One of the supreme highlights of my 2024 Cannes experience was discovering the films of New York filmmaker Tyler Taormina. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is presented through its marketing as a cheesetastic holiday movie, but is in fact a wide-eyed paean to the dynamics of family and the suburbs as a place of ecstatic joy. It’s his feature follow-up to 2019’s Ham on Rye, a strange coming of age movie in which the suburbs is not painted in such a dewy-eyed light.
Your first feature, Ham on Rye, was a film that was critical of life in the suburbs. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, is almost the opposite, framing it as this rapturous place.
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I would say that there are thorns presented to that particular rose. Ham on Rye is for me the story of staying in the womb too long and not cutting the cord. I think that Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is the story of how tempting it is to stay in the suburbs. The bosom of childhood is what the suburbs becomes in this film. But I think we present a little bit of darkness and some of the limitations. But also, I wanted to make a Christmas film in a way that was warm and inviting and not written with cynicism.
Where did that impulse come from?
Well, the germinating seed of the film really is my writing partner and I sort of waxing poetic about our memories with family members and these little details that have become sort of characterised in our minds. It really was with an affection for those memories that started the whole thing.
How were you able to select and assemble the soundtrack of wall-to-wall Christmas tunes?
Well, so the first thing I’ll say, and I always take this sort of compliment, but none of the songs in the movie are Christmas songs, but they feel like it. They’re all just pop songs from the ’60s, or at least that sound like the ’60s. The soundtrack is really one of the germinating seeds of the work, and it came to us from listening to the Scorpio Rising soundtrack. We wrote the script listening to that soundtrack, and it’s pretty obvious. It was very difficult to get all the licensing for the songs. And in the end, there’s a lot of songs that sort of just sound like the period so that we can play the bigger, more expensive songs that are really important.
Rather than use the act structure, your films – including this one – are more like passing through a moment of time, and seeing that time from many different perspectives.
The shape is everything. Yeah, I definitely am aware that I am not working in a sort of traditional dramaturgical way. And I think that the way in which Eric Berger and I approach a script, we’re really studying a sort of milieu and what it’s like to be there and what it’s like for a camera curiously going from person to person.
What did the initial script for the film look like?
The way in which I understand these films is actually through drawing out the space. What I mean is we drew a house on the top left corner of a piece of paper, and we populated all the scenes we wanted to be there, sort of left to right in order you’re going to see them.
It’s like you’re trying to trap a moment in amber with this film.
Well, the first Christmas ornaments were made of amber. Yeah, this was a big thought of ours, day one of writing. And I kind of regret not naming the main character Amber.
