ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with Violent Night writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller about the upcoming holiday action movie. The duo discussed David Harbour’s portrayal of Santa Claus and their thoughts on Sonic the Hedgehog‘s Big the Cat.
“When a team of mercenaries breaks into a wealthy family compound on Christmas Eve, taking everyone inside hostage, the team isn’t prepared for a surprise combatant: Santa Claus is on the grounds, and he’s about to show why this Nick is no saint,” reads the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Pat, an action movie with Santa Claus — it’s basically Die Hard with Santa Claus — is such a unique take. How did this idea gestate and begin with
Pat Casey: Die Hard? What’s that? I’ve never heard of it. No, obviously, we were fans of Die Hard. The idea of doing Die Hard with Santa … we did a thing like this back in high school. That was when we had the idea initially and did it for a local TV show we had when we were teenagers on the local cable access station, basically like Wayne’s World. We always thought it was really funny, and every few years, we’d be like, “could we do that Die Hard Santa thing as a real movie?” But then we would think, “no, that’s way too stupid. No one would ever go for that.”
Josh Miller: Then it turned out to be just stupid enough. I also think, to your initial Die Hard question, decades later, people were always debating whether or not Die Hard was a Christmas movie. The only reason that debate could even happen is that it’s set on Christmas, but it’s not about Christmas in the same way that The Santa Clause is about Christmas. So we wondered, “well, I mean can you do a version [where] there’s not going to be a debate because it’s about Santa Claus himself?” Our general feeling [was] that it had been a long time since anyone had made a real good R-rated action Christmas movie. The world was due.
Pat Casey: I mean, every Christmas, we’re always thinking about movies and ideas. So every Christmas, I feel like we’re always like, “we should make a Christmas movie.” And so we realized now was our opportunity to do it.
Josh, there’s been violent Santas before. Futurama has a really funny one, and we’ve seen various horror takes, but this is very unique as he’s still a hero. What about that specific framework did you really like for this movie?
Josh Miller: I think that was part of the idea that … I feel like Christmas horror has become such an increasingly popular thing, almost more and more every year. It was the idea that it’s not really a Santa movie, in our mind, if Santa is killing people. We wanted the challenge of “can you do an R-rated action movie that’s also essentially following all the rules of a true Christmas movie, which is all about believing in Santa and the Christmas spirit?” The general idea that we felt that of any TV special or whatever about Santa, it’s always the idea of “oh no, will Santa be able to finish delivering his presents?” Then the triumphant ending is, yes, Christmas will continue — which is obviously never the plot of a movie where Santa’s going around murdering people. I guess in Futurama that was kind of tied into the whole thing.
Pat Casey: But I mean, Santa is a hero. He’s a hero to kids everywhere. So all those other movies about a killer Santa who’s bad, that’s not the real Santa; this is a movie about the real Santa.
With David Harbour, the casting nailed it because he’s charming, he’s funny, and has a physicality. When you started seeing the scenes and the dailies and such, how cool was it to see these scenes you wrote come to life?
Pat Casey: I mean the crazy thing is that while we were writing the movie, even from the very first pitches, people were like, “who do you see as Santa?” We were like “David Harbour!” Then we would list off some other people just in case, but David Harbour is who we always wanted and who we always envisioned in our minds. To see him in the costume and really doing it … it was crazy, because it was just like, wow, this is literally our imagination come to life right in front of us. This is exactly what we wanted.
Josh Miller: Especially because we had nothing to do with them making an offer to him. I think that almost proves how perfect he is for it. They told us Universal was going to make an offer to David Harbour. We were like, “oh, that’s crazy because that’s who we always pictured.” Just for reading the script, everyone was just like, “who, right now, would make the perfect badass Santa?” It’s hard to think of someone who checks all the boxes the way Harbour does.
Pat Casey: You need someone who’s funny but is also good at the drama. Is big and can realistically kick ass, and also, you know, it’s Santa. He needs that special little twinkle in his eye. That’s the real key ingredient.
You guys are adapting It Takes Two, which is a phenomenal video game. The director of that Josef Fares, who has a film background, and that’s been so unique seeing his video games since he has that cinematic eye. So with that, what about that game spoke to you and made you want to adapt it?
Josh Miller: I mean, in some ways it’s the fact that it’s so obvious — at least to us and all the people involved in making it — what the premise is. Like that’s one of those … you don’t need your hot take on “how do you adapt It Takes Two?” It’s basically a movie premise about two parents who are bickering, and their kid, Liar Liar-style, makes a wish and sends them on this big Toy Story meets Alice in Wonderland meets Wizard of Oz kind of adventure. Not to imply there aren’t hurdles since it is a video game that’s 16 hours of gameplay and you have to figure out how to turn that into a 100 minute movie. That was what first drew us to it. The fact that the game is so fun … it’s a really unique game to play. Granted, some of that is unique to a video game and won’t translate to a movie, but the spirit of it just feels very cinematic.
Pat Casey: We’ve spent a lot of time playing the game together and replaying various parts. It’s a blast every time. It’s an incredible game. Josef’s so cool. I mean he’s a video game genius, so we’re trying to do it justice.
