That Christmas: Filmmaker behind Notting Hill and Love Actually releases new seasonal film on Netflix

Richard Curtis tells Esther McCarthy about his first foray into animation for a film that features a song by Ed Sheeran 
That Christmas: Filmmaker behind Notting Hill and Love Actually releases new seasonal film on Netflix

A scene from That Christmas, currently on Netflix.  

Richard Curtis knows a thing or two about Christmas. As well as his screenplays for classics like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, the British filmmaker is fond of a festive tree or Christmas jumper in his storytelling.

Love Actually has become an annual Yuletide ritual for its devoted fanbase, while Curtis has also written Christmas specials for shows including Black Adder, Mr Bean and The Vicar of Dibley.

When it comes to jingle-bells storytelling, it’s all about the deadline, he says - and Christmas can make the perfect setting when it comes to building drama. “When I wrote Love Actually, we sort of artificially said: ‘You’ve got to sort out your love life by Christmas’,” he says of that movie’s intertwining storylines and characters.

“The more I think about it, I think it's a great narrative deadline, Christmas. I like the deadline. I like the fact that it's a countdown, it's a ticking bomb! And it's also all the characters - it's Avengers, Christmas Celebrants Assemble.” 

Curtis is back on our screens with his latest movie set around - shock and horror - the festive season. Co-written and executive produced by the storyteller, That Christmas is adapted from his own successful series of children’s books. It also marks his first foray into animation which sees him join forces with director Simon Otto, who previously worked on the much-loved How to Train Your Dragon movies. The result is a good-looking animation, blended with the moments of dry wit we’ve come to expect from a Richard Curtis story. The soundtrack includes ‘Under The Tree’, a song by Ed Sheeran and Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid.

 Ed Sheeran, Richard Curtis, and Claudia Jessie at the making of the Under the Tree music video, from the That Christmas soundtrack. 
 Ed Sheeran, Richard Curtis, and Claudia Jessie at the making of the Under the Tree music video, from the That Christmas soundtrack. 

Set in the English town of Wellington-on-Sea, the movie revolves around a series of characters for whom everything that could go wrong over one Christmas does just that. They include two very different twin sisters, a boy who is trying to settle having moved home and to the village, and a blizzard that is the villain of the story, bringing havoc and upending everyone’s best-laid plans.

“One (story) is the group one, which is a bunch of kids wish that Christmas wasn't quite so traditional, and their wish comes true because their parents get stuck in a van on a lake, and they have to celebrate Christmas in their own way,” says Curtis. “That's where the title of the movie comes from, because That Christmas is the one they'll never forget.” 

A star-studded cast including Cork actress Fiona Shaw, Bill Nighy and Jodie Whittaker lend their distinctive voices to proceedings - in a coup for the production, Scottish actor Brian Cox, fresh from his award-winning role in Succession, gets to voice Santa Claus.

When preparing to bring the stories based on his three children’s books with illustrator Rebecca Cobb to the screen for Netflix, Curtis faced the challenge of merging them - a pursuit that turned out to be fun, he says.

“When things are adapted, it's all about what's cut out, whereas actually, we had to double up each of the stories, they needed an extra element. Instead of being able to feel: ‘Well, I've got to protect what I wrote and not mess with it’, I had to expand and develop it. So it's almost like all three of them were the original story and then the sequel I got to do at the same time.

“In a book, you can be relatively one dimensional with people's lives. But in this case - particularly Mrs. Trapper, which is the character played by Fiona Shaw - we had to give her a whole back story. You know, the kids in the original book, Christmas just goes fantastically, whereas in the movie, something goes very badly wrong. So it was actually really fun to be able to take the books and make them better.”

 A painstaking amount of work goes into the process of making animated films, with up to hundreds of people collaborating to create what can often amount to just a few minutes of footage per week. Was that the situation here?

“I'm trying to do the maths, but that's such a fun question,” says Curtis. “I think it's four weeks per minute, that's about what it takes in the end. It's a very long, loving, but ever-developing process. The animation goes from literally line drawings, to a kind of animated thing, which looks like Minecraft, eventually to this really finished version. And then they do beautiful final lighting. I've got this theory now that people in animation are nicer than people in other lines of business, because they've got to get on with each other.”

 “It takes an animator about a week to do three seconds of film, and that's just the character performance,” adds director Simon Otto. “Then you have effects, and that's on the back of storyboarding and editing and sound and so it's this really sort of layered process. An animator takes about one week to do three seconds of film, and in total, I think we peaked at maybe 70, 75 animators.

A scene from That Christmas, on Netflix.  
A scene from That Christmas, on Netflix.  

“The total number of people who worked on the film is in three, four hundreds,” adds Otto of production at its peak. “We had some animators in Mumbai. We had some animators in Montreal. Most of it was done in London.

“What was unusual and also really great for us, is that Richard and [co-writer] Peter Souter were writing the screenplay while we were developing the look and feel of the film and the research we did in Suffolk. So all that coming together was a kind of circular process where we could inspire Richard's script, and Richard's ideas inspired how he would design the characters.”

 For Curtis, who was born in New Zealand and lived in Australia before moving to the UK with his family at the age of 11, it was a particular joy to have the film set in the place he’s made his home. “For me I think the big thing is actually the geography of the movie,” he says. “It’s set in Suffolk, where I've spent every Christmas for the last 30 years. The whole team came up, spent time in the villages and towns near us, got to know all the local geography.

“The thing I love about it is that it's really close to a world that I know and go through every year. And then my brother has twin daughters. The original book was dedicated to them and written just when they were born. It's the most autobiographical movie I've ever done.”

  • That Christmas is now on Netflix

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