“You’ll shoot your eye out!”
We really wanted the original cast to come back.
That was a timing thing.
Yana Blajeva/Warner Bros.
PETER BILLINGSLEY: It was a little ‘now or never.’
We built 11 houses around the Parker family house, including the Bumpus house.
We needed the right resources.
Yana Blajeva/Warner Bros.
You don’t want to mess it up or just revert back to a bunch of callbacks.
A couple of criteria for those jobs is that you have to love the original.
You really got to love it, not just like it.
Yana Blajeva/Warner Bros.
And you’ve got to want to protect it.
You’ve spent the majority of your adult life working as a producer.
Was it intimidating to step back into being the lead of a movie?
Yana Blajeva/Warner Bros.
It’s been a minute.
He’s a producer on this and we spoke with him a lot about it.
He’s very supportive.
He said, ‘You know that’s never left you, it’s in you.
it’s possible for you to jump into this easily.’
As both a producer and a friend, he gave me a lot of confidence.
Ralphie is a relentless guy.
In the original, everyone’s telling him no, Santa’s kicking him in the face.
He’s just getting up, dusting off, and moving on.
He’s not going to stop trying to convince people to give him this BB gun.
I love that quality.
That’s a good quality in an adult and in a protagonist.
You want your protagonist to be relentless in pursuit of whatever his goal is.
And he’s a dreamer.
I always say he’s a dreamer and a nightmarer.
He has visions of how he wants things to go and how they can go horribly wrong.
That’s relatable, if we’re honest with ourselves.
Those were the early pillars that I grabbed onto.
I did rewatch the original a lot.
Since he never left me, it took a minute, but he got right back in there.
I love that you went back and rewatched the original.
We watched it over and over to be like, “See how they did that?
Let’s not make the mistake of not handling it like this.”
For example, not everyone is super nice to each other.
It’s okay to be a little mischievous.
It’s okay to allow the characters to be a bit flawed.
That’s what makes them real.
I’ve always loved that this family doesn’t feel Disney-fied.
That’s exactly the word that I use.
Because people ask me, “Why does this movie resonate?”
Because it’s a real family, man.
It’s not that family, but it’s also not the Bradys or Disney-fied, as you said.
The dad gets a little hot.
The mother is overburdened.
The brothers are at each other’s throats.
It’s like, “Yep, that’s my family.”
It’s so wonderful to have much of the original cast return.
How challenging was that?
Surely, not all of them have been acting for the past 40 years?
And that didn’t matter to us.
Theyarethese characters and we wanted them to come back.
Fortunately, they all wanted to come back.
It’s been nearly 40 years, what’s Scott Farkus been up to?
What are Flick and Schwartz up to?'
You just couldn’t imagine anyone else playing those roles.
Who was the hardest to track down?
The good news is that we had such a good experience on the original that everyone kept in touch.
I’ve seen all the guys throughout the years.
We’ve never been able to all be in the same place at the same time.
So that was pretty cool.
We’re starting to blow snow for the next night’s work.
I looked around, and I was like, Oh, my gosh, we’re here.
And I called them I said, “You guys got to get down here right now.
Just get out of the hotel, get over here.”
What made Julie Hagerty the right fit?
Did Melinda have any input as to who would be taking on her role?
Melinda, as you say, has retired from acting and wished us the best in our pursuits.
I had spoken to her about this.
Julie has such an unbelievable comedic sense of timing.
She has also the heart of the mother as a person and as an actress.
Julie’s been in a lot of very cool, very big movies.
What I love about Julie is this was her instinct from day one.
She wanted it to feel familiar but wanted to make it her own.
She also had the luxury of it being thirty years later.
So with that character being much later, she really made it her own.
I’ve always loved the relationship with Ralphie and his mom in the first one.
One of the relationships I love is the relationship with Erinn Hayes, who plays my wife.
It’s very real, that mother-in-law, daughter-in-law relationship.
They love each other, but there’s a little bit of competitiveness between them as well.
The original movie is based on the writings of Jean Shepherd.
Here, Ralphie is trying to become a writer.
So, how much are you still turning to Shepherd’s work in this story?
We optioned a lot of Jean’s other books for this movie.
Ultimately, this is the story about your first holiday without a loved one.
It was definitely challenging.
Some of the powers that be were very nervous of the ability to thread that needle.
But it gives great stakes to the world and to this Christmas in particular for Ralphie.
The old man was such a part of Ralphie’s life.
This movie wanted very much to be a mid-life coming-of-age, to have a similar trajectory throughout.
It is a coming-of-age film.
The second one needs to feel like this."
