Dan Stevens stars as Charles Dickens in The Man Who Invented Christmas. Photo / Supplied
Dan Stevens stars as Charles Dickens in The Man Who Invented Christmas. Photo / Supplied
Christmas has long been a time to cherish loved ones and give generously to those in need, but what many people don't realise is that one man made that happen.
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol was published in 1843 and, as well as popularising terms like "Merry Christmas", "Scrooge" and "Bah humbug", the novel saw a huge rise in charitable giving and prompted many to reach out to those in need at Christmas time.
It's cemented itself as a Christmas tale for the ages, but a new film coming this Christmas shows just how much of a struggle the novel was for Dickens to pen.
Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) delved deep into Dickens' past for the film, The Man Who Invented Christmas; a "very vivid" study of the six weeks in which Dickens wrote his famous Christmas novel.
We pick up Dickens' story after three failed books and as he's moved into a new house, and the pressure is on to come up with something new - and fast.
"Dickens was getting himself under a huge amount of personal pressure with four kids, one on the way, mounting debts and a real need to have a hit book, looking at his contemporaries and not feeling satisfied, and was also looking around society and the rise of the rampant industrial capitalist and it was depressing him," says Stevens.
"All of these things boiled into A Christmas Carol and the way he conjured his characters was - as described by his daughter - quite similar to what we see in the film."
In the film, Stevens' Dickens labours intensively to come up with Scrooge's name, stalking around his study like some kind of melodramatic villain as he tries to embody Scrooge's persona.
The second the name comes out, so does Scrooge - dressed the part, with his own personality and views, challenging Dickens through every other step of the writing process as the two share an adventure to track down the rest of the characters, face Dickens' own demons and find that elusive ending.
"He's obviously, like any writer, drawn inspiration from the world around him but he somehow sort of conjured them into this room and whipped himself into a real frenzy," says Stevens, whose crazed depiction of Dickens shows the kind of mania involved with racing a deadline.
This could've been a fairly grim story about societal and professional pressures, debt, capitalism and poverty. Thankfully, it's lightened by an element of fantasy - a jolly ghost feasting above a doorway, characters dancing around Dickens' study and Scrooge becoming a friend only Dickens can see.
Dickens and Scrooge embark on a late-night adventure. Photo / Supplied
Meanwhile, Dickens deals with the real-life characters who follow him just as relentlessly, giving us insight into his own Scrooge-like journey of forgiveness and generosity.
We examine Dickens' strained relationship with his father, his friendship with John Forster "who really saw him through some quite dark times", and his struggle with his own past working in a factory and struggling to get by.
The story and research behind the story comes from Les Standiford's book of the same name, which the film is based on, and it had a profound effect on Stevens.
"I don't think I ever had any real, human knowledge of him. I studied him as literature with a capital L. We're taught to revere him on a plinth almost, rather than engage him as a human being who was fiercely creative and incredibly driven, [with] a fierce intellect and fierce wit, but also probably quite a fierce depression at times," says Stevens.
"And he had this sort of manic engagement with his work, so all of that was quite new to me. And to get to dive into that - physically and emotionally - was fun and also he's a very playful character so there were many facets I hadn't seen."
And that learning curve was an unexpected one for Stevens, whose most recent projects include Disney fantasy Beauty and the Beast and Marvel superhero drama Legion.
"I know, it's an interesting path - and Dickens was not necessarily a planned stop on the route," he laughs.
"But I just found the script and the story so charming and the idea of how to portray six weeks in the life of someone who - as I say - is so revered, and so revered that people are sort of terrified to take him on, but you could never really take him on as a whole, it would be some sort of 200-hour, epic HBO series or something to really do it justice.
"But I think people are intimidated by these great figures sometimes, but actually they're people, and it's fun to realise that."
LOWDOWN: What: The Man Who Invented Christmas Who: Dan Stevens When: In Cinemas next Thursday
