Zemeckis: 'Carol had to be set in UK'

A Christmas Carol director Robert Zemeckis has said that he never considered setting his adaptation of Charles Dickens's classic story outside the UK.

Speaking at the London press conference for the 3D animated film, the Back To The Future filmmaker insisted that he didn't want to take the movie away from the source material's British roots.

"Set it in another country? No, never," he remarked. "A Christmas Carol in Miami? I just could never imagine it. It never crossed my mind."

Zemeckis explained that the pioneering performance-capture technology, which involves actors' movements and expressions being mapped onto a computer and rendered as photorealistic animation, gave him the opportunity to bring a fresh approach to a well known tale.

"The descriptive imagery that Mr Dickens puts in his writing has never been truly realised in a way that I think he may have imagined it," he noted. "We really never had the tools to do such a large rendition or landscape of it. Now we finally have a tool to bring an illustrated version of it to life."

Jim Carrey, Colin Firth, Gary Oldman and Bob Hoskins star in A Christmas Carol, which opens in cinemas worldwide on Friday.