Getting plastered

COLIN FIRTH never stops smiling as the ever-cheerful Fred, Scrooge’s good-natured nephew, in the new screen version of A Christmas Carol. But he found nothing amusing preparing to film the role using the performance-capture process.

This involves actors dressing in tight Spandex outfits, with dots attached to face and body, to have their every movement and expression captured by computerised cameras.

Before filming, a cast of the actor’s head is taken which – and this is the bit that worried Firth – involves him putting his head into “a big gummy, rubber thing” which “if you are remotely claustrophobic, which I am, is perfect panic attack material”.

His head was encased in plaster with only two small nostril holes for breathing. “You can’t be heard, can’t speak, can’t see and can’t hear,” he says of the experience.

“The headpiece is very, very heavy – I can’t remember how many inches of the stuff is on you – but it’s thick, so you feel like you are entombed.

Now some people are fine with it. I am not.”

He thought those getting him plastered looked worried on finding out he hadn’t been through the process before. “I saw them looking at each other nervously because they clearly had actors freaking out and tearing it off – which, in the end, is what I did. I didn’t actually tear it off, but they had to open up the mouth area to get in.”

That, he thinks, may be why on-screen Fred has acquired a prominent, un-Firth like chin.

He can’t help wondering if ripping off the plaster meant they had to use their imagination on making the chin for his mask.

Jim Carrey plays Scrooge in Disney’s version of the Charles Dickens’ classic, with Firth as Christmas fan Fred, who tries to persuade the miser of the error of his bah-humbug ways.

One reason for taking the role was to see what performance capture was like. “Also, what’s at stake when you only have about four hours of work to do,” he says.

He had to pull on Spandex and have dots stuck all over him. He still doesn’t understand why he had to “rom in” before entering the “volume”, as the set is called.

“Before you walk into the volume you put all your gear on. People are buzzing around you as though you’re about to get into the space shuttle.

“Then you walk into another studio, with a white floor and cameras lining every wall.

You’re told to stand on a red mark. One of the PAs says, ‘lift your left leg, please, to the knee.

Now the right leg, right arm, all this sort of thing. Scrunch up your face, frown, smile.

“Now that takes quite a long time. That’s called roming in. Why? It has something to do with the database and the computer recognising where your dots are and, therefore, once you’ve walked into the volume they’ve logged on to you.”

But if you leave the volume, as for a call of nature, you have to rom out again. “Don’t know why, but you do. So imagine you need to go to the loo. You’re a rom away. You’re wearing Spandex and there’s all this lifting up your right leg and left leg.

“You get there – this is probably too much information – and have to negotiate the Spandex.

Then you come out again and get, ‘hi, I’m Brad, I’m checking your dots’. Then you have to rom back in again. Ten minutes of that, by which time you need to go to the bathroom again.”

Earlier, at a press conference, Firth had come over as very Scrooge-like with his comments about Christmas, joking that he felt like slapping ever-happy Fred. On reflection, he reckons that Fred makes a good case for a merry Christmas.

Firth, as we spoke, was only hours away from switching on the Christmas lights in London’s Regent Street, as co-stars Jim Carrey, in Oxford Street, and Bob Hoskins, at St Paul’s, flicked switches too.

He says: “What makes Christmas delightful for me is I’ve got children who are the right age for it. There comes a moment when the magic of Christmas ebbs, but you relive that again when you’re around other children.”

He doesn’t want to “go down the misery route” but sees one reason for Christmas upsetting some people is the expectation, the feeling, that it has to be a happy time.

“Christmas certainly provides some of my best memories and I find it an absolute delight stage-managing that for kids. There’s certainly no bah-humbug when it comes to that.

‘IMIX it up. I don’t have Christmas just in one place every year. I find that really helps. My wife is Italian. Sometimes, we go to Italy. Sometimes, we make a trip elsewhere.

My oldest son and stepkids grew up in North America, so I’ve had a lot of Christmas destinations. I’ve had rainy Christmases and sunny Christmases and very few white Christmases.

It doesn’t have to be turkey. The best way to enjoy it is to just see what happens.”

What happened acting in performance-capture mode offered more freedom than might be expected, Firth reveals. The way an actor is programmed to look is in other people’s hands, but the way motion capture works facilitates a lot of spontaneity “because you’re free to do what you want,” he says.

“You can walk around the room. You don’t have to worry about lights, or where the camera is, or about getting in anybody’s way because there’s no point of view. You’re just doing it as if it was real. You’re doing in sequence, you never have to stop or wait or reposition anything.

“All the actors are aware where they’re supposed to be in the story. So the person knocking the door, the person looking in the window, the person cooking dinner are all standing precisely where they are supposed to be standing and you’re doing it in real time.

“It seems strange and quite hard to convince people of that, that we aren’t overwhelmed by the technology. We’re not suffocated by it, quite the opposite.”

■ Disney’s A Christmas Carol (PG) is now showing in cinemas.