It’s often said that movie trailers represent not necessarily the tone and spirit of the movie, but rather the tone and spirit the moneymen wish the director had brought. Despite what you may have inferred from the inescapable trailer for Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol, the film is not a showcase for the mugging, pratfalling, and backside-talking antics of Jim Carrey. Nor is it a glorified theme park ride, although the 3D, computer animated film does make time for several outsized action sequences. The surprise in Zemeckis’ film is that it sticks relatively close to Charles Dickens’ brooding atmosphere, from the memories of Scrooge’s failed marriage, the deeply cruel visions presented by the Ghost of Christmas Future, and even the dark, dingy London interiors, made even darker and dingier by 3D glasses.
“For some reason, past versions of the story have not delved into the idea that Dickens had great tension and suspense in the way he wrote it,” says Zemeckis (Forest Gump, Back to the Future) in a conference call. “And that seems to have been watered down in all these other versions. Y’know, that kind of feeling of foreboding and that feeling of dread you have in the first half of that story I think has been missing. I feel very strongly that you have to have the dark before you have the light.”
Zemeckis, who also wrote the screenplay, calls Dickens one of the greatest writers of all time and A Christmas Carol one of the greatest stories of all time. Hearing him talk about his adaptation, this does not sound like hot air. “It’s a timeless story that is rooted in Scrooge’s character, his character development, and his story of redemption, so we had to be true to that. The other thing I did which made everyone very nervous at the studio, but it couldn’t work any other possible way, is I have everybody speaking in the language of the time, the way Dickens wrote, which I think is beautiful. So we kept all that, and we basically kept the tone that Dickens wrote in the original piece.”
Following The Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf (2007), A Christmas Carol is Zemeckis’ third film using the image capture technology—not universally beloved, but with some of the flaws ironed out. How does it work, you ask? Well, our man on the inside is happy to walk you through the process. “The actors 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 bodies. We have a new rig of cameras that capture their facial movement, and those are actual high-def cameras that run at 60 frames a second, so every pore, every crease, their tongue, their retina, their eyelids, everything becomes a marker, and these cameras record everything that their face does.”
“So what happens is the actor steps in this volume and his entire body, face, everything he does is recorded in three dimensions, all the time. Of course, the sound is perfect because the microphone is put wherever you need it, and that’s invisible because it has no marker on it. And so the actors do a scene from beginning to end interact with each other, pace the scene. They don’t worry about camera marks, lighting marks, anything like that, they just do the scene. We take that information […] and we basically wrap a digital skin, digital hair, digital costume around that performance. Then we take that character and put it in a digital environment.”
Which is how the 47-year-old Jim Carrey can play the 80-ish Scrooge. He may not appear an ideal Scrooge, but for Zemeckis the Dickensian scholar, he was the first and only choice. “I knew that you needed someone who had a magnificent sense of humour and a great ability to do drama to really make Scrooge as mean as Dickens actually wrote him.”
A Christmas Carol is in theatres
