(This interview was originally published in the November 9, 2009 issue of Broadside, though most of it had to be cut due to space constraints. This is the unedited interview.)Beginning with The Polar Express and Beowulf, award winning director Robert Zemeckis has become the pioneer for motion capture technology, a technology that allows the performers’ movements to be captured and reproduced digitally, and his latest visual darling is the Jim Carrey starring A Christmas Carol. Broadside recently chatted with Zemeckis on the look and feel of his new film, the challenges of getting it done, and what new elements he hopes to bring to the timeless story.
What inspired you to follow-up Beowulf with A Christmas Carol? Why Dickens’ Christmas Carol and not another story?
When I was doing Beowulf, I realized that this is a great form to reintroduce classic stories in a new way to a new generation of movie-goers because what you can do is you can create a version of the story which is visually modern and separate it out from what would have to be, and many of these classic stories have great spectacle in them which makes them, in a strange way, makes them difficult to do for the big screen so they are sort of relegated to masterpiece theater and that sort of thing. So you get a chance to really, in the case of A Christmas Carol, get a chance to realize the story in a very spectacular and surreal way that Dickens wrote it. So anyway, obviously it’s a very familiar title and it’s a great story to be told in cinema and all those things sort of added up and the idea came, so I thought, why not give this a try?
A Christmas Carol is a timeless story. How do you balance the dual problem of adhering to a very traditional story, but also creating a piece that is fresh, new and exciting?
Well, of course, that was a challenge and that was the reason that we did it, which is to attack that problem head on and say, okay we are going to be extremely true to the underlying material and we aren’t going to tinker with it too much, although we do a little bit. We provide some action at the end to get Scrooge from place to place. But we really are going to distill this down to making sure that all the elements, the fact that it’s a timeless story, is rooted in Scrooge’s character and his character change and character development and his story of redemption. We have to be true to that. The other thing, of course, that I did which made everyone very nervous at the studio, but I don’t think it could work in any other possible way, is that I had everyone speaking in the language of the time, the way Dickens wrote it, which I think is beautiful. So we kept all that and we basically kept the tone that Dickens wrote in the original piece.
Do you want to explain how Jim Carrey uses different dialects for his different characters?
When I said the language, I meant the way in the old English, Victorian English that the novel was written in, but yes, Jim also, for each of the ghosts that he portrays, he came up with a different dialect. The ghost of Christmas past is Irish and the ghost of Christmas present is sort of Scottish and Scrooge is, you know, the Queen’s English.
Is there anything in the Dickens story that you feel has been overlooked by past filmmakers that you highlight in your version of the story?
For some reason, you know, for some reason, past versions of the story have not delved into the idea that Dickens had great tension and great suspense in the story, the way he wrote it, and that seems to have been watered down in all these other versions. That feeling of foreboding and that feeling of dread that you have in the first half of that story I think has been missing a lot, so I thought that was really important because you have to understand that Scrooge basically has this wild nightmare. I really feel very strongly that you have to have the dark before you can have the light. That was something that I really wanted to present in the way that I think Dickens wrote it. And the other thing that is amazing that I realized about Dickens that I hadn’t realized before I started adapting this was how cinematic he wrote. He wrote very filmically 100 years before the invention of movies. It’s really amazing when you read his work. He writes in scenes.
Regarding the character of Scrooge, how do you view him? Is he a good man who needs to discover his past humanity or is he fundamentally a bad natured man who needs to learn to be decent?
Well that’s a great question. Of course, he’s a man who has been…he was abused and he is filled with fear and the way he protects himself from having to feel that fear is misguidedly feeling that he needs to collect material things to guard against. And there’s a line in the novel, we have it in the movie, where Bell says, “You fear the world too much Ebenezer.” And that I think is key to his character when he goes back in time, so what he needs to do is he needs to have a sort of, I’m going to use this term very loosely, a spiritual awakening, which is to understand that those childhood fears which have been basically pounded into him, he can deal with and he can go on and he can alter the course of his life. That’s a universal story, so to answer your question specifically, he’s not a bad man. He’s just a man who doesn’t know what to do with his, how should I say this, his scarred past. And I think that’s why it’s a timeless story and that’s why it’s such a great story and why we can all relate to that story so well.
How do you see the 3D aspects of the movie as aiding in the telling of the story?
Well, it aides in telling of the story in the intellectual sense. Obviously, the images don’t do that, even an old black and white movie isn’t going to do that. But aiding in telling the story from an emotional standpoint, the 3D is a storytelling element just like the music is. You have the underlying intellectual material that is what Mr. Dickens wrote and then you embellish it with performance and you embellish it with color and you embellish it now with immersive 3D image. So what that does for the audience is it gives them another emotional handle on the story. It presents it in an emotional way. So what we’ve been able to do is we’ve been able to immerse the audience in Dicksonian London.
How involved were you in the casting process? Was Jim Carrey someone who was always high on the list?
