The Big Picture

Collider’s Steve Weintraub talks with director David Lowery for his new Disney+ short film
An Almost Christmas Story
.

An Almost Christmas Story
is the final part of a holiday series produced by Alfonso Cuarón about a lost young owl and little girl who find each other in New York City during Christmastime.
In this interview, Lowery talks about pivoting from live-action to animation, working with Cuarón, his approach to difficult scenes, and working on
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew
.

An Almost Christmas Story is the final short film in a three-part holiday series from producer and five-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón and Disney+. The short was preceded by Le Pupille (2022) and The Shepherd (2023), both of which garnered attention at the Oscars, and is directed by David Lowery (The Green Knight, A Ghost Story), who spoke with Collider’s Steve Weintraub ahead of its streaming premiere.

From a story by Cuarón and a screenplay by Jack Thorne (His Dark Materials) and Lowery, An Almost Christmas Story follows the epic journey of Moon (voiced by Cary Christopher), a young owl who finds himself stuck in the tree that will soon be decked out for Rockefeller Plaza. As luck would have it, little Moon’s path crosses with Luna (Estella Madrigal), a young girl who’s also lost in New York City, and together they embark on an adventure to find their parents.

In this conversation, Lowery shares his own epic journey, from the very first Zoom meeting with Cuarón to planning a live-action short to pivoting to a uniquely beautiful animation style. The lauded filmmaker also shares his unexpected influences on the film, past experiences on his other movies like The Green Knight, as well as the upcoming Mother Mary, and his unforgettable time directing two episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. In addition, Lowery discusses his love of Andor and why he prefers the series to a movie.

‘The Green Knight’ Was a Near-Impossible Mountain to Climb
Lowery also shares other tricky scenes from ‘A Ghost Story’ to ‘Mother Mary.’
Image via A24

COLLIDER: I really enjoyed the short, which I knew I would because it was you, but I really enjoyed it.

DAVID LOWERY: Thank you. It was such a pleasure to make, and now that people are seeing it, I’m like, if this gives people 22 minutes of happiness in the midst of whatever they’re going through in their lives, I can’t imagine a better responsibility as a filmmaker to make something like that.

Yes, some of us think we’re living in the darkest timeline, so I’ll take whatever joy I can get.

LOWERY: Precisely.

You know I like throwing some curveballs at the beginning before I get into why I’m talking to you. You’ve done a lot of stuff; which shot or sequence in all the things you’ve worked on ended up being the toughest to pull off and why?

LOWERY: That is a great question. The entirety of A Ghost Story, perhaps, just because we were never confident that the sheet would work. [Laughs] That was 19 days of edge-of-your-seat, gut-churning dread. But for one sequence — we should put a pin in this until we talk next year about Mother Mary because that would be the one — but the movie that I’m making now, it certainly has that. That was the one where, I won’t talk about it because no one’s seen the movie yet, but it has had some of those sequences in them, certainly.

Every movie has them, and they always feel like, “Nothing has ever been harder.” And then you make the next one. You’re like, “What was I thinking about? That was a piece of cake. This one’s the hardest.”

Related ‘The Green Knight’ Is a Sumptuous, Surreal Exploration of Honor’s Value in the Face of Death | Review David Lowery’s take on the Arthurian legend is hypnotic yet deeply earnest and profound in its assessment of the human condition.

That’s because you climbed the hill already on the previous one and solved whatever you had to solve.

LOWERY: Yeah, and often there are things like the Great Hall sequence in The Green Knight. That one is an easy one to talk about being a very challenging sequence because not only was it at the end of the shoot, and we were all exhausted, I was medically incapacitated for most of it in one way or another, so a lot of medication, not enough time. Also, I was realizing that my ambition as a filmmaker had changed over the course of making that movie, and what we had five days to shoot really should have had 30. That was a sequence where we were just like, “Do we have the beat that is described in the script on camera?” And if the answer was yes, we moved on. Then I had to figure out how to make everything feel intentional in the edit. I’m glad you asked this question because I need to not forget about that sequence. That was like a real mountain that I don’t know if I ever fully reached the top of, but definitely eventually got pretty close.

