too…
When did the idea come to turn these three books into a film?
I wrote [the books], I can’t remember, two years apart or something, and I was so bewitched by the illustrations. It was quite an easy job in that I wrote the stories and I liked them, and I rewrote them a lot, but I felt the really beautiful work was what Rebecca [Cobb] did. If I hadn’t loved the way the first one turned out visually, I’m not sure I would have done the second and third ones, but I was just so in love with the way she illustrates them, with the kind of humanity and compassion and tenderness of those original drawings… It’s a bit like being someone who writes lyrics for a great musician. Like Bernie Taupin, you know, you write something that’s okay, and then Elton John turns into something that’s absolutely marvellous.
I was really bewitched by that bit of the process. And then it was my friend, Colin Hopkins, with whom I produced the Comic Relief TV show, who suggested turning these into an animation. His original idea was maybe just do one that was half an hour long or something for TV. And I think it was a conversation with Locksmith that said there might be a possibility of turning it into a film, if you link them all together. And then I thought about that quite hard. I’ve written a multi-thread thing before, in Love Actually, I thought, well, I know it’s doable, even though it’s very complicated.
I’m sure, if you’re adapting a novel, most of what you notice is what is cut – because it’s 400 pages, and you can really only make a film out of 100. [On That Christmas] it was all about expansion. So, you know, we basically doubled each of the stories. We have to give the Mrs. Trapper character, who’s a man in that book, a whole life and a whole story. And that was particularly fun. Rather than thinking all the stuff I liked in the books is gone, it was the opposite. You know, if I rewrote the books now, they’d be twice as long – maybe twice as good.
This is your first time working in animation – what surprised you about the process?
[One thing] which did surprise me is how epic and big animation can be with something tiny. Because in my mind, it was always a series of quite little stories. And we loved that – we loved the fact that it was intimate. But the bigger the movie got and the further we got along in the process… [It was] getting better and better.
I’ve gotten quite taken by how many emotions an animated character can do in how short a time. There were some moments when the mum will say something to dad, and he can look angry, then sad, then hopeful, in literally about a second and a half. I mean, I think it is faster than the human face can do, or definitely more accurate, and it’s so brilliant, the way they really could get every detail.
Rebecca Cobb’s drawings are beautiful, but the finished film is in a very different style – was that a difficult thing to give up?
It was really interesting. I mean, when Colin [Hopkins] first spoke about it, I had in my mind those Christmas Day half hours that are completely accurate – The Snowman and the Alex Scheffler ones, where all they do is exactly reproduce [the illustrations]. But I had a lot of lessons from the team saying, if we did that, you’d also be sacrificing a lot of the detail and the emotion.
So that was a great big leap of faith, but it’s one that I’m slightly used to, because I’m not a very visual writer. Anybody who ever read any of my screenplays would say I don’t really describe anything in the stage directions. I basically see the characters as stick characters, and then the journey towards production is always so exciting for me -they gain their visual dimension [as we go].
I must say, I didn’t feel we were being crushed into anything or aiming for any particular style. I think the films we spoke about most at the beginning were the Charlie Brown films and My Life As A Courgette, which are just completely different movies stylistically to this, but which had these very intense observations about being young and being a child.
What else did you bring from live-action films into this one?
There are no minor characters. I mean, this has been a bit of an obsession of mine, so when I did Four Weddings, Mike Newell was unbelievably thorough in his casting. I know people who work in very different ways with casting, a lot of people cast on instinct and hardly do auditions, whereas Mike used to say that a movie is 60-70% made by the time you finish the auditions – and particularly in this where every character requires so much detail and so much passion. I think I’ve carried that through my movies generally, where we would audition 20 people for the tiniest of roles. And in this, you really see why that is – they’ve got to make a whole character, it’s going to look completely different, move in a completely different way.
[There’s a] lovely drawing where all of the characters are just standing next to each other. I love seeing that and thinking of the work that we put into how she looked, how she dressed, every single one of them. So that was like my normal movies, we do work very hard on making the casting really bright and specific. But I just love the fact that all these the stars of this movie have never existed before.
You mentioned Love Actually – was the multi-thread element a similar writing process this time around?
The reason I wrote Love Actually was because of Short Cuts and Nashville and Smoke and Pulp Fiction. I really love that format. And then I think quite early on, it became clear to me that even though the three stories were never set in the same place I could see that you could have all the kids in the same school, and then head on from there and link them up.
We were kind of prepared for it, because Love Actually was a really interesting experience. I remember the read-through of the script was one of the loveliest afternoons I ever had. It had such a huge cast, and they met together and read the whole thing through, and it seemed like a good film, and then we shot it, and then we watched it, and it was a catastrophe, terrible, because the intertwining is such a complicated bit of mathematics. When I wrote the film, it seemed fine to go with the stories, A-B-C-D, A-B-C-D. Then when you edited the movie, you kind of realized that you had to go A-B-B, B-C-A, you had to keep interested in every story, and sometimes tell a bit more of one than you thought you were going to do originally. In Love Actually, that was all done in the edit – we shot everything and then we fixed it. But of course, animation is so different because the edit, the casting, the directing, the writing, all happen at the same time. You can’t, as we did in Love Actually, make 40 minutes of film that you then throw away. It all had to be incredibly disciplined.
What is it about Christmas that keeps bringing you back?
I have fixed on Christmas as a very emotional family time. I don’t know whether it’s because we travelled a lot when we were young and so, oddly enough, my Christmases have been through different phases. Where I live now, we have a very communal Christmas – about six families all gather for Christmas lunch. But when we were living in Manila and in Sweden and in the north of England, it was only ever me and the family. There was nothing communal, because all our relatives lived back in Australia. So, I don’t know… For some reason, although I’ve always been very sort of emotional about Christmas, and also found Christmas very funny.
I remember one Christmas where we invited two guests up to Warrington. They were 22, and they were traveling Australians, and none of us bought them any presents, because we assumed they wouldn’t be expecting them. And then they arrived in a taxi, and over the back of a taxi, they had these huge gifts [for us]. So, we all had to redistribute our presents. I had to give them a Beatles album, and my mum had to give them a mixer. I got a pencil from my brother that year.
And then when I wrote Love Actually, which only became a Christmas film halfway through the writing of it… I think that time of year is like looking at us under a magnifying glass. Everything that’s sad becomes sadder; everything that’s happy becomes happier.
That Christmas is streaming on Netflix worldwide now.