Well, obviously I cast every single actor in the movie and when I write, I try very hard not to think of an actor because I don’t want to start writing in the voice of a specific actor so I just think of characters as shadows when I’m writing. But when I finished, Jim was my first and only choice because I knew that you needed someone who needed a magnificent sense of humor and a great ability to do drama to really make Scrooge as mean as Dickens actually wrote him and as we adapted him in the screenplay. And then I felt that I got a great actor who can do any kind of character, so it was the logical extension in my mind that let’s say, Scrooge is having this nightmare, these ghosts would be an extension of his alter ego. They would be his alter ego. So there could be some of Scrooge in each of the ghosts so I said to Jim, “Hey, why don’t you also do all the ghosts?” and he said, “Oh man I love that idea.” And the challenge there of course was that he had to do scenes with himself, but he’s such a great actor it wasn’t really a problem. So that was the casting process.
What was the process like when Jim had to play a scene against himself?
Well, what you do is you put in a stand-in actor. Cary Elwes, who is a great actor in his own right, was gracious enough to volunteer to be on the receiving end of Jim when we did all the scenes so when Jim was Scrooge, Cary would do a ghost and when Jim was a ghost, Cary would do Scrooge. Having a really great actor who was able to watch Jim and basically memorize the way he was doing one or the other side of a character and bringing back in the timing that we needed was really crucial, so that’s basically how we did it. And it was great because Jim when he was playing Scrooge would say, “Now listen, when I’m the ghost, I’m thinking I want to do this, this, this, this and this,” and Cary would do his version of it and Jim would react as Scrooge, then Jim would go back and do the ghost and Cary would do that reaction as Scrooge and it turned out to be, in my opinion, a tour de force performance.
Jim Carrey is known to improv a lot. With a traditional storyline like A Christmas Carol, was that ever an issue in the process?
Well, Jim can do anything. He can do improv and he can do stand up and he can do anything. This role called for it to be very much a straight forward dramatic performance and nobody was going to tamper with Mr. Dickens. You’re not going to improv Dickens. Jim would come up with slang terms that he would research. He would come up with little things that are in between the lines a little bit, like exclamations and things like that that he would come up with. Where most of his improv came was by doing physical things, doing things that just gave Scrooge this magnificent characterization. The thing that is amazing about Jim is that when he acts, he acts with every muscle in his body. His whole body transforms into Scrooge; his movement, his fingertips, everything becomes Scrooge. Yes, there was some improv, but I would say mostly it would be in the way he would use his physicality and body language to present Scrooge rather than to change any of the dialogue.
As a director, when you’re working with your actors, how do you get them comfortable working with the technology necessary to make a film like A Christmas Carol?
Well, first of all, you walk them through it very thoroughly and you walk them through it very, very extensively, you know, slowly and thoroughly and you explain it as much as you can. It’s really interesting, no matter how much I try to explain to them what the experience is going to be like, it’s impossible to imagine until they do it. The thing that weirds them out the most is having to put the leotard on, but then what happens, and this has happened, you can look at the list of actors that I’ve worked with in this process—Tom Hanks, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Gary Oldman, Jim Carrey, I mean, great actors—what happens and why they all immediately fall in love with it after the first hour of working in this process is they very quickly understand it’s all about performance. You get to see this wonderful revelation that happens. It’s like, “Oh man, this is just about my performance. My performance is everything here. I don’t have to fumble with a costume. I don’t hide behind a costume. I don’t hide behind a beard. I don’t have make-up.” It’s all pure. It becomes this amazingly exciting thing that happens because it’s just about the way they—it’s like doing black box theater, where you have minimal props, no sets, no lighting, no costume and you create scenes and that’s what we do. It’s really powerful and it’s a lot of fun. The other thing that they love about working in the process is that they get to act all day long and it’s not chopped up into traditional movie coverage. On a typical movie, an actor, in the 12 hours that he’s on the set, works maybe 20 minutes. In this process, they work all day long and they act all day, so they love it.
Do you want to explain a little bit about how there’s literally no camera in the space?
Right, there’s no cameras in the space. This is difficult to describe in any circumstances. It’s going to be really difficult on the phone. The actors work in a volume of infrared light and they are surrounded by receptors which, for lack of a better word, are cameras that record digital information that comes off their sensors which we strategically place where all their joints are in their body and of course we have a new rig of cameras that capture their facial movement. Those are actually hi-def cameras that run at 60 frames a second. So every pore, every crease, their tongue, their retina, their eyelids, everything becomes a marker. So every pore in their face becomes a marker and these cameras record everything their face does. So there are no cameras in the traditional sense. All of the cameras are virtual. So what happens is that the actor steps in this volume and his entire body, face, everything that he does, is recorded in three dimensions all the time. Of course, the sound is perfect because the microphone is put right where you need it because that is invisible because it has no marker on it. And so the actors perform in this volume and it’s the size of a theatrical stage and they do a scene from beginning to end. The actors interact with each other, they pace the scene, they don’t worry about camera marks, lighting marks, anything like that. They just do the scene. When we’re done with that and we all feel like we’ve got the scene, we move on. So what we do is we take that information, that digital performance that’s been burned into the hard drive, and we basically then wrap a digital skin, digital hair, digital costume around that performance and then we take that character and put him into a virtual environment. And then the last thing we do is we put our virtual cameras in and those create ultimately what is your traditional shot from a movie. Does that make any sense?