‘An Almost Christmas Story’ Was Originally a Live-Action Short

I could drill down on this, but let’s jump into why I get to talk to you. How did this short film happen for you? Was it Alfonso [Cuarón] reaching out? Had you seen the previous ones, and you were like, “I wanna do this?”

LOWERY: If my memory is correct, and my memory of the past few years is a little hazy at this point because there have been all sorts of time warps that have happened, but it was Christmas of 2021. Le pupille had just come out and was probably about to be nominated for an Oscar, and so I saw that one, also as a fan of Alice [Rohrwacher]; she’s incredible. So, I knew about that. I didn’t know that it was part of a series of short films that Alfonso had managed to get Disney to greenlight, which is an incredible feat. I received an email from him, and Gabriela Rodriguez, who was his producer, and she, he, and I got on Zoom to talk about this.

Part of the reason I said yes was I just wanted to go talk about movies with Alfonso. I’d never met him before. But the icing on the cake was that they had sent me the script that he and Jack Thorne had written and it was lovely, just absolutely like a treat to read. It was right as I was getting ready to go do pickups for Peter Pan & Wendy, and that movie was such a big, huge, gigantic, all-consuming thing that the idea of making something short and sweet felt very appealing, and it also felt far away because it was a Christmas movie. So, I thought, “We’re not gonna make this till next Christmas. I’ll get to spend the next year just sort of building my way towards making this wonderful short film. We’ll shoot it in New York.” It was live-action at that point, and I was like, “I’m gonna spend two months in New York at the holidays, my favorite time of year to be in the city. This sounds like just another joy. And I get to elaborate with Alfonso. Of course I’m gonna say yes to this.” So, that’s how it came about. Then I spent the next year realizing how hard it was going to be to make this movie in live-action in New York City at Christmastime, and it started to change course at that point.

Image via Disney+

That leads me to my next question. Things always change in the production process. I did not realize you originally were thinking about this with live-action. With the script, is it the same thing that you guys originally were gonna do, and it’s just now in animation?

LOWERY: More or less because over the course of the months leading up to Christmas of 2022, which is when we were thinking of shooting it, I had rewritten the script, or at least begun to rewrite the script. One of the things that Alfonso encouraged me to do was to make it my own. He’s like, “I wrote this, but make this a David Lowery movie.” And so, I had a couple of things I wanted to address initially, just for my taste, like, “Here I would move A to B and get rid of C and add D.” But, as you do with any script, you start to work on it, and it becomes more and more personal. You start to bring more of yourself into it. So, already, it was different from what he had sent me and yet still very similar when we decided to start thinking about animation.

One of the things that I realized in the process of doing that was I have made movies with photoreal talking animals before. I love our Green Knight fox and I love Elliott in Pete’s Dragon, although he doesn’t talk. I didn’t feel that was necessary for this one. I wanted to treat the animals differently, and so I proposed that we shoot everything in live-action, but do all of the animals with something that may not be stop-motion but that has a sort of handmade feel to it. I wanted all the animals to feel like they were handmade Christmas decorations or something like that. I was unknowingly setting out on the path that led us to the eventual aesthetic choices that manifested in the movie that you’ve seen. That was the very first inkling of stepping into a different territory with this movie.

This Sequence Was Inspired by ‘The French Connection’
“I realized that every frame has a dollar sign on it when you’re making animation.”
Image via Disney+

Going back to what I said at the beginning, which shot or sequence in this was the one that ended up being really difficult? A lot of people don’t realize that certain things in animation and certain shots are just more expensive than others, and you need to limit where and when you deploy those resources.

