With just three features to his name, Tyler Taormina has cemented himself as one of the most perceptive chroniclers of small-town America. His 2019 debut, Ham on Rye, tracked a gaggle of high school seniors as they geared up for prom night and life away from home. Shot by Taormina’s regular cinematographer, Carson Lund, the film heralded two motifs that would haunt the director’s cinema. On the one hand, an interest in immortalizing perfectly anonymous stretches of US suburbia as dreamlike, surreal terrains; on the other, an unresolved tension between our need for communion and the forces that inevitably pull us apart.
Everyone longs to connect in Taormina’s films, but few ever manage––a tragic state of affairs that was basically the plot of Happer’s Comet (2022), a nocturnal snapshot of a US town and a few of its residents, all of them captured as they wait, alone, for something to happen.
Which is a good way of thinking about Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. Shot again by Lund and written by Taormina and Eric Berger (the director’s co-scribe in Ham on Rye), the film follows an Italian-American family over the course of one last dinner-cum-reunion at grandma’s Long Island home. “Last” because the place, unbeknownst to the overarching majority of this garrulous bunch, will soon be put on the market. Hence the melancholic register. For all its gags and absurdist humor––much of it courtesy of two hopelessly incompetent cops played by Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington––Christmas Eve is drenched in nostalgia. It’s a story told by someone with an insider’s knowledge of this world and its arcane rituals––someone who, as others at the dinner table, knows this may well be the last time they all sit together. With its restless zig-zagging between characters and conversations, Christmas Eve may not offer much in the way of plot. But it does nail a vibe: a preemptive longing for a time and place that are evaporating as we watch.
After Christmas Eve premiered at Cannes this year, Taormina and I sat to discuss the significance of rituals in the film, his ability to wring the surreal out of the most quotidian activities, and his disorienting handling of time.
The Film Stage: As it was for Ham on Rye and Happer’s Comet, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is also concerned with rituals. I was hoping we could start by unpacking that leitmotif.
Tyler Taormina: You know, I’ve learned about this interest––or rather I’ve found the context for it––only last year at my little sister’s wedding, easily one of the happiest days of my life. It really reminded me of a premiere, in the sense that right at the beginning there was this horrific existential dread; I was so anxious… but once the ceremony wrapped, I kept thinking about my friends’ own weddings. My family’s pretty conservative and emblematic of average America––much more so than my friends, who are, to put it very concisely, left-leaning. And yet, having attended a few of their weddings, I realized that they were the ones who didn’t seem to buy the whole sacrament. Like, they didn’t really let loose to it.
And what I realized with Ham on Rye especially is that the more we can let loose to rituals, the more we can enjoy life. It’s a thing of grace. Rituals are also inherently sentimental––we are here, and we’re alive. Slavoj Žižek says that even if you don’t believe in Christianity, there are things about its ceremonies that can complicate matters. You’re at mass, and you partake in all these very specific choreographies––same as a wedding! You’re basically repeating gestures that people have done all through time, and that reinforces belief. That’s another aspect I find very interesting.
There’s also something to be said about the relatively short time span of these rituals. Your films seldom stretch longer than 24 hours; what is it that interests you about these time-constrained narratives?
Well, when I fell in love with movies in a really deep way I was in my early twenties, and I started to look for trends in those that spoke to me the most. Stuff like Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, or Slacker, or Mystery Train, Elephant, and then, later, Voci nel Tempo… they were movies that seemed to focus mostly on ambience and characters. And that, as someone coming from music, really intrigued me, though I didn’t know why exactly. So I decided to explore that interest.
And the way I framed it in my mind is that these are ecosystem films. They don’t explore a story in any conventional way, but they explore an environment. It’s as if you placed the camera in space and the camera became the character. The camera’s curious and wants to know who’s there, what’s going on. There’s something very ontological about it, and I feel like you would lose a lot of that ontology in a more elliptical narrative. The very first short I made, Wild Flies, was also a total ecosystem film, my own exploration of that form.
