SACK-MAN BEGINS
Klaus I How Netflix’s first original animated movie reinvents Father Christmas…
IT EMULATES BATMAN
“It was about nine years when I started playing around with the idea,” says Klaus director (and Despicable Me co-creator) Sergio Pablos. “I noticed a trend for origin stories – things like the Dark Knight movies – that were bringing wellestablished characters and all their lore to new audiences.” Pablos began listing icons that could lend themselves to a similar treatment: Napoleon? Dracula? Santa Claus! “It’s amazing – Santa doesn’t have an origin story,” says Pablos. “I was like, ‘It’d be great if we could do something like that… but how would you make it work?’”
THE ELVES HAVE BEEN SHELVED
For starters, don’t expect legions of pointy-eared helpers in Klaus, or candy canes, or star-capped conifers. “We wanted to separate Christmas from Santa Claus,” explains Pablos. “We’re trying to tell a story about what happened before the magic.” But before anyone cries ‘humbug’, there are still familiar festive elements. “We kept the ones that were most meaningful to the story,” he teases. “And tried to see how we could ground them in reality. That’s where the fun of it would come from.”
THE ‘HERO’ IS NAUGHTY, NOT NICE
The key to breaking the story lay with what you might call the anti-Santa. “The idea was, if Santa is a symbol for altruism, we need a character to learn that lesson; someone very self-centred and egoistical.” Enter Jesper, a spoilt postal-academy student shipped off to a frosty village (in every sense) above the Arctic Circle. But how do you get viewers to invest in someone so reproachable? Hire Jason Schwartzman. “He was the one who brought an intrinsic likeability to Jesper,” says Pablos of his vocal lead. Schwartzman put his, ahem, stamp on the postman by improvising roughly 40 per cent of his dialogue.
SANTA’S A BIT OF A GROWLER
Jesper encounters Klaus, a taciturn carpenter who lives alone in a toy-filled cabin. J.K. Simmons provides the voice – or lack thereof. “J.K. was fantastic,” raves Pablos. “We wanted the character to start in a place that wasn’t ‘Santa Claus’, then gradually come out of his shell. J.K. would help us by saying, ‘Would he even talk here? Could he grunt?’” Eventually Klaus starts to get his jolly on, but for the first half of the story, “it was a question of, ‘How much growl do you put in the voice?’ That was what we were dealing with!”
IT’S TRADITIONAL, YET MODERN
Produced in Pablos’ native Madrid,
Klaus flaunts a unique look that mixes hand-drawn animation with cuttingedge lighting and texturing techniques. “Our plan was to do a traditionally made film, but not to do it in a nostalgic way,” he says. Financing wasn’t easy, Pablos reveals – Netflix initially turned Klaus down (“At the time it was not interested in producing a feature animation”). But once on board, the streaming giant stayed hands off. “To a shocking degree,” recalls Pablos. “I’d say, ‘I don’t know if I agree with that note,’ and they’re like, ‘Don’t do it.’ And I’d be, ‘Really? Can I do that? Alright!’”
ETA | 8 NOVEMBER / KLAUS OPENS IN SELECT CINEMAS NEXT MONTH, AND IS ON NETFLIX FROM 15 NOVEMBER.