Richard Curtis’ new animated Netflix movie That Christmas has more than a little in common with his previous holiday classic Love Actually. While one’s a family-friendly children’s flick and the other is a romantic comedy, both films have intertwined storylines following multiple characters across the backdrop of a festive yet stressful Christmas season. In a prerelease interview, however, Curtis tells Polygon that one big thing differentiates That Christmas:
“There’s no nudity, very little swearing,” he jokes.
Directed by Simon Otto with a script from Curtis and Peter Souter, That Christmas adapts three separate Christmas-themed children’s books written by Curtis and illustrated by Rebecca Cobb. The book That Christmas is about a group of children who get to celebrate the holidays their way when their parents get stranded at a wedding. The Empty Stocking follows twin sisters: One’s on Santa’s nice list, and the other has been quite naughty this year. And in Snow Day, a lonely boy spends an unexpected afternoon with the school’s strictest teachers.
For this movie, though, the stories all take place in the same little town, where the characters know each other and their plotlines cross over — a storytelling method Curtis is particularly fond of.
“I’ve always loved [hyperlink cinema] — particularly Robert Altman’s movies like Nashville and Short Cuts. And I love Pulp Fiction — the way they’ve got those [interconnected] stories,” says Curtis. “So where [That Christmas] is Love Actually is that there are a lot of characters and quite a few tales that weave together in a slightly unexpected way.”
That Christmas presented Curtis with a unique opportunity. Adapting his short picture books into a full screenplay gave him a chance to expand on some of the scanter details and flesh out the characters. For instance, Curtis says he and Souter looked at the lonely kid at the center of Snow Day to figure out why he was lonely. (“What does his mum do? What’s happened to his dad?”) According to Curtis, the entire experience was fun, though making sure that all those separate plotlines fit together neatly was its own challenge. But Curtis had his time with Love Actually to lean on for that.
“One of the things we learned in Love Actually is — when we first started it, I thought you would just go A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D — one story each,” he explains. “But actually, you have to commit to spending a lot of time with one story for a while so that people get properly invested in it before you jump onto the next one. There was a lot of that learning. We would think that scenes were going to be divided, and then we put them back together again, and suddenly it was much more interesting. It’s a bit like playing three-dimensional chess. Any bit can go after any other bit.”
The storytelling craft Curtis learned while working on Love Actually isn’t the only thread from the 2003 film that made it into That Christmas. The animated feature actually includes a direct homage to the romantic comedy. One of the characters laments about how they have to watch the same boring Christmas movie every year. Cue an actual scene from Love Actually (the one with the signs in the doorway… y’know) playing on the television. It’s a fun little nod, especially if you’re familiar with the shared pedigree between the two movies. But as it turns out, no one ran that joke by Curtis before the final cut.
“I was hijacked!” he laughs. “I was coming in to watch [the final movie]. I assumed it would be a clip of some ghastly black-and-white American movie. And there was my movie and I couldn’t complain, because if they think it’s a ghastly old Christmas boring movie, then I guess it is!”
That Christmas is streaming on Netflix now.
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