I’m happy to hear you use the word “ecosystem”; like its predecessors, Christmas Eve is also a film primarily concerned with moods and atmosphere. But how did the writing unfold? How does one work on a script that’s powered less by plot beats than vibes?
I’m going to have to speculate here because I’m not too sure how these things came to be, but I think I’ve had a bit of practice with the previous films. If my movies tend to embarrass me, which they do, by the end of them I can also sense the totality of what I experienced, and that’s what creates this thing in my body that I don’t understand. But it really, really lights me up. That’s where I think the true expression lies. The trick is to convince someone to follow you for the whole journey and keep them wanting more. Which means figuring out the right rhythm, the story impulses, different ways to intrigue and parse information. If you get people to stick with you, then the hope is that by the end they will think back to those earlier scenes and feel the displacement of where and how long they’ve traveled. That’s pretty fantastic to me.
Take Ham on Rye. The movie very much embarrasses me, but I’m also very proud of it because by the end, when you remember the kids talking, that makes for a weird juxtaposition. Same in Christmas Eve. We’re hanging out with these teenagers, the night is unfurling, and there’s, like, a sadness coming through, but a sense of wonder as well––it feels like this distant thing that I can’t quite believe I was there for. And I love it.
Tyler Taormina
What about your research then? There were so many details here that looked like they had been cribbed from someone’s childhood.
Christmas Eve really is based on my own experiences, and the inspiration was my emotional inability to watch home movies. I just couldn’t do it. And still can’t. There’s something too painful about them. Only by making the film was I finally able to conquer this burn of time passing, and I feel like I captured the energy as if in a jog. It’s like I’m watching my own life onscreen. Of course it’s not just mine: it’s also Eric Berger’s, my co-writer, and Kevin Anton’s, who was assisting with the story. We really brought in a lot from our own families, including some specific characters from each. Even the dialogue you hear in some of the home movies played in the film is often reenacted.
Much of our research was simply just a matter of looking into the past that way, but it’s not all literal. A translation can never be literal; it just doesn’t work that way. There’s an emotional truth as well that just feels right. Plus there’s plenty in the film that’s just fictitious, and part of that was the beginning of our writing process. Eric and I went through the whole family tree. We talked about everybody’s lives. And one of the things that was most informative––and this is kind of going back to what I was saying earlier about our relationship with rituals––is that we decided that the patriarch had died while the kids were still young, and that their overbearing mother had parented them all in different ways, and that they themselves had become different parents to their own children. But the trauma had been passed down through generations, which helped us chart this big psychological portrait of the family. We didn’t tell the actors any of this, and that’s, I think, what makes it seem so real.
Christmas Eve is powered by the same tension that fueled Ham on Rye––between our desire to come together and the forces that, sooner or later, lead us all to pair off. Could you speak about that friction?
Absolutely. But first I wanted to say one more thing that you sparked in me just now: I really do believe that life is worth celebrating. But it’s so, so hard to find a space to dance and enjoy and sing. Come to think of it: a big part of why I like to explore rituals is to confront the fact that on my best day I can actually do those things. I wait and wait for those moments, but they’re so rare.
To go back to your question, I think the scene where the teens all pair off is so deeply central to the heart of this movie because––and this is just my interpretation––it seems to me this is the engine that motivates our crossing the threshold into the next age. After all, Christmas Eve, the day before Christmas… it’s an entryway to tomorrow. And what’s driving these people to grow is almost a sort of automatic need. They have to explore this sexual realm that’s completely foreign to them. Some of my early sexual memories as a teenager still blow my mind; it felt like I was being born for the first time. It’s such a formative experience. Sex, companionship, and love are so central to our being I feel like they make great subjects.
As Christmas Eve moves away from the grown-ups to track their teenage children, the narrative feels looser, the conversations less-scripted. I was wondering if there were any substantial differences in how you wrote and directed the two cohorts––adults and kids––and if you left the latter more room for improv.
