Last Christmas Director On Why He Cast Emma Thompson As An Immigrant

It was both. The movie is based on the song ‘Last Christmas’. It was hard-wired in there. When Emma [Thompson] wrote her script, other than ‘Last Christmas’, she would write, “They walk around and it’s a good place to play some George.”

There were some spots in the movie that were set up to have a George song. When I came onboard, we started going through all of his music and just realising that his music is so great that I then started to steer us towards, hard-wiring it into the movie a little bit more — like using ‘Heal the Pain’, which I felt was such an anthem for the movie as much as ‘Last Christmas’ was, because it’s so much about what the characters are going through.

We just kinda expanded on that. That’s why we open with, in the church because we wanted to see Kate as a kid. I thought, how great it would be if she was singing a hymn version of ‘Heal the Pain’. When we were in post, we started realising, gosh, we can use more and more of his music.

That said, were there George Michael songs that didn’t make the cut?

I was always a fan of his but working on this film and really doing a deep dive into his catalogue just made me realised what an amazing talent he was. My biggest regret is that I wish he was around to see this movie because I really think he would love it.

Also, he was involved in the beginning when Emma took on the project. She’d talked to him about it. It was important to him that we brought in some element about the homeless because that was a big cause for him.

We got most of them in but some covers I would like to get in. His cover of Queen’s ‘Somebody to Love’, which he did at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert at Wembley, is one of my favourites. I would also love to get his version of Stevie Wonder’s ‘They Won’t Go When I Go’.

So there were a lot. His catalogue is so deep. For me, the exciting thing about Last Christmas is that people who were his fans will get to rediscover him and people who didn’t necessarily know his music before will now get this discovery of this amazing artiste they weren’t aware of.

It hangs over the city, the whole country really. But the thing about this movie, for Kate’s family, it’s really an immigrant’s story. You can’t really tell an immigrant’s story in London without playing into Brexit because it does hang over the immigrants.

We try to touch it in the lightest possible way. We didn’t want to make it a political story. At the same time, it would not be an honest story if we didn’t have an immigrant family dealing with the fears of what Brexit means to them.

Why did you cast Emma Thompson as Kate’s mum, Petra? She’s so British that we have problems buying her as an immigrant.

She was never meant to play that role. She was sitting there while we were putting this movie together, and I was going, “Wait a minute, I am going to have Emma Thompson on the set with me every single day. Am I crazy not to put Emma Thompson, one of the greatest actresses of all time, in this movie?"

I felt that she could play that role and give it the humour it needed. It’s a very complicated role. Petra’s a very overbearing, damaged woman but she still needs to have this lightness about her.

Some of the biggest laughs we get came from Emma. Boris Isakovic, who plays Kate’s father, is Serbian. We tried to be authentic as much as we could, but at the same time we were making a movie and we wanted to make sure it was entertaining with the best cast.

Last Christmas (NC16) is now in cinemas.

Photos: UIP