Cannes 2024 (Directors’ Fortnight): Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point | Interview of Tyler Taormina

Presented at the Directors’ Fornight as part of the Cannes Film Festival 2024, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point loosely centers a large extended family, whose members span every age group, united by the Christmas Eve tradition. The adults prepare dinner as the younger children play video games in the basement, and everyone comes together for the gift-giving ceremony. And despite the massive roster, the movie gives due time to each character, providing a well-rounded picture of how everyone fits into the family dynamic. Even characters outside the family are given time to exist as people, creating a rich world within the film.

Whereas most Christmas films pivot around the holiday, this one is mostly experiential: it becomes clear that the audience is witnessing a random point in all of these characters’ lives, and it only happens to be Christmas Eve. Around the halfway point, the focus shifts to the teenagers of the family who sneak out to hang with their friends, and from there the movie turns into a carefree romp through the Long Island suburbs. Nothing notable happens, nor does anyone learn a moral or lesson, yet characters live and love and the night is special.

But looming in the distance of the mundanity is a sense of finality: for the teenagers, entering college signals a transition into adulthood and implicitly threatens their relationships; for the adult siblings, they debate the possibility of moving their mother to a nursing home. Taormina has cited Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Ingmar Bergman as references—these feed into a unique holiday film that can be simultaneously a lighthearted mood piece and a meditation on the fact that the traditions we partake in will outlast us all.

How did you approach the freeform structure of the movie?

Tyler Taormina: We drew out a map. I was able to see the structure of the movie visually—the map was literally like, the home is here, a block down is the fire truck parade, the road around the home is where we do the walk. We got where all the scenes take place and we actually populated the map with bubbles that represented each scene in it. Just knowing which scenes happen where and how, and how we feel a certain way here or there, it mapped the emotional journey of the film. I was able to physically find my way through the film.

Did you shoot in the neighborhood you grew up in?

Tyler Taormina: One scene was shot on my front lawn, some were in my childhood home, and many were in my neighborhood. A lot of it was in the greater Long Island area.

For someone who’s not familiar with the region, what are some Long Island idiosyncrasies you included in the film?

Tyler Taormina: There’s certainly the Italian American accents, which are really specific. And there’s this sort of obnoxiousness that is very specific to Long Island. So is the obsession with the police and the paranoia of the other, and the fire truck procession with the Christmas lights—that’s actually a very Long Island thing.

How much of the movie is drawn from your own memories of Christmas traditions?

Tyler Taormina: Whether it’s literal memories or impressions of memories, I shared a lot of memories with my writing partner, Eric Berger, and my editor and story editor, Kevin Anton. It’s sort of an amalgam of all our experiences, even to the point where we literally would take dialogue from our home movies and put them in the film.

How did you approach writing for characters both older and younger than you?

Tyler Taormina: It’s all through observation, really. One of the strengths of Eric’s writing is that he’s so astute in the psychology of different people—I mean, his whole family, they’re all psychologists. I just know these people so well, I’ve seen them all my life, I’ve seen them grow, even.

With such a large ensemble cast, how did you make sure everyone gets proper characterization?

Tyler Taormina: For the family members, who are all part fictitious, part inspired by real people, we really went through the entire family tree. We looked at everything in the generations prior and at what traumas were passed down, how these affected the way they parent, the way they see each other, and how these affect the generation below them. We looked at how these relations that they have with one another could be found in the way they celebrate this holiday and give into Christmas. Also in the casting process, we cast people who can really elicit a physiological response—they make you feel so much just because of how beautiful and vulnerable and silly they are.

Why did you choose to spotlight the teenage characters in the story?

Tyler Taormina: In Letter from an Unknown Woman by Max Ophuls, one of my favorite movies, Joan Fontaine in one of her early voiceovers says that a human being has two birthdays: one when they’re born and the other when they gain consciousness. I think this is profound, and I think this actually happens right around the time that these characters are, at about 16 years old, or for me anyway. They have no idea what’s coming in the future, and that naivete is interesting in the context of this film where we the audience can get an idea of what happens in the future based on the other characters. These characters are all in a web, they’re all in a continuum of aging, and I find that very interesting.

What is the look of Christmas to you? How did you capture that in the film?

Tyler Taormina: The decor of the house and the holiday and everything is totally excessive. I feel that Christmas is a shining example of excessive America, but I didn’t necessarily want to shake my hand in a condescending or patronizing way to that tradition, because excess is also an enormous part of something positive. Actually, I think there’s an excess of beauty and memory—there’s a richness found in here too. I wanted to explore both those things, the richness of beauty and the gluttonous, doomed