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“I Love Corrugated Cardboard”: David Lowery on Directing An Almost Christmas Story
An Almost Christmas Story [Courtesy Disney] Director David Lowery admits he loves Christmas (he was born the day after), and that’s part of the reason why he embarked on his latest project: An Almost Christmas Story, a CG animated short for Disney from producer Alfonso Cuarón, who conceived the film with writer Jack Thorne. Set during the holiday season, An Almost Christmas Story sees a young owl named Moon who unexpectedly taken from his family when she accidentally catches a ride in the Christmas tree destined for Rockefeller Center. At that famed location, Moon encounters a young girl named Luna, who is also lost and searching for home. With musical narration from John C. Reilly—and boasting voice performances from Natasha Lyonne, Mamoudou Athie, Jim Gaffigan and Alex Ross Perry—the film is inspired by the story of a owl that was once discovered in the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in 2020.
Beyond being a yuletide fan, Lowery admits An Almost Christmas Story allowed him to navigate the complex cocktail of emotions that the holidays delivers. I spoke with Lowery via Zoom just before Thanksgiving about the Christmas season and how he pivoted from a live-action film to his first professional foray into animation, plus his acting debut in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer alongside Daniel Craig.
Filmmaker: A few years ago I interviewed Alice Rohrwacher about her short film Le Pupille, which was another Alfonso Cuarón-produced short set at Christmas, who told me Cuarón approached her about pitching an idea for a series of shorts for Disney. Was it a similar process for you?
Lowery: Gabriella Rodriguez and Alfonso Cuarón emailed me and asked if I would be interested in making one of these films, and the one that they had in mind was a project that Alfonso had conceived of and written with Jack Thorne. It came at just that right time, where it felt like making this will just make me happy. We were nearing the end of Peter Pan and Wendy—there was still a long road ahead—and the idea of making something short and blissful seemed like a great idea. I’m a big Christmas person, too, so prolonging the holiday spirit seemed like a great idea. It was an instant yes.
Filmmaker: How about the animation? Was that something you had done before, or were you just curious about experimenting with a new medium?
Lowery: I’m such a reactive filmmaker; so much of what I make comes from seeing some iteration that I don’t like. This film began as a live action film. When I first read the script, it was clearly set in New York City at Christmas time. And I thought to myself, “This is going to be wonderful. I gotta go spend two months shooting a movie in New York at Christmas.” I spent the ensuing months working on the script, making it my own, then started to realize how expensive it was going to be to shoot this in New York at Christmas time. To achieve the scope and scale that I envisioned, I needed to rethink how to go about making this film.
I took it out of the live-action realm at that point, but I still had this idea that there would be some photographic element to it. I’ve always wanted to make things with puppets, so I thought, “Let’s make this entire movie with puppets on miniature sets.” We went down that route for a while, and I was looking at the tests and the production schedule for that and realized that would also not quite yield what I had in mind. I made this pivot to full animation relatively late in the game and that finally was when everything clicked; all of a sudden, I was able to realize this exactly as I wanted.
It’s not my first animated film—it’s my first animated film since I became a professional. [laughs] I started off making stop motion shorts because I just didn’t have any actors to work with. I love that medium, I’ve always wanted to return to it and I’ve always wanted to incorporate more traditional animation in my movies. We wound up making a fully CG short that still looks very handmade, and I’ve tried to preserve those aesthetics that were important to me from the very beginning of my filmmaking career.
Filmmaker: I’m curious about the texture of the film, because, as you said, it looks very handmade. Can you talk a bit about the process behind its design?
Lowery: The initial seed of that design was the cardboard. As soon as we left realistic New York City behind, I very quickly seized on the idea of making this movie entirely in a cardboard city. I love corrugated cardboard; that’s a texture I grew up loving. I really wanted to both pay homage to my own past and this nostalgia associated with that and see how far we could take it. When we were still working in live-action, we started designing these sets that would be constructed in cardboard. The puppets were going to be papier-mâché, and everything was going to have a texture to it so that even though you’re watching it on a screen, you know exactly what that feels like. You understand it on a very tactile level. Once we pivoted away from live action and puppetry, we had these models that we built and were able to use as references, and, for better or worse, improve upon it. We were able to fine-tune the tactility of the aesthetics. That was a really strange thing for me to realize. I love things that are handmade, things that are real, love shooting actual, physical props. To look at our photographic test and look at the CG test and realize the CG ones felt more real… It really did a number on my brain.
