Last Christmas: Paul Feig’s curiosity about Emilia Clarke

After playing the vengeful Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones, Emilia Clarke is spreading her wings.

Emilia Clarke is taking a leap from dragons in Game of Thrones to romance in Last Christmas. Picture: Getty

Tone is everything, says Paul Feig. “It’s all I care about. I always look for movies that have a difficult tone.” With his new film, Last Christmas, he has given himself a bit of a balancing act, a significant tonal challenge. Set in London, it’s a yuletide romantic comedy chock-full of George Michael numbers that’s also about trauma, Brexit, immigration and self-­destructive behaviour.

Finding the right tone, he says, involves bringing together those distinctive, potentially contradictory elements in a way that an audience can accept.

“The fun comes out of the extremity of the characters and the situations, but once you find those, you have to make sure they feel that they could actually happen. I think tone is really about guarding against the moment when audi­ences go, ‘Oh, come on, that’s dumb, why would they do that?’”

Director Paul Feig pictured in Melbourne. Picture: Aaron Francis

Feig, actor, writer, director and dedicated wearer of suits — today he’s in bespoke Anderson & Sheppard teamed with a tartan Ralph Lauren jacket — is in Melbourne ahead of the Australian premiere of Last Christmas. As the title suggests, the film is inspired by ­Michael’s song. It is written by Emma Thompson and Bryony Kimmings, and stars Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) and Henry Golding (A Simple Favour, Crazy Rich Asians).

READ MORE Emilia Clarke and the final Game of Thrones | Paul Feig’s A Simple Favour

As well as tonal challenges, Feig also likes to take the opportunity to present actors in a new way. “That’s my favourite thing in the world,” he says. “It’s why I try to meet people — auditions, whatever. But when you get to meet somebody, especially somebody with a name that audiences know, I’m obsessed with wondering: who are they? Let’s have a drink, meet for dinner, do something.”

As a Game of Thrones fan, he was curious about Clarke, who plays the severe, vengeful, dragon-riding would-be occupant of the Iron Throne, Daenerys Targaryen. “Four years ago, I found out she was in LA, and I thought I’d like to meet her. She was delightful and funny and we were laughing all the time.” That was a side of her, he thought, that he wanted to show. When he read the script for Last Christmas, he says, “it just felt so much like Emilia”.

She plays the scatterbrained, fast-talking Kate, who works in a Christmas-themed shop, auditions in a disorganised fashion for musical roles, avoids her domineering, pessimistic mother (played by Thompson), couch surfs with friends and leaves every kind of disaster in her wake.

Emilia Clarke in Last Christmas. Picture: Supplied

There are traumas, we discover, that Kate is doing her best to keep at bay, but in the most erratic fashion. One day she meets a handsome stranger (Golding) and starts to think that life could be lived differently.

WATCH The trailer for Last Christmas

Casting Michelle Yeoh as the proprietor of the Christmas shop was another decision that grew out of curiosity. The connection came via Golding, who had made A Simple Favour with Feig before starring in Crazy Rich Asians, in which Yeoh played his imperious, judgmental mother. Feig knew her from drama, martial arts and action roles, but the minute he met her for dinner, he says, he recognised a comic talent that he wanted to make the most of.

“I get obsessed with showing if anyone has any sense of humour,” Feig says. “But it has to be the right role, that’s the thing. It’s got to be everything I see in them.”

As a filmmaker you have to be ready to have your expectations reversed, be prepared for surprises, and be able to make the most of them. “That’s why I always want the writers on set with me, and I don’t tend to rehearse a lot, because it’s not until you’re there in the moment that it becomes real. You don’t go off script or far afield, you just want to play.”

What you think is a comic highlight, he says, may not play out the way you expect; but an improvisation or an aside “just destroys”.

“One of the biggest laughs I’ve got in one of my movies ever,” Feig says, is a Thompson ad lib in the final scene of Last Christmas.

Since the runaway success of Feig’s third feature, Bridesmaids, written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, he has been known for his focus on female leads. In the case of his 2011 hit Bridesmaids, which also launched the career of one of his regular collaborators, Melissa McCarthy, this focus was welcomed. But he has seen the other side too: his 2016 version of Ghostbusters with female leads was met by an internet campaign of detractors and a level of vitriol that Feig wasn’t ready for.

“I was very surprised. But it’s the natural contraction before expansion.” The hostility laid bare the assumptions behind it, he says, in a way that helped generate a debate. “I wish it hadn’t affected us, but it got things out of the way.”

As if addressing his detractors, he says: “Kick up your heels and scream all you want on the internet. But you’re not stopping this train. There are audiences who have felt under-served, and talented people who hadn’t got to do what they could do, and now they are, and they’re proving that they’re great and also commercial.

“And if Hollywood’s making money, they are going to keep at it.”

Feig now has an inclusion rider on all productions with his company, Feigco Productions, a provision that means at least 50 per cent of cast and crew must be ­diverse.

“There have been times when people have given lip service to this sort of thing, but then it goes back to how it was. But in the wake of MeToo and all this stuff, finally the town has woken up. Women have said, ‘We’re not putting up with this any more.’ People of colour have said, ‘We’re not putting up with this any more.’ And now it’s up to any of us who have any kind of clout to support it. We have to be allies, so the opportunities can be there.”

Ghostbusters was considered a failure, but Feig is well aware that films and television shows can get second lives and re-evaluations. We talk about Freaks and Geeks, his funny, heartfelt TV series set in a 1980s high school that went to air in 1999. It was cancelled after 12 episodes, but it has been on a wave of critical attention and fan love ever since.

“It’s crazy to make a TV show people are still talking about after 20 years. We had this amazing cast” — it includes Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Segel and Linda Cardellini — “and they’re all successful. People say, ‘Are you going to do a reunion?’ and I say, ‘I can’t afford to, they’re all too high-priced.’ ”

Next cab off the rank is another tonal challenge, in a genre with plenty of rules to live and die by: a Universal monster movie. “I’ve finished the script, it’s in with the studio and hopefully they’ll let me do it,” he says.

“It’s in the grand tradition of Frankenstein and Dracula and Bride of Frankenstein, and I’ve created a few new characters. I ­really want to get right into this one. I’m hoping to start in the new year, and I’m just waiting to hear if the studio agrees.”

Last Christmas opens on Thursday.