“I’ve reached a point in my career where I only want to work with nice people,” says UK film stalwart Richard Curtis of That Christmas, his first animation feature project.
Curtis adapted his own trio of festive books – one of which is called That Christmas – for the film, with Peter Souter co-writing the screenplay. Simon Otto, head of character animation on the three How To Train Your Dragon films, makes his feature directing debut here. “Simon has done work that is human in outrageous situations,” says Curtis. For this film, “I required being human, touching, personal and intimate in a very human situation. And Simon is officially nice.”
The three intertwined tales in That Christmas’ follow a young boy enduring a lonely Christmas when his mother has to work; twin sisters with distinct personalities that may affect their gifts from Santa; and a group of children left to their own devices on Christmas Day when their parents get stuck in the snow. With a voice cast including Brian Cox as Santa, Jodie Whittaker, Fiona Shaw and regular Curtis collaborator Bill Nighy, it is the second feature from UK studio Locksmith Animation, after 2021’s Ron’s Gone Wrong. Netflix boarded worldwide rights in 2022, with the film debuting at BFI London Film Festival in October this year before an awards-qualifying cinema release ahead of a streaming launch on December 4.
Seven years ago, Curtis’ Comic Relief producer Colin Hopkins suggested tying the three books into one feature. “It was such a lovely idea,” says Curtis. “Suddenly there was the possibility of an animated movie in an area where I would have some of the skills – particularly the interweaving stories, because of all the lessons I learnt on Love Actually.”
Known for writing romantic comedies including Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill, Curtis’ first foray into animation writing proved trickier than he expected. “You see, ‘Here’s a complicated section. At that speed it’s going to require three more visual jokes’,” says Curtis. That was exacerbated by the multiple storylines, which Otto describes as “absolutely unusual in animation”.
“Animation is instantly so many characters you have to set apart,” says the director. “You have to make them idiosyncratic. Richard’s experience of having edited multi-threaded storylines made it a win-win.”
That Christmas includes a couple of cheeky nods to Love Actually, 21 years after Curtis’ holiday classic was released. “I’ve often wondered, ‘Why do people watch Love Actually?’, and I think the answer is that even I have no idea what scene is coming next,” says Curtis. “I’ve got the original shooting script – it’s in a completely different order to the film. The edit was like a game of 3D chess. So I took some of that wisdom into the writing of the That Christmas script with Peter. We worked as hard as possible to get a script that everybody completely agreed on; then spent the next two years rewriting, deconstructing, reordering it.”
Moving into the director’s chair, Otto used lessons learnt from previous collaborators including How To Train Your Dragon director Chris Sanders. “Don’t be a ‘directing animator’ going in and making sure every little detail is correct,” says Otto. “Help animators understand the characters; but let them do their thing. They brought so many ideas to That Christmas that I wouldn’t have come up with.”
Love Actually is regularly rewatched and reevaluated, and plays successfully in UK and Ireland cinemas every December, grossing £1.35m ($1.69m) combined for reruns in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, for example. “When I watch my old films, there are some things I would not write today,” admits Curtis.
“I suspect that won’t be true of this one,” he says. “We’ve dodged the culture wars bullet on this. Even the concept of ‘naughty’ and ‘nice’ is a controversial one – you don’t have naughty children and nice children, you have children who are not fully understood and therefore behave in a certain way; and children who may be nice because they’re nervous and afraid. You’re pushed into modernity – I only see it as a good thing.”
Family has taken precedence over romance in his stories. “I was still writing about people falling in love for the first time, 10 years after I’d fallen in love for the last time. The big thing in my life for the last 25 years has been family; so that was the thing I was most interested in writing about.”
Looking ahead, Otto has “some ideas that I’m poking around”, but currently feels “like a deep-sea diver that has to find a place where you can decompress”.
Curtis says he is “trying only to do new things.” He says he “always talks” to Working Title heads Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, and that he brought Four Weddings… producer Duncan Kenworthy to an early That Christmas screening; but has no specific new projects in the works with them or others.
“I think I’m just hanging around from Christmas to Christmas.”
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