Audrey Geisel applied the same no-nonsense approach to deciding who was going to play The Grinch: Jim Carrey may be the biggest comedy star in the world, not to mention the one whose rubbery features make him pretty much a natural for playing a fantasy creature with green skin and a sinister leer. But even he was going to have to audition like everyone else before she would consider him for The Grinch.

And that was where the next problem came in: at the time, Carrey was playing Andy Kaufman in Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon. And, as anyone who has read anything about that movie knows, Carrey spent all his time in character, on set and even at home. He did, however, agree to let Audrey Geisel see Andy Kaufman doing an impression of how Jim Carrey would play The Grinch. And that did the trick. Audrey was stunned. “Without make-up,” she recalls, “he simply became The Grinch before my eyes.”

So plans began to be hatched for a big-budget, big-screen version of the story of how The Grinch, looking down from the slopes of Mount Crumpit on the happy little town of Whoville, decided he was going to spoil the Whos’ Christmas - out of spite and because, well, that’s what Grinches do. But then little Cindy Lou Who (Taylor Momsen), the only Who not to be totally in love with Christmas, decides to find out all about the Grinch - which, in Whoville, is the equivalent of signing a deal with the enemy. And finally, Cindy Lou and the Grinch join forces and come swooping down Mount Crumpit to return all the presents and find a whole new meaning for the holiday.

The first problem for Grazer and his team - headed by Oscar-winning make-up genius Rick Baker - was to figure how to make the Whos. Should they be human, animal, or maybe even bugs? The way Dr Seuss had drawn them, it could have gone either way.

“I started out making some of the Who test make-ups a little too scary,” says Baker. “Ron wanted me to hold back and make them more human, so that people could relate to them and know that they had a heart. It took some time to get the balance between Seuss-like and human-like for the Whos.”

Recognising that children’s storybooks and movies work in slightly different ways, Grazer encouraged Baker to keep trying. It was worth the effort. “Ron’s Whos were different, in that they looked like they were from a different world and that this world was governed by a different sensibility and their own philosophy,” he says. “But, at the same time, they were human enough and cute enough to satisfy my aesthetic.”

Next problem was the Grinch himself. Baker started out simply painting Grinch-like designs on his own face. “But I ended up looking like someone from the cast of Cats,” he admits. In the end, he opted for full rubber make-up, a spandex lycra suit with individually sewn yak hairs dyed green, plus contact lenses and false teeth. It was, says Carrey, “like being buried alive on a daily basis”.

Just to make sure his director knew what he was going through, Carrey made Howard submit to the make-up process himself. “Ron never did the lenses, though,” grins Carrey. “It covers your entire eyeball and that’s what pushes you over Niagara. When that artificial snow gets in there, it’s all over.”