How did you come to be involved withThe Man Who Invented Christmas? Was it a body of work that you had known about and working to develop, or were you approached by someone to do it? A Christmas Carol has always been really important
to me, I came across it when I was 12 and it kind of invented Christmas for me. I come from a family that didn’t really celebrate Christmas and yet I was surrounded by all these people in the north of England, who were having a great old time and I wondered what it was all about. I came across this great book [A Christmas Carol] in the library, read it and I finally understood what everybody is getting into. It really introduced me to Dickens, who I think is an incredibly important character in terms of literature, in terms of politics and in terms of social change. He was an extraordinary personality and I’ve loved his books and in particular,A Christmas Carol. It’s been done in so many ways and is at the core of
most great Christmas films and all those films about redemption, like Scrooged. EvenGroundhog’s Day, which is a very populist film, which I love, but at its heart, it’sA Christmas Carol. A man revisits himself, all on the same day, but he basically changes himself and becomes a different person, a better person. So, because of the connection I mentioned earlier, I’ve been trying to find a new way into telling this story. Some producers heard that I was interested and approached me with the script forThe Man Who Invented Christmas and told me, “We’ve got a really clever way of getting into Dickens andA Christmas Carol that’s really fun and engaging. Would you be interested?” They sent me the script, a work of genius, really, Susan Coyne’s script is such a perfect script. I’m always interested in how the process of adapting a book works. Is it more of a challenge than coming up with something original? It has its advantages and its disadvantages. In this
case, there is a book calledThe Man Who Invented Christmas, the original has a much longer title, that’s a wonderful fact-based book around the period when Dickens was trying to write his book. His world, the people who were around him and what did and didn’t influence him…and Susan Coyne just ran with that. She came up with this kind of joyous movie in which Dickens is visited by all of his characters and he is lead through his own life and asked to redeem himself. It’s a mirroring of AChristmas Carol and Dickens’ life and was a bit of genius that Susan had.
DECEMBER 2017 | RAGE monthly DECEMBER 2017 |
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