LOWERY: In the screenplay that I read in December of 2021, there was a sequence that says, “Moon takes off, and thus we began a chase sequence that will feel like The French Connection with pigeons.” It covered so much ground in New York City, and I love shooting chase sequences, so I was like, “I cannot wait to dig into this.” So, we put together this incredibly extensive, spectacular chase sequence. My brother, who does concept work for all my movies, did the storyboards, and we were just coming up with so many gags and so much ground covered — they covered so much of New York City in this chase sequence. That one was definitely where I realized that every frame has a dollar sign on it when you’re making animation and that removing some of those frames was necessary.

Finding which ones are the most necessary to the story was my big learning curve. Every beat of an animated film needs to contribute to the story. Every beat in a live-action film should do that, too, but there you have more room to look for these random grace notes on set. You could be like, “Oh, look at what the sun is doing through the trees. Let’s go shoot that, and maybe we’ll use it, maybe we won’t.” With animation, if you’re gonna make the choice to film sunlight coming through the trees, it better be for a really good reason.

So, really distilling down those big sequences that cover a lot of ground was the one that, I think, on a technical level, those were the most challenging. It was an incredibly difficult sequence. Even just the one shot, it was something I’d storyboarded where I wanted to be on 60th Street, leaving Rockefeller Plaza on the top of a taxi cab that turns the corner onto Fifth Avenue, and the sun needs to be setting down 60th the way it does at a certain time — in reality, it rises on 60th [laughs] — behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I was like, “All of that needs to be in one shot,” and that was a renderer’s nightmare. The lighting needed to be a very specific type of lighting, and there weren’t cuts in that. One of the things I’ve learned from Alfonso is how good a really beautiful oner can be when it succeeds and I definitely planned on doing a lot of those in this, and the ones that still exist certainly were not easy to pull off technically.

There should be, down the road, a course just on his oners in movies and what he’s done because it all goes back, for me, to Children of Men . His oner work is insane.

LOWERY: Especially as it’s gotten more invisible. Because there are the ones, like Children of Men, where you’re in the car, you’re like, “Oh my god, this is one take. It’s still going on.” But now — I don’t know if you’ve seen Disclaimer yet, I just finished it last night — it’s invisible oners where you’re like, “Wait, when was the last edit?” You don’t even think about it. It’s really a new level of it for him.

How John McTiernan Influenced This Disney+ Short Film
Image via Disney+

I love when Little Moon is talking to the girl and they’re each talking but not understanding each other, and then you have the John C. Reilly song underneath it all. Talk about the construction of that because I think it just plays so well.

LOWERY: That was something that was in the original script that really appealed to me, this idea of these two characters who are different species, so they’re not gonna be able to communicate, and yet they both want the same thing. It was originally very underlined in the script. We had a lot of business about them not being able to understand one another, and it was one of the beautiful discoveries in the animatic stage where my editor, Mike [Melendi], who’s worked on everything since A Ghost Story, recorded all the voices himself and laid them in and we realized, “Maybe we’re hitting this nail a little too hard.” Not because it’s unimportant but because it was something that could emerge much more gracefully and beautifully. I really wanted there to be a simplicity to this, not just because every frame costs a certain amount, but because I wanted this to be a very simple and streamlined and elegant film.

So, we just started boiling that down, and I realized what I could do is, if they were just talking at the same time, it really could kind of come down to a number of syllables. One character would say a certain number of syllables, and the other character would talk, and you would just have their sentences build on top of one another. You would get the sense of both the misunderstanding and the fact that they can’t understand one another, but also their mutual similarities in a really beautiful way.

As a film nerd, I also have to say that one of my favorite scenes in any John McTiernan film is in The 13th Warrior when they’re sitting around the campfire, and Antonio Banderas gradually learns the language that the Vikings are speaking. I always just thought that was such an incredible sequence, and I thought about that a lot while making this film, oddly enough. I was really thinking about Eaters of the Dead a lot. It’s something that you probably would not expect as a reference point, but it certainly was one.

Image via Buena Vista Pictures

I swear to you, this might be the headline of our interview is, how John McTiernan influenced this Disney+ short film.

LOWERY: I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to Blank Check, but I did an episode with them about The 13th Warrior, and this wasn’t done yet, so I couldn’t talk about it, but my whole reason for wanting to talk about that movie was because I love that scene so much.

