‘Klaus‘ is a 2019 animated Christmas adventure comedy film written and directed by Sergio Pablos, produced by his company The SPA Studios and distributed by Netflix. Serving as an alternate origin story of Santa Claus independent from the historical Saint Nicholas of Myra and using a fictional 19th-century setting, the plot revolves around a postman stationed in ‘Smeerensburg’, an island town to the Far North who befriends a reclusive toymaker (Klaus). The fictional ‘Smeerensburg’ is actually based on real life ‘Smeerenburg’, a whaling settlement on Amsterdam Island in northwest Svalbard: it was founded by the Danish and Dutch in 1619 as one of Europe’s northernmost outposts, but was abandoned around 1660, when the local bowhead whale population decimated and whaling developed into a pelagic industry.

From an interview with director Sergio Pablo’s on Polygon.com

Was the setting of Smeerensburg inspired by anything in the real world?

Well the town of Smeerenburg — that’s Smeerenburg without the [second] ‘s’ — actually does, well did, exist. In my research, I found a list of the northernmost human settlements in history. And one of them was Smeerenburg. It was up in Scandinavia, I think it was Norway. It used to be a very prosperous whaling post back in the 1600s. I like my films to have certain roots in plausible reality. Now the place is a pile of rocks and does not exist anymore. It’s a bit of a thing of legend for Scandinavian culture. So I thought, well let me kind of misspell it on purpose, but I’d still like to have that grounded sense of a plot. Plus, there was something about the word “smeer” that made the name sound interesting to me.

Where did the idea for the Sámi people as Santa’s helpers come from?

We were basically making a list of all the things that make up Santa’s legend. So like flying reindeer, going down the chimney, the stockings, […] But we don’t have elves. What do we get? So I did my research and I found out about the Sámi. I thought, well if we go on this stream of “kindness is contagious,” [Klaus and Jesper] deliver this toy to this little Sámi girl and in exchange the Sámi come back and help them, that would actually fit in very well with that central message. We would not show them as elves, but they would still be in the burgeoning workshop. Not only that, but Margu was one of the main characters in the film. Margu is a little Sámi girl and she was essential in Jesper’s transformation. At one point in the film, I […] realized, oh actually this works so much better if they speak only Sámi. So […] we found Neda [Labba] all the way up in Tromsø, Norway. I went up there to record her and my relationship with her was very similar to that with Jesper and Margu, because she doesn’t speak English, I don’t speak Sámi. So we had to do this whole recording session through translation and mimicry. I brought a lot of that with me when we started doing those conversations between Margu and Jesper that are so central to the story.

From an interview with director Sergio Pablo’s on Polygon.com