Christmas comes early

'A Christmas Carol' is one of the best-known and best-loved stories in the English language. Written by Charles Dickens in 1843, it tells the tale of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of the holiday season by a parade of ghostly visitors.

Given its potent blend of fantasy, humour, spine-tingling spookiness and unabashed emotion, it's no surprise that 'A Christmas Carol' has been catnip to filmmakers as long as films have been made, and there have been literally dozens of cinematic adaptations of the story.

The latest one comes from director Robert Zemeckis; features a starry cast that includes Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Robin Wright Penn and Bob Hoskins; and employs the state-of-the-art technique of 3D performance capture.

Zemeckis is well known for his embrace of game-changing technology — witness such innovative films as 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?', 'Back to the Future', 'Forrest Gump', 'The Polar Express' and 'Beowulf' — but insists that with 'A Christmas Carol' he never strayed from his aim of making a film that would be true to Charles Dickens' original vision.

"Technology should serve the story, not the other way round," the director says, "but what's remarkable when you read 'A Christmas Carol' is that it's as if Charles Dickens wrote this story to be a movie. It's so visual and cinematic and I wanted to use the latest technology to tell the story the way I think Dickens must have seen it in his mind's eye."

'A Christmas Carol' was first published nearly 170 years ago. Why do you think it was instantly popular and still connects with people today?
When I first read 'A Christmas Carol' when I was young the thing that impressed me was the time travel element and the macabre images of ghosts and just how suspenseful it was. But it's also an amazing and beautiful human story of redemption and that, of course, is universal and timeless. It still has something to say to us.

Given how many previous film versions of 'A Christmas Carol' there have been, what made you think there was room for one more?
For one thing, I think a great story can be told and retold in any number of different ways. What also made this the right moment for a new version is that until now we've just not had the cinematic tools to actually present the story the way it's written. It really is amazing how filmic Charles Dickens' imagination is even though he was writing so long before cinema was invented. To give you an example, in nearly every film of 'A Christmas Carol' the Ghost of Christmas Past is played by a woman in a white wedding dress or with a sheet over her head. But you read the story and the Ghost of Christmas Past has a jet of light streaming from her head. The great thrill for me was having the tools to do justice to what Dickens wrote and put all these surreal and fantastic images up there on screen.

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