My thing is The Hunt for Red October when they’re zooming in on Sean Connery’s mouth and it goes from Russian to English. I’ve always thought that is one of the most brilliant uses of changing language so you understand they’re speaking Russian, but you hear it in English, and I’m like, “Why don’t more movies copy this? This is brilliant.”

LOWERY: It really is, especially when the movie needs both languages. Sure, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, everyone can speak English with an English accent — that’s fine because everyone in that movie is Scandinavian. But when a plot point pivots on English and Russian and the fact that they don’t speak the same language, but you need the actors to speak in English, it’s incredible.

It’s rated G. Did you have to battle to get a G rating, or were the MPAA always like, “No, this is G?”

LOWERY: This one just was an automatic G. I am very proud of this G rating. I really wanted a G rating for Pete’s Dragon but I learned that G is uncool, and for a movie like Pete’s Dragon, you need a PG so that kids don’t think it’s a lame movie. There’s one “damn it” in Pete’s Dragon that was improv on set that one of the actors did, and they’re like, “Put that in there. That gets us our PG, and we’re cool.” But I really wanted a G. I don’t know, maybe it’s just a nostalgic thing, but I love the idea of making a G-rated film. I love that David Lynch has made a G-rated movie, so I wanna continue in that tradition.

“I Have to Make the Story Paramount”
“In so many of my movies, I’m really more after a mood or a tone or a vibe.”
Image via Disney+

One of things with animation, and we talked about this, is the cost. The short is 22 minutes. Did you always know going in, “We can’t go over this amount of time?” How did that work in figuring out the runtime?

LOWERY: No, that was a real, I won’t say a struggle, but something I definitely learned. As recently as May of this year, the movie was probably four minutes longer. Then, as we were animating, there’s a little bit of horse trading where it’s like, “Okay, we can keep this, but we’d have to lose this. This shot is gonna cost this much more to fully animate and render.” Even the fact that all of the characters in the movie who aren’t our protagonists are just made out of cardboard, which is one of my favorite creative decisions in the movie…

By the way, I love the use of cardboard.

LOWERY: I’m a cardboard fan. I love cardboard. This movie fulfills all of my cardboard dreams. But you make these creative choices that are all about finding a way around a limitation, and one of the limitations we certainly had was there were things that I did not want to get rid of that cost more to render. So, to keep those, like the chase sequence, I had to lose other things. You really wind up saying, “Okay, if I have to lose this sequence that is technically important, can I take the dialogue from it, bring it earlier into the movie, making sure those beats land, or is it, in fact, a sequence that’s not actually necessary?” Again, I focused more on story on this one than I ever have on any movie I ever made. In so many of my movies, I’m really more after a mood or a tone or a vibe. With this one, out of necessity, I really was like, “I have to make the story paramount.” And you really are, again, looking to make sure every frame is serving that story.

I’m really grateful that Disney+ is making short films like this because it’s fantastic.

‘Skeleton Crew’ Is Giving Fans the Vintage Star Wars Treatment
“I got the Jabba’s Palace Muppet experience.”
Image via Disney+

Before I run out of time with you, they sent me screeners of Skeleton Crew this morning. Jon [Watts] told me you directed Episodes 2 and 3, so I definitely have to touch on what it was like playing in the Star Wars Universe and being a part of that series.

LOWERY: As someone who decided to make movies at the age of seven due to a severe love of Star Wars, this was an incredible full-circle moment. It was, I can say without a doubt, the happiest I’ve ever been on set simply because I was surrounded by the ephemera of everything, not just my childhood, but the reason I’m where I am now as a human being. To be able to sit in an X-Wing — it’s dorky to say that, but it’s real, it’s profound. It was really special. To get to make something in that universe, no matter what people think of the current slate of Star Wars — and I know there are a lot of opinions about it — there’s no diminishing the amount that it’s mattered to the people it’s mattered to, and I’m one of those people. I know you are, as well. This could have been a shot-for-shot remake of the Star Wars Holiday Special, which there actually is a Holiday Special reference in the show, but it could have been that, and I would still have been very moved to have been there and very happy to be there because I’m participating in something that has been a formative part of my life.