Josh Miller: Talking to him is interesting because he was even thinking of it in movie terms. So I know that — of course he’s proud of the game, he keeps winning all these Game of the Year awards — but I think there was even the element of him where he had these ideas that are more movie ideas that didn’t necessarily work in a video game, but that’s just how his brain works because of his background.
Pat, I was curious, you guys are talking about certain elements don’t really match and one thing that makes it takes too so unique is that the gameplay is always changing from scene to scene. Is there any way to incorporate that freshness as the movie goes along and as the scenes change to keep that type of feel?
Pat Casey: God, I hope so. No, but I mean that’s always part of the thing when doing a movie: thinking about how to make each sequence fresh. As was the case with Violent Night or with the Sonic movies. The premise of Sonic is that Sonic’s fighting robots continuously. But you can’t make the whole movie only Sonic fighting robots and it’s sort of like thinking about different kinds of sequences you can do. So each time you get to a new action sequence, the audience is like, “Ooh, what’s next?” Instead of like, “oh, more Sonic smashing robots.” That’s the challenge with any sort of action-heavy movie, including It Takes Two and Violent Night, is to think of ways to vary up all the sequences and with It Takes Two, how to incorporate some of those special gameplay elements in a way that feels movie-like instead.
Josh Miller: If anything, Hazelight made it hard on us because there’s too much good stuff from the game. So it is kind of like there’s a bit of triage of “oh no, well we can’t fit all this in. What’s the best stuff to keep?” You try to think of if there are ways that you can meld one level with another level so that fans of the game will get it, they’re like, “oh, I see, they combined these two things.”
Josh, in Sonic 2, you end with that Shadow, the Hedgehog tease, which is so fun. In the standalone Shadow game, he has guns and is such an edgelord. How do you find the right tone when adapting a character like that?
Josh Miller: That was a big challenge with us and Jeff [Fowler] and Toby [Ascher], breaking the story for Sonic 3 and, obviously, they’ll murder us if we reveal too much, but with a character like Knuckles it very quickly was easy to see how we’d make Knuckles work so you can take him seriously, but he can also be funny since this is a Sonic the Hedgehog movie. You look to characters like Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation or Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s easier to wrap your head around that with Shadow, again, because he’s not really supposed to be that funny. I’m trying to think of what we can say since we can’t reveal anything.
Pat Casey: You have to look for it in the contrast between Shadow and Sonic and the other characters. Because Shadow is a very serious guy, but you don’t want to make him into a big joke like Lego Batman or something because he’s got to carry a serious story. But yeah, we can’t really reveal much.
Looking at Sonic, the lore is just so wild and you’ve done such a great job bringing in like Tails and Knuckles so far. But do you want to get really weird? Do you want to bring in stuff like Big the Cat, stuff from the Archie comics, that sort of thing? What’s the potential here?
Josh Miller: One thing that makes our lives a little easier is that the rights for the games are different than the rights from the comics. So I think just wholesale, we can’t really use stuff from the Archie comics, specifically. That at least narrows down what kind of things we can be doing. But I mean, I think anytime we’re working on it … at some point gets real weird and crazy and then we have to get reined back in. I don’t even mean Pat and I specifically. The whole team does it, and they’re like “we can’t do that!” Or “as big budget as these movies are, we can’t even afford that so let’s stop thinking about it.”
Pat Casey: But we’re both pretty pro-Big the Cat. At times, Big has had a cameo in basically all of these movies and then we have to pull him out.
Pat, what has it meant to see Agent Stone become so beloved, since he is an original character? Part of that’s the performance, but he’s just become like such a great part of these films and that’s all on the writing crew and the film.
Pat Casey: I mean, we love it. We love that people have been praised Agent Stone. It is funny, because his role in the first one was not even quite as big as it was in the movie in the script phase, but like Jim thought Lee [Majdoub] was so funny and kept calling him, he was like, “let’s get Lee in here. Robotnik should be saying this to Agent Stone.” When we saw that first movie, we were like, “man, this Agent Stone is just killing it. So we’ve got to put more of him in the second one.” The fans really, really embraced him. So that was the right decision. I love seeing all the Agent Stone fan art and stuff.
Josh Miller: If anything working on Sonic 3 was gratifying — I mean it should definitely be gratifying for Lee, but I mean to your initial point of this character who’s not from the canon, and as Pat was noting, the initial version of him in the script wasn’t even really that interesting. There just needed to be someone there for Robotnik to talk to. He was even an amalgam of two different characters, and they’re just like, “this should only be one actor.” But in the process of Sonic 2, we started working on it before the first movie came out. So Stone barely figured into Sonic 2 because we didn’t realize fans loved him so much. Then we’re like, ” oh we’ve got to cram Stone into 2.” So my my point being is that now Sonic 3 was the first one that we started talking about after already seeing the love of Stone. I think it should be gratifying for Lee that Stone was getting talked about at the same level as Knuckles and Tails. There was never a version of Sonic 3 that Stone wasn’t going to be in a core character of.
