LITTLE SAINT NICK
A BOY CALLED CHRISTMAS I Director Gil Kenan retells the legend of Santa Claus.
This is not your parent’s Christmas elf movie!” laughs Gil Kenan, only half-joking. “We had a set of rules on set: no red and green touching. No stripes. No bells on toes. And definitely no big buttons…” After spending most of his career celebrating Halloween with Monster House, City Of Ember and Poltergeist, Kenan decided to switch holidays after reading Matt Haig’s bestselling children’s novel about the origins of Santa Claus.
“I just loved the character, and I loved the fact that there was an actual adventure at the centre of the whole story,” says Kenan. “But Matt Haig’s real masterstroke is in not holding back from the full weight of human emotion – this sense of darkness that’s there as a counterpoint to the light and the whimsy and the magic. That was when I realised that I would have to stop at nothing to tell this story.”
When Teasers visited the Prague set of A Boy Called Christmas, Kenan was busy corralling 150 elf extras through an entire town built to scale on a studio backlot. With everything handmade by local craftspeople, the level of detail (even hidden behind shop windows that would never be shot) is extraordinary – including vast
beamed ceilings hung with origami, working wooden windmills and piles of handsewn indigenous fabrics shipped from Finland.
“It’s a world I’m so proud of,” says Kenan, citing visual influences as diverse as Once Upon A Time In The West, The NeverEnding Story and silent German mountaineering docs from the ’20s. “It became very important right from the planning stage that we can make our film as tangible and tactile as possible.”
Assembling his dream British cast with the likes of Sally Hawkins, Jim Broadbent, Maggie Smith, Toby Jones and Stephen Merchant, Kenan lucked out finding newcomer Henry Lawfull to play Nikolas – the young hero who sets off with his reindeer and a pet mouse to find his missing father.
“Henry is a brilliant actor, but more than that, he just has this amazing naturalism,” says Kenan. “There’s this bass note of coolness in him, and that’s very rare in kids. Also he told me that he likes the cold, and I needed a leading man who wouldn’t freeze to death…”
Shooting scenes north of the Arctic Circle in the most remote regions of Finland, Kenan wanted to make sure the film looked and felt as authentic as possible. “I wanted to approach the making of this film the same way Nikolas approaches his journey. It had to be an adventure,” says Kenan. “This film was the hardest physical challenge I’ve ever had, but it was also the greatest thrill I’ve had as a director.”
ETA | 26 NOVEMBER / A BOY CALLED CHRISTMAS IS RELEASED IN CINEMAS AND ON SKY CINEMA NEXT MONTH.