You have mentioned that A Christmas Carol is possibly one of the greatest time travel stories ever. My generation considers Back to the Future one of the greatest time travel stories ever. What is it about time travel that appeals to you in the stories that you tell?You’ll notice that in the three Back to the Futures, there’s a lot of influence from A Christmas Carol when you look at them. I think I actually have scenes, I think they’re in the second one, and there’s a little bit of it in the third one too, where characters actually confront their grave stones and things like that. When they see what could happen in the future—I think Back to the Future 2 has got a lot of Christmas Carol in it which is one of my most interesting movies. So yes, I know that Christmas Carol is the first time travel story I ever read when I was about seven or eight years old I think. So Christmas Carol very heavily influenced the Back to the Future movies, as did The Time Machine. Back to the Future uses the HG Wells theory of time travel which is you travel through time, not through space. But A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life and all those time travel movies were a big influence on Back to the Future.
Are you a fan of other Charles Dickens books? Do you have any favorite novel?
Well I love A Tale of Two Cities, I love Great Expectations, I love Oliver Twist. Dickens is the greatest writer in the English language, so you know, his stuff is great.
What is the musical score like for this film? Is it anything like The Polar Express?
Similar only that it’s my long time composer, Alan Silvestri who’s doing it. I don’t know, you know, I can always hear—every composer always has his favorite phrases that he always has, he has his favorite orchestration that he always uses. I hear that all the time, but I think A Christmas Carol is one of the greatest scores, most beautiful scores, that Alan did. We do weave a lot of traditional Christmas music in and out of the score as well, a lot of Christmas medlies. And he wrote a beautiful, original song based on the score that Andrea Bocelli sings. So yes, it’s a great score and it’s very unique nowadays because it’s played with a 102 piece orchestra and a 50 person orchestra. You don’t get that much these days anymore. Everything’s digital [laughs].
What do you want people to take away from your new take on a family holiday classic?
If they can just be reintroduced to this fantastic story. You know, it’s interesting that people we’ve been showing the movie to in the test audience, people think they know the story, but they really don’t. Unless you’re a scholar or a real cinephile and you’ve watched every single version of A Christmas Carol, people think they know the story and they see the movie and they go, “Oh I didn’t know it has all this in there.” So that would be what I would like people to take away. It’s really one of the greatest stories ever written and maybe you might want to go back and read it after you see the movie.
A Christmas Carol seems to wrap up a trilogy of you adapting some of the greatest classic books of all time. Do you have other books in mind that you’d like to bring to the big screen?
Not off the top of my head, but you know, the way I like to define A Christmas Carol, I think A Christmas Carol is one of the classic books that has such scale and such scope and because it’s so fantastic and it deals in the realms of time travel and ghosts and supernatural and all this great stuff that we never had the cinematic tools to ever present it really as spectacularly as it was written. And I think there are a lot of books out there that were written even before the invention of cinema that are so huge in their scale, they’re such giant sagas, they have giant battles, like Moby Dick with whales or whatever you can imagine. They’ve always been sort of adapted to the screen with limitations and now with the birth of the digital cinema—the thing that I think is one of the most spectactular things that we do in A Christmas Carol is we create London in the 1840’s, but not just a 100 yard façade of sets with wagons going by in the foreground. I mean, you can do anything. It’s painted. It’s digitally painted. And so we no longer have any technical limitations so we can present some of these classic stories in this new breathtaking way.
What were your biggest challenges in making A Christmas Carol?
Well, when we started the movie, we started our own company so we didn’t go to outside vendors to render any of the images, so the biggest challenge, which is basically technical and not that exciting from a filmmaker point of view, was that we had to hire all the artists, we had to build the facility, we had to write our software, we had to stock the place with all our mainframe computers and all that stuff. At the same time we were making the movie. So a lot of people worked a lot of really long hours. That was the biggest challenge, to do both of those things simultaneously.
What advice would you have for aspiring filmmakers?
Write. That’s the advice I give all my inspiring filmmakers. I went to film school at USC and so I’m very connected there and I mentor films there and by the way, USC has the first performance capture curriculum in the world there now. I’ve been asked this question my entire life and that’s the same answer that I give everyone. Write because A) to be a really great filmmaker, you have to know how to do that anyway and B) it really is the ticket in because everyone will be receptive to a great idea and other than that, there’s no pattern. Everybody has their own success story, but the only real thing that is a commonality is to write your way in. That’s the advice that I give to everyone.
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