Tyler Taormi­na: ​‘The sound­track is one of the ger­mi­nat­ing seeds of the work’

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.

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.