Carrey on Christmas, again

Jim Carrey stars as the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Photo / Supplied

When Robert Zemeckis read A Christmas Carol as a boy, he was impressed by Charles Dickens' story of a man confronting his past and future. The director did something similar in his own Back to the Future trilogy. Now pioneering film-maker Zemeckis is combining many of his favourite things - time travel, ghosts, animation, motion capture and 3D - to make a new state-of-the-art version of A Christmas Carol, re-imagining the 19th century story as Dickens wrote it.

"Dickens used fantasy and macabre images of ghosts to tell a beautiful story of redemption," says Zemeckis. "It's the classic Christmas story of all time."

Still, it's a risky venture telling the story of a Victorian era mean old codger to kids.

But behind Scrooge's voice and expressions is Jim Carrey, who has already done one turn as a yuletide grouch in Dr Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Carrey not only plays Scrooge as a mean old man, but the character at four different stages of his earlier life. Then he's also the ghosts of Christmas past (the only time Carrey's face is clearly visible), present and yet to come.

"'The fun thing about this was Bob would say, 'okay, you're gonna play a 7-year-old now', and I'd have to go back to before I had any fur at all," says Carrey. "It was just so challenging to be all these different things. Then Scrooge is such an iconic character. It was so much fun crippling and twisting my body and then having to age my voice as well."

Seeing the finished results was often alarming, says Carrey.

"One of the first things I said when I watched the first close-up image of Scrooge was 'My family is going to have a heart attack because that is my father'. My father was the happy version of Scrooge. It is unbelievable. It is really a look into the future for me."

Zemeckis, who had previously used motion capture in The Polar Express (starring Tom Hanks) and Beowulf (transforming Angelina Jolie into a serpent-woman) , had a willing accomplice in Carrey, whose features have always been borderline cartoonish.

"Jim approaches it with every muscle, with every cell in his body," he says. "That's why it works amazingly well."

"I hear people say that motion capture destroys film, but it's just another way to tell a story," notes Carrey. "It's another tool in the film-maker's toolbox and it's a beautiful thing to see this story come to life. I feel so blessed to be able to do a broad spectrum of things by amazing visionary film-makers who look at me and see there's something more than a clown."

Carrey and his castmates say the technology makes acting liberating. Bob Hoskins, who starred in Zemeckis' Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and plays Fezziwig in Carol, was astounded, and despite the advanced technology surrounding him, compared it to working in theatre.

"They give you a helmet and they have cameras that catch all of your reactions," the 67-year-old English veteran actor says.

"'I was in Hollywood for five days. I was in, out and finished, collected a cheque and went home."

For Zemeckis, the film represents a leap closer to new 3D digital cinema taking hold. "Cinema has been around for 100 years, it's had a good run; and I think it's exciting to see what the future can bring in terms of making images digital. I actually think it's a genie that's out of the bottle, but we have no idea the impact this digital imagery is going to have on the future. The only thing to do is to underestimate it.

"It's still a beautiful film in 2D if that's the only way you can see it, but I think it will enhance your experience tenfold if you can see it in 3D. I designed it to be seen in 3D."

Carrey says the story about penny-pinching Scrooge is as relevant today with the recession and corporate misdeeds as it has been the past 160 or so years. "I think these stories get told at times when they are supposed to be told It was Bob's choice to choose this story, but someone was choosing Bob and that story needs to be told right now. Scrooge is the first corporate scumbag."

- additional reporting AAP