I did, yes. I think that has partly to do with the fact that a lot of these youngsters were non-professional actors; I thought they might shine a little more if they were just being prompted for topics and having fun together. We got a lot of truth from them that way. I know I wanted the kids’ section to feel like a betrayal, but a wholesome one, and I wanted the whole film to feel like it was unfurling and slowly wilting like a flower. That’s how I pictured its form: a slow and gentle opening that points to death. But it’s hard to say. I just feel that each puzzle piece has its own function and things it must accomplish to feel true to me. And by the end I knew the film’s chemistry so well that I didn’t think in terms of what this or that scene needed to do, but what felt right and what didn’t.
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By restlessly zig-zagging between different characters and chats, your camera fosters a kind of omniscient narration. But how did you manage to retain a temporal continuity amid all the hopscotching? What informed your conversations with your editor, Kevin Anton?
That’s something accomplished in the script phrase. And that’s also why Kevin is credited as a story editor. He was on the writing retreats with us, not actually writing screen pages but listening to how the narrative pinballing would operate. In fact, it left us very little room for improvisation and rearrangement in the edit room. If you think about it, these scenes all have some portions of the family in them. So you have to be extremely careful about the sequencing; there’s this weird contemporaneous logic that you need to be conscientious of.
Actually, how we did it is we drew out the whole storyline in space. Which meant I was able to see where everyone was at each time. And the contemporaneity had to be understood at the script level to give the film that feeling of psychedelia: this is all chaos, and everyone’s out and about living their lives. That’s something I was extremely interested in, how these people could both share a sense of togetherness and also a sense of inescapable alienation. They’re all under the same roof but have separate experiences and are never fully cognizant of one another, you know?
I do. And I also think the soundtrack helped lots with the sequencing you were describing. There were songs in Christmas Eve that felt like bridges between different conversations; as they did in Ham on Rye, some of them registered as commentary, too. How did you go about choosing them?
I didn’t realize this until much later in the process, but I was so fascinated by the lyrics of these songs. A lot of them were like, I love you, or Don’t ever leave me, or You’re the greatest thing, or I need you so badly… and the singers all had this manic frenzy. I wanted to reappropriate those lyrics in different contexts. A mother who’s losing her influence over her 16-year-old daughter, say, or the cousin who can’t seem to extricate himself from the family womb. I thought there was an interesting interplay with the lyrics that I didn’t even intend.
Take the lyrics of “The Point of No Return”: You just can’t get off a train / That’s moving down the track / I’m at the point of no return / And for me there’ll be no turning back. Now, that’s pretty incredible in the context of this movie! I didn’t choose these songs for their lyrics, but for their manic energy, which makes absolute sense for the way I think of cinema and this story specifically.
If Christmas Eve conjures that surrealism we were talking about that’s also credit to Carson Lund’s cinematography. Like Ham on Rye before it, this one traffics in odd, dreamlike visuals. How did you two wring out so much wonder from such unassuming settings?
Carson and I spoke a lot about references, though we don’t really need to talk that much at this point. He just gets it! [Laughs] He’ll read [the script] and he’ll go, “Oh yeah, I know what this is!” I think that’s because our upbringings were very similar, and so are our points of nostalgia––as you could see in Christmas Eve and Eephus. We also share the same sensibility in terms of ambient cinema, and we both come from music, which is another part of it. But yes: I storyboard intensely by myself, and the storyboards are probably 70-to-80% representative of what you see in the film. I’ll share them with Carson and we’ll discuss ideas. And once on set we won’t look at the storyboards unless it’s absolutely necessary, like for scenes that require some complex blocking. Otherwise we just go by our memory of the storyboards. He chimes in with great ideas and I’m always open to his beautiful mind.
How much did you end up shooting and how much did you cut out in the end?
In terms of additional scene work, almost nothing was cut. But as far as the odds and ends of each scene are concerned, we cut quite a bit. We shot for 25 days. Which was tight, yes, but it never felt impossible.
Speaking of time: there’s something beautifully disorienting about the way you handle it here. I’m still not sure I could pinpoint when exactly the film is set. Some of your temporal markers (like the brick-sized mobile phones) seem to suggest the late ‘90s, but there are other, older and newer items that blur things…
Well, the film is nostalgic, so obviously we didn’t want to show modern cars or iPhones or anything of the sort. I actually think that the 2010s marked an incredible decline in aesthetics. Even the way we would decorate our homes with those “Live Laugh Love” signs––it all became incredibly ugly and I didn’t want to photograph it. Maybe this my own nostalgia talking, but I find that the home décor of the film’s period has a warmer feeling. The cars, the clothes––just to photograph that is emotional.
But to single out specific historical events of the era, like when people reference things that are happening around them at the time, I find that generally corny. Except for Ricky D’Ambrose’s film [The Cathedral]. It’s just not the point of Christmas Eve. It’s absolutely not the point. It’s a feeling of time passing, if anything, and I didn’t want the film to be read through that part of your brain, you know? I don’t want that part to be working here; I wanted to stimulate something different.
I like how some of these objects do not just blur one’s temporal coordinates, but also heighten the film’s melancholy. Where did you find them? And what was the rationale behind the amalgamation?
You celebrate Christmas, I take it?
I do, yes.
You know those decorations that have been around like your whole life? Isn’t it weird how these objects gain this weird power over time? Well, the whole film is filled with things from the entire community we shot with. Like, everyone’s most sentimental possessions are right in every shot. Which is pretty amazing to think of. If memories could sort of physically overlap one another in this house they would create such a dense fog––you couldn’t even cross through it!
But yes: Paris Peterson was our production designer, and he’s just a sensitive genius. A beautiful, beautiful man. He wallpapered the whole house. Bear in mind the house you see in the film is actually four different houses. And in three of those the matriarchs had passed that same year––which is to say last year. And the kids were about to sell the properties. We shot right in that time, which is essentially the plot of this movie.
It’s as if reality had magically spilled into it.
Absolutely. It was really, really crazy. But these people now have this film as a beautiful artifact. Though the main house you’re probably thinking of, that one we completely changed and turned into a little swirl of a memory.
As an On Cinema fan, I’m contractually obligated to ask about your collaboration with Gregg Turkington.
God, he was great, wasn’t he?
He was! He was also, I thought, channeling something of his On Cinema persona; his near-robotic moves and drone-like delivery, both in the film and the show, always feel a little extraterrestrial. I’ve been watching him act for years now and I still don’t know if he can move his neck.
I know! [Laughs] And I think that stiffness was maybe part of the directions I gave him. I really wanted him to be totally non-human, which I think comes across, and to use his body to depict that. The way he and Michael run after Emily, hoping to catch her as she flees with the bagels… those runs are so brilliant. I think Gregg’s gonna love this movie.
Has he not seen it yet?
Not yet, no. But he was just so, so supportive and positive throughout. He really is such a beautiful person.
How and where did you cross paths with Turkington and Michael Cera? And how did you end up recruiting them?
Michael saw Ham on Rye in 2019 and he reached out saying he really liked it. Then, a week later, he said he wanted to write a film together. At first I didn’t know how and if I could write a studio comedy. It’s not my forte, but I thought we’d talk more about it. Then when he pitched me his film called Gummy I realized why he’d thought of me: we are on the same page. We wrote Gummy together with Eric Berger, and we’ve been collaborating creatively ever since. I hope it’ll be his directorial debut; we are looking to produce it as soon as we can. But anyway: Michael then connected me with Gregg, and the rest just followed.
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point opens on November 8.
The post “Life Is Worth Celebrating”: Tyler Taormina on Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point first appeared on The Film Stage.