The icing on the cake was that it was so much fun to make, and I think it turned out really well. I’ve seen the first four episodes, and I know what happens in the rest of the series, but as a fan, I was like, “I’m not gonna watch anything else.” I wanna sit back over December and watch this story unfold.

One of the reasons why I know this show is gonna be good is Jon and Jon [Favreau] have embraced matte paintings and stop-motion. They went back to the original Star Wars movies. Did you get to play with any of the matte paintings? Did you get to do anything vintage Star Wars in your episodes?

LOWERY: I got the Jabba’s Palace Muppet experience where the two episodes I did have so many puppets in them, and I was just in heaven. As someone who loves puppetry and I’m a big Dark Crystal, Labyrinth fan, who loves all that stuff, I was just surrounded by puppeteers with their hands in little creatures, and that was just the best. Some of these creatures — by now, people know that the Teeks from the Ewok films are in this show, so that’s not a spoiler to say that — I was like, “Are they going to augment these digitally to make them look more real?” Literally, these characters were hand puppets, and that’s still what they are.

We shot partially on the Volume in Manhattan Beach, and to be on the state-of-the-art sound stage with all these LED screens putting up this crazy environment, what is technically state-of-the-art technology, but then the camera is focused on a hand puppet — that is the best. I also just love that Star Wars can include that. I love Andor, where probably you don’t want hand puppets popping up every five seconds, but that Star Wars can also be inclusive of something like Skeleton Crew, and they both exist in the same universe, it just reminds me of why I love that series and why I love those movies originally.

Related It’s ‘Goonies’ in Space in Star Wars’ New ‘Skeleton Crew’ Trailer The series stars Jude Law.

I have not seen the show yet, but I do think that Andor is the best Star Wars since 1980. It’s a masterpiece. It doesn’t make sense how good it is.

LOWERY: Not only does it not make sense how good it is, but I am someone where it is hard to get me to watch a series. One way to get me to watch it is to put Star Wars on it, but I really am someone who, as much as I love the form, I just am a movie person. Every now and then I’ll see a series where I’m like, “That is something that is better than a movie.” Andor was better than a movie. That’s something where I would rather watch 10 episodes of that than have it condensed into a great film.

Hopefully, I’m going to do a Collider event for Andor Season 2. For Season 1, we did the first three episodes as an event on the Disney lot. I had Tony and everybody, and then we did Episodes 7, 8, and 9 with Andy Serkis, his three-episode arc.

LOWERY: Amazing.

Seeing those episodes on a movie screen was amazing.

LOWERY: When we were doing the grade for Peter Pan & Wendy and trying to look at the amount of film grain to add to it, I was like, “Hey guys, look at Andor. It’s streaming on Disney+ right now and it looks like it was shot on 35-millimeter in 1977. Streaming can hold up with some film grain on it.”

Related Andy Serkis Unpacks ‘Andor’ Episode 10’s Ending [Exclusive] Andy Serkis starred as Kino Loy in a 3-episode arc in ‘Andor.’

Personally, when I’m watching things on streaming, adding what makes a film a film, adding that sort of stuff makes it so I don’t feel like I’m watching a TV show. I want to see grading. I want to see that kind of stuff. I just watched something the other day, and I’m like, “You’re on location and it just looks still like a TV show. You gotta do better.”

LOWERY: I wish I could show you the 16-millimeter grade for Peter Pan & Wendy because it looked freaking great. It looked like we shot on 16 and it was beautiful.

An Almost Christmas Story is available to watch on Disney+ now.

An Almost Christmas Story Moon, a curious young owl, finds herself trapped in a Christmas tree destined for Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. Trying to escape the city, Moon befriends a lost little girl named Luna. Together, they embark on an adventure.Director David Lowery Runtime 21 minutes Producers Alfonso Cuarón

Watch on Disney+