From Black Death to Get Santa

“It was amazing,” marvels Chris Smith. “To go up those stairs past the Gladiator posters and the Alien on the wall and to meet Ridley Scott. You have to pinch yourself – a kid from Bristol sitting with Ridley discussing a Christmas movie.”

That’s right – the boy from Whitchurch is on first-name terms with Ridley Scott. A brief recap: Smith has an MA in Film Production from Bristol University, and two locally made shorts under his belt: the BAFTA-nominated The 10,000th Day and The Day Grandad Went Blind, which was shot on location in glamorous Knowle West. The latter went on to be shown at the Encounters festival and was broadcast by ITV West. Now based in London, his break came with 2004’s Creep – a stylish if rather poorly written low-budget horror flick set on the London underground. In 2006, he followed this with Severance, a blackly comic slasher taking a crowd-pleasingly cynical view of corporate team-building exercises, which even extracted a decent performance from Danny Dyer. Then came 2009’s well-reviewed Triangle (“a smart, supernatural time-shift chiller,” enthused The Guardian). But it was Smith’s best film to date, the 2010 medieval plague drama Black Death, that got him through the door at Ridley’s Scott Free productions.

“He said, ‘I like your movie. What do you want to do?’ So I pitched this sci-fi movie, which he liked. Then he said, ‘Got any other ideas?’ So I told him about my Christmas movie idea, thinking he’d say, ‘Why are you pitching a Christmas movie to me?’ And he just went, ‘Let’s do that one. It sounds really cool.’ It was the best meeting I ever had. He paid me some money to go and write a script. It proves that Ridley has a soft side.”

It turns out that like many actors and directors who’ve recently become parents, Smith wanted to make something he could watch with his nipper. His son was born just after the completion of Black Death and is now nearly six. But really – a Christmas movie? With Santa? Smith says his aim was to capture the spirit of films like Spielberg’s ET that he enjoyed as a kid (“Making horror movies is something I enjoy, but it was never the be all and end all.”). He’s also keen to distance himself from the genre’s worst abominations and understands the urge to reach for the sickbucket. “People who make British Christmas films seem to go, ‘Let’s make it really broad, really rubbish, with loads of terrible bright colours.’ They do all the awful things that we said at the beginning we’re not going to do. I think that’s why you hesitate, because it’s not just a Christmas movie, it’s a British Christmas movie. You naturally go, ‘Yeugggh, really?’ I think the best Christmas movie of all time is Bad Santa. The second best is Badder Santa. Third best is our film. It’s the kids’ Bad Santa.”

Fighting talk, huh? Get Santa stars Oscar winner Jim Broadbent, who’s cast as the fat, jolly bearded fella for the second time in a movie from Bristol (he was, of course, the voice of Santa in Aardman’s Arthur Christmas). In Smith’s film, Santa crashes his sleigh in London and befriends a nine-year-old boy named Tom (newcomer Kit Connor). When the corpulent, whiskery old gift distributor finds himself banged up in jail after attempting to retrieve his reindeer from Battersea Dogs Home, Tom has to persuade his reluctant, estranged ex-con dad (Rafe Spall) to help him save Christmas.

Smith drew on his memories of Porridge for the U-rated prison scenes in what he describes as an unconventional family comedy with plenty of heart but absolutely no cheese. “Obviously we don’t dwell on it, because it’s a feelgood movie, but we do touch on the serious things about your dad not being around. There’s real heartfelt stuff in there. It’s definitely my best film, by a mile.”

Rather like those unfortunate folks who find themselves manufacturing Christmas decorations at the height of summer, anyone who makes a Santa flick has to keep a close eye on the calendar. Start it too late and it’ll never be ready in time. Which is why Smith and his crew found themselves trying to summon up the festive spirit in a barn in Yorkshire (doubling for Lapland) and the decommissioned Lancaster jail back in January. As if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, reindeer shed their antlers at this time of year, so these had to be stuck back on with cable ties. “The alternative would have been to fill them with steroids, but obviously we didn’t want to do that.

“There was definitely the sense of a Christmas comedown,” he concedes. “We’d have to knock on doors and ask, ‘Do you mind if we put some Christmas decorations on the front of your house?’ But making films is what I love. It takes years to get anything made, so by the time you finally get onto the film set and start directing these guys who are all brilliant, you find yourself in a festive mood because you’re so relieved. But when you start doing test screenings in June and go to the Cannes Film Festival with a Christmas movie, it does start to feel a bit weird.”

Get Santa opens on December 5.