Thank you so much for reading We’ve Got This. This is my bi-weekly newsletter filled with feel-good “We’ve Got This” moments. Each one will have stories, interview snippets, quotes, and more that I’ve devoured and found helpful. I love the behind-the-scenes, starting out, keep going stories - I really hope you enjoy them and find them as inspiring as I do!
As I made my way through yet more Christmas films (even the Channel 5 ones) it got me thinking about how our favourite Christmas films and songs came to be.
I have read so much about the making of many Christmas films that I could have gone on forever, but have whittled it down to focus on just 4 classics.
I recommend reading this one curled up under a blanket, with your Christmas lights on…
All I want for Christmas is you
Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas has had an interesting journey from charting in 12th place when first released in 1994 to getting her first Number One with the single in 2020 and breaking records for the most streams in one day (Christmas Eve 2021).
Mariah Carey cowrote the hit holiday song with veteran songwriter Walter Afanasieff and this is how Walter describes the writing process and how the song came together:
“I started playing some rock ’n’ roll piano and started boogie woogie-ing my left hand, and that inspired Mariah to come up with the melodic [sings] ‘I don’t want a lot for Christmas.’ And then we started singing and playing around with this rock ’n’ roll boogie song, which immediately came out to be the nucleus of what would end up being ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You.’ That one went very quickly. It was an easier song to write than some of the other ones. It was very formulaic, not a lot of chord changes.
“Then for the next week or two, Mariah would call me and say, ‘What do you think about this bit?’ We would talk a little bit until she got the lyrics all nicely coordinated and done. And then we just waited until the sessions began, which were in the summer of ’94 where we got together in New York and started recording. And that’s when we first hear her at the microphone singing, and the rest is history.”
Love Actually, 2003
Love Actually’s screenwriter, Richard Curtis, originally thought his next films after Notting Hill were going to be what turned out to be Hugh Grant and Colin Firth’s stories in Love Actually.
However, after working out whole films on those subjects, he didn’t want to do them as they were just “turning out to be a shape I know.” Instead he “found something I wanted to do, rather than write something I thought I ought to write.” He explains:
“I’d be more interested in writing a film about love and what love sort of means, and how, you know, about the subject than rather than one example of a story about that subject. And then I remembered how much I loved Robert Altman’s movies with lots of stories — Nashville and Short Cuts. And how much I loved those Woody Allen movies with three or four stories. And Pulp Fiction. And Smoke. And I suddenly thought, Oh, I’ll write one of those. And then if I write one of those, I can not only deal with the Jolly-People-Fall-in-Love-and-Kiss ones, but I can also deal with the Emma Thompson story and the Laura Linney story and the father and son story and stuff.
They only had a week with each of the stories when filming, and Richard said the edit was “murderous” and how forming the eight stories together was like “playing three-dimensional chess.” In an interview Richard Curtis describes the editing process:
“You know, you could go anywhere and any of the stories next. I've never had a more depressing view of the first cut. I got so much of the pacing wrong and I realized as an audience member it wasn't going to be satisfactory. I suddenly had to put in three scenes and one of the things just to give you the feeling you were getting somewhere. Otherwise the whole movie felt like a, you know, a bunch of snacks.
That movie was nice to shoot and nice to write but hard to finish.”
So, how did it become a film about Christmas? This excerpt from Richard Curtis’s journal shows the moment that idea came to him and I loved reading the excitement as it all clicked into place:
THIS IS THE BEST THOUGHT I’VE HAD SO FAR ON THIS – how about ending the film at Christmas? - and it would be the thing that links all these stories - and be about Christmas and love - and even include the Christmas story itself… The idea that everyone heads for some kind of emotional resolution at Christmas…. It might make it a much less serious film, the Christmas thing - because I was hoping to do depression and anorexia - but maybe I could do that anyway…
The Holiday
“If anybody in December 2006, when that movie came out, told me 14 years later someone’s going to say ‘When it’s December, you watch The Holiday‘ — what can I tell you? Time will tell. The audience is everything.”
Interestingly, The Holiday was not the huge hit it is now when it first came out in 2006, and even almost didn’t get made, according to an interview with The Holiday’s writer, producer and director, Nancy Meyers. “It didn’t have the numbers anybody was hoping it would have”.
She explains how, on the film’s release, she had felt like it wasn’t sold in a way which made people want to see it and felt it needed to adjust. She remembers feeling “so depressed” and for many years she didn’t watch the film, not because she “lost faith in it” but because she “felt badly.”
“It was always something I felt badly about. But in the long run, over the course of my work, it has brought so much joy to me because of people’s response to it. I had to wait 13 years.”
When reading how The Holiday came to be, Nancy revealed how it was built around her interest in “unrequited love and how really smart people can get turned upside down.”
In fact, Jasper, Iris’s unrequited love interest is taken directly from Nancy’s personal experience.
Nancy “uses images a lot” when writing and makes photo files on “every character and every set” that she then shares with people. She collects images whilst writing and once she knows she’s directing the movie. It’s not about certain clothes or looks for the characters but instead a feeling or an attitude.
Similarly, when discussing her writing process, she shares she had “very big bulletin boards” in her offices with all kinds on it.
“As a matter of fact in The Holiday I had seen this little cottage in Vogue magazine, they had done a fashion shoot out in somewhere, the Cotswolds I think. And this cottage just stuck in my mind and I had it by my computer when I was writing and then it went up on my bulletin board and then they found it, I remember they called me “we found it! It’s impossible to get to. It’s impossible we could never film here.” So we sort of copied it. But that cottage, everybody knew what we were looking for.”
Home Alone, 1990
To finish off, I couldn’t not talk about Home Alone. Writer John Hughes had already enjoyed Christmas movie success, bringing out Home Alone after hit National Lampoon’s Christmas.
John Hughes’s son recalled how John came up with the idea for Home Alone:
“On August 8, 1989, my father, John Hughes, jotted down in a notebook a movie idea, born of traveler’s anxiety, that occurred to him during the bustle of departing for our first family trip to Europe, and set it aside. Two weeks later, after returning home, he revisited the premise: What if one of the kids had been accidentally left behind? Over the next nine days, he completed the first draft of Home Alone, capped by an eight-hour, 44-page dash to the finale. Before finishing, he’d expressed concerns in the marginalia of his journal that he was working too slowly.”
The movie ended up enjoying a record number of 12 weeks at No.1 and the rest is history…
I loved reading about the different ways the films we watch each year came to life and how in some cases, were not considered a huge success initially. What’s your favourite Christmas film and why?