Director Zemeckis discusses bringing 'Christmas Carol' to life in 3-D

Robert Zemeckis, director of “Forrest Gump” and “Back to the Future,” retells Charles Dickens’ holiday classic in Disney’s “A Christmas Carol,” which will be released Nov. 6 in Disney Digital 3-D. Jim Carrey stars as Ebenezer Scrooge and Gary Oldman as Bob Cratchit. Zemeckis is featuring Carrey much in the same way he featured Tom Hanks in “The Polar Express” (both play multiple characters in their respective films). The State News took part in a conference call with the Academy Award-winning filmmaker, who discussed his upcoming film.
 
Question What inspired you to follow up the 3-D “Beowulf” with “A Christmas Carol”? Why Dickens?

Answer 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 moviegoers, because what you can do is you can create a version of the story which is visually modern. Many of these classic stories have great spectacle in them, which in a strange way makes them difficult to do for the big screen, so in a way they’re sort of relegated to “Masterpiece Theater” and that sort of thing. In the case of “A Christmas Carol,” you get a chance to realize the story in a very spectacular and surreal way that Dickens wrote it. It’s obviously a very familiar title and it’s a great story to be told in cinema.
 
Q How does Jim Carrey use different dialects with his characters?

A For each of the ghosts that he portrays he came up with a different dialect. The Ghost of Christmas Past is Irish, the Ghost of Christmas Present is sort of Scottish, and Scrooge is the Queen’s English.
 
Q Do you feel there is anything from Dickens’ story that you feel has been overlooked by past filmmakers that you highlight in this version of the story?

A 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. That seems to have been watered down in all of these other versions. That feeling of foreboding and feeling of dread that you have in the first half of that story has been missing a lot. So, I thought that that was really important because you have to understand that Scrooge basically has this wild nightmare. I really feel strongly that you have to have the dark before you can have the light.
 
Q Tell me more about the casting process. Was Jim Carrey always someone who was high on the list?

A When I write I try very hard not to think of an actor because I don’t want to start writing in a specific voice of an actor so I just think of characters as shadows as I’m writing. When I finished, Jim was my first and only choice because I knew you needed someone who had 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.
 
Q What do you want people to take away from your new take on a holiday classic?

A 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 go, “Oh I didn’t know it had all of this in there.” So, that I think is what I’d 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, which would be a nice thing.