Robert Zemeckis has always been accused of being more in love with special effects than he is with character or story, which seems pretty unfair when you consider he's given us the Back To The Future trilogy (1985-'90), Forrest Gump ('94), Cast Away and What Lies Beneath (both 2000).
Sure, studio whizzery has played a strong part in many of Zemeckis' movies, but most of them have been pretty darn entertaining too. Except for Death Becomes Her ('92). And Contact ('97). And the over-rated Who Framed Roger Rabbit ('88).
Oh, and his two latest movies, The Polar Express (2004) and Beowulf ('07), both employing a little patented wonder dubbed motion capture - wherein the actor has all his features and later his performance fed into a computer, to be then manipulated into whatever shape or form, or age, and any location, that Zemeckis so desires.
As anyone who has seen The Polar Express or Beowulf will testify, the results have been pretty spectacular when it comes to the scenery but laughable-verging-on-creepy when it comes to the performances. Everyone has the cold dead eyes of a killer. And they all run like Ronnie Corbett.
Zemeckis is hoping that the world will finally see the light with A Christmas Carol, his no-holds-barred adaptation of the Dickens' classic certainly a perfect vehicle for the filmmaker's latest techno toy. When Ebeneezer Scrooge is magically flown through scenes from his past, present and possible future as his nightmare before Christmas day unfolds, Zemeckis has the freedom to create any kind of wonderworld that his imagination, or Dickens, can muster.
It also means that leading man, Jim Carrey, can play seven different roles, including the three ghost chaperones. Gary Oldman, meanwhile, gets to play not only Scrooge's old partner and his loyal employee, Marley and Cratchit respectively, but also the latter's ailing son, Tiny Tim.
Beyond the carefully constructed Scrooge though, everyone else in A Christmas Carol looks like they've just come straight from the hospital after some extensive facial reconstruction.
When Paul Byrne caught up with Zemeckis in LA recently, he was surprisingly frank about his PR struggles for motion capture. Surprising, because Disney had warned us that he didn't want to talk about anything but A Christmas Carol. And he didn't want to talk about the technological aspect.
PAUL BYRNE: Always risky, taking on a literary classic...
ROBERT ZEMECKIS: Well, I'm a huge Dickens fan, and I didn't really realise this until I immersed myself in this book, but he's an amazing cinematic writer. A hundred years before cinema was invented, he was writing his novels like screenplays. That's why they're so compelling, I think. He always wanted to be an actor – he was an actor, actually; he performed. But I think he just had this instinct to write in scenes, and he wrote cinematically. It's really fascinating.
Dickens wasn't crazy about America, so, I'm not sure he would approve of a guy from Chicago adapting his work – especially with the word 'Disney's' splashed before the title of his 1843 novella...
This thing of putting about putting the Disney name on there – what the Disney name should mean to everyone is quality. It's kinda like, when you think of Disneyland, you don't just think of the teacup ride. You've got Space Mountain, you've got The Haunted Mansion, you've got Pirates Of The Caribbean. I believe that this movie was made in the tradition of Walt Disney. You've got to be true to the material, and presenting tension, presenting suspense, they're all dramatic tools, and it's what Dickens did in the novel. And that's what I think we did. And that was really the extent of the discussion.
And there are no half-measures here – you seem to be aiming for the definitive version. Which must have been a hard day's night for you too – the shoot started in February of last year...
Oh, yeah, it was a long journey, but you get to do it in your sandals. You don't have to be out in the middle of a jungle somewhere. So, you get to do it inside, you get to shoot it in your facility, but it is a lot of work. A lot of back-breaking work.
How many days did you shoot with Jim?
With Jim? Twenty-eight days.
Do you think performance capture will open the gates to adapting other classic novels where scale and scope would have defeated Hollywood in the past?
Yeah – think of Moby Dick, or Mutiny On The Bounty, or any of these. You've touched on on something that I believe; it's a way to present classics to a new generation of audience, because you can do it in a way that's a visual feast, and why not? Because, otherwise, the classics are relegated to Masterpiece Theatre. So, this gives you a way to do it on the big screen again. You could invite whole new generations to appreciate them. I think you're right about that.
You stuck with the Dickensian language here too, rather than trying to tailor it for your average American teen...
Yeah, I thought that would be a mistake to do that; that would be just awful, to try and modernise the language, to some extent. Again, the only difference that I did, was that I thought the actual poetry of the way Dickens wrote it, and the actual tone had to be kept, but if you read Dickens' dialogue, it's a lot longer. People spoke... They were more winded, because it was meant to be read - people don't speak that way. That was the main adaptation. People would speak in soliloquies. And then you had to make it seem like it was normal conversation, but keep the correct tone. There wasn't that much of it; a lot of times it felt like people spoke two sentences too long – that was the kind of thing you had to try and keep shorter...
Was it an easy decision, giving Jim seven characters to play?
Well, the Jim character was a creative decision, because we had the ability for the same actor to play different ages, so, why not do that? It makes perfect sense. The ghosts, I always thought, were extensions of Scrooge's alter-egos. Let's assume that this is just a bad dream that he's having; how would he see these ghosts? He might see a lot of himself in there. It's his ego – it's his alter-ego.
So, that was a creative decision, and Jim just loved that idea. As he said that he's got a lot of characters in his head at all times anyway, so he might as well be able to put them out there. And to be able to attract actors of a high calibre, like Bob Hoskins, Gary Oldman... For Bob to come out from London to do the movie, or for Gary to come all the way out, you say to them, 'Well, why not play Cratchit and Marley?', and then you get a great actor who gets excited and says, 'Yes! Okay, great - I'll do both!'. As a filmmaker, that's great, because now I've got a really high-calibre actor doing all these different roles.