Filmmaker: What was the process behind the voice casting? Were any of the actors on board before it became an animated production?
Lowery: Most of the cast came on board when it was going to be the puppet version, so they were expecting it to be voice acting. We cast Estella Madrigal, who plays Luna, and based the entire puppet for her, but then switched to the animated version; in both forms, it was entirely based on her. When we shifted over to animation, we were able to really use her as a reference point—all of the movement the animators brought to that performance was based on video reference of her. So, she not only did the vocal performance, but really served as the model for the physicality of that character,
For me as a director, it really became a much more physical and performative act. I felt like an actor along with the cast, because usually they’re in the room by themselves, and I’m the one who’s reading every other part. I found that I could, to some degree, control or direct the performance through my own performance. I often gave these really big, ridiculous performances just to elicit a different reaction. It made me want to do more of it. I really, really enjoyed it.
Filmmaker: There is something very specific about Christmas in New York, which has been captured on film so many times before—it’s often a mixture of holiday joy and a wistfulness, a melancholy. What was your specific vision for the location and the time of year it’s set?
Lowery: The color palette was defined by the cardboard of it all, and the fact that I really love sodium vapor lights—I loved the idea of lighting the entire city with this gold and amber quality. The melancholy feel was a very important part of the story, not just in terms of the tone. When Alfonso and Jack sent me the script, they encouraged me to make it my own. It really led me to interrogate my own feelings about why I love Christmas, what I really respond to about the holidays and what I want when I sit down to watch a Christmas movie. Often it is that mixture of happiness and sadness, that joy and melancholy entwined together, really defines the holidays for me. A lot of the dialogue John C. Reilly has in the movie was representative of me asking those same questions of myself, specifically in December of last year.
I think it’s also relatively universal that there is this sense of wistfulness at this time of year, because we are conditioned to look at Christmas as a joyful thing, but it’s also a joyful thing that will be over very, very soon. You have to acknowledge the inevitability that good things will come to an end. Both of those things are fraught with tension and sadness, just as much as they are with joy. We can try to make every Christmas as happy as we can, and we all have our own ways of doing that, but we also know it’s going to be over soon, and that is perhaps a little miniature representation of our entire life. I could go really deep about this. But I wanted to address the fact that these are feelings that we have during the holidays, and that they are things that we can’t quite define or put in words.
Filmmaker: My last question for you is on a completely different topic: I saw Luca Guadagnino’s Queer last week, and I was surprised to see you turn up in a scene. How did that happen?
Lowery: It’s so funny. I’ve known Luca for a while, and he had reached out to me about making a cameo in another project, and the timing hadn’t worked out. He was gearing up to make Queer, and he sent me the script and asked me if I would play this part. We were supposed to be shooting [Mother Mary] exactly the same time. It just so happened his schedule shifted, and the window of opportunity opened; I was prepping in Germany, they were prepping in Rome, so it was really easy for me to fly over. And it was the most incredible weekend in Rome.
I’m not an actor in any shape or form, nor do I pretend to be. But whatever Luca wanted from me, I trusted, and he was happy with what I was able to provide. And I got to just sit there and watch him direct, to see how he makes films. I got to act opposite Daniel Craig—that’s a real humbling experience for the first time ever being on camera—and left completely confident that the scene would not make the final film. Lo and behold, a couple months ago, I got an email asking to come do ADR.
I was only getting a hint of what his vision for that movie was. There were a lot of visual effects to really bring it into that Powell and Pressburger world. Luca was telling me about these miniatures they were going to build, and all of the visual effects the way that they were going to do. I’d read the entire script and didn’t quite understand how what was on the page was going to be realized. He was explaining this very old-fashioned approach. As someone who’s always wanted to make movies with miniatures, it was really fun and very inspiring.