This is a book that's been adapted again and again – what do you think the big attraction is about this tale of redemption?
Well, it's universal, all through time. That's what we love. We're all on the same journey; that's the human journey. We're all trying to be redeemed. Subconsiously, that's the hero's journey, that's our purpose in life. This has been the cornerstone of Western storytelling all through time. That's why we love it; we can all identify with it.
You've changed the name of motion capture to performance capture, which reflects the PR struggles you're having with this technology – there are those who just won't accept this kind of manipulation of actors on screen...
Well, don't forget that back in 1926 there were a lot of film scholars who said that no one wanted to hear what a film actor's voice sounds like. There was a lot of debate about that. 'We don't want to hear these actors talking!?' If you go back and read film history, that's exactly what they were saying.
Well, they knew that it would all lead to Rob Schneider...
[Laughs] Look, here's the thing – whenever a new technology is introduced anywhere in the world, it's greeted by fear. It's human nature. People always fear something new. It's always been that way, and that's what we're up against. Look, doing these interviews for thirty years, and no one has ever asked me what my microphone is. Never once. That's a major piece of technology. No one ever has ever sat across from me and asked, 'Did you record those actor's voices in analogue or digital?'. Do you even know that a filmmaker has to make a choice like this? See? It's like, no one talks about that anymore, and that's what's going to happen to this.
This technology gives you the freedom to have, if you so wish, a whale go through the eye of a needle and mount a fly – anything you want, you can have up there on screen. Which is its own little cage, because you now have to make decisions based entirely on your artistic ability, rather than being limited by what you can physically do with a DeLorean...
Right. It's a trade-off, so, hopefully, if you want to be a glass-half-full guy, the good news is, we'll get back to the basics of storytelling – which is character and story. Because the imagery will be blase to everyone, because everybody knows that we can do anything. So now, entertain me! The images aren't going to entertain me for the sake of themselves, so, entertain me with the basics.
So, basically, what this really does is it re-empowers the writer. Because now you're writing with images. And I think that's what everyone is responding to with this movie. Anyone who's ever read Dickens' book sees how surreal and how magnificently visual the story was, and it's never really been right in the other 25 adaptations that have been made. So, now you've got to go back to the writing – so, I look at it as good news. Because we'll get this visual effects thing out of system once and for all, and it'll be a level playing field. Now, the bad news for filmmakers is, you all will expect all the imagery to be perfect at all times. There is no excuse. Think about these kids in film school – what a burden that is?
Would you make Forrest Gump any differently today, given this new technology?
No, I don't see anything in Forrest... Actually, I could really do the historical footage perfectly. Kennedy would have been perfect, Johnson would have been perfect. When you look at that movie, it's very quaint, and I would be able to do incredibly elaborate scenes. I wouldn't be limited to extracting footage out of old news reels. I could have Forrest walk into the men's room at the White House and have Kennedy peeing in the urinal beside him. I could have done that.
In fifty years time, some young shark will be remaking Forrest Gump that way, so, you can leave some notes for him..
[Laughs] Yeah, that's right, that's right...
Is it easier to work with actors when they're 'virtual puppets'?
Well, easy sounds like a, em, a negative word. It's liberating. The answer is yes, because I can work with the actor, and only have to worry about his performance. I'm not encumbered by any lights, camera, marks – it's like doing black box theatre with my cast. So, my cast, my actors, we do the scene, and if the actor says after we've done it three times, and he wants to enter the scene from a different angle, it's fine. I don't have to pull my hair out because the actor wants to try something different. It's very freeing, because we can do everything that we want.
Here's the thing that happens most of the time, when you're doing a traditional 2D movie. You're on the set, and you're on take 2 or 3, and the actor does something that is just magnificent. It comes out of nowhere. It's magic, right. And you go, 'Oh, my God, that was wonderful – cut! That was great!'.
And then the camera man says, 'It was out of focus. We didn't get it'. And then you want to kill yourself. And then the actor tries to get it back, they try to get it back, and it's never as great. So, what happens constantly in 2D movies is that you've got the collision of technique and performance that are always compromising each other. This finally liberates the filmmaker because whatever the actor does, you've got it, it never changes, it never goes away, it's always there. And then I can, at my leisure, put in the cinema, exactly the way I want it. But the performance of the actor, the magic of the actor, is always there, and I don't beat him up with my technique.
Given your dislike of idiot camera men...
It's not their fault – it's 100 year-old technology to capture images. Think about that. Nothing else – look at this thing [points to digital voice recorder] – nothing else that we use today is 100 years old, except movie cameras. But, go ahead...
Is live action no longer that strong an attraction for you, given the freedom performance capture gives you?
Well, that would be the technology wagging the dog. Look, this is very expensive right now. So, you have to have a very, very accessible story that's going to lend itself to the big screen. If I fall in love with a story that's small and intimate, it's irresponsible to make it in this form. I would have to make it in a responsible form. So, you have to look at 3D in the way we look at widescreen. A filmmaker makes a creative choice – 'Should this movie be widescreen, or should this movie be 1:85?”. Every filmmaker does this on day one. So, this is just a bigger version of that decision. Should this film be 2D, or should this film be 3D? Well, it depends on the story.
Interview Continued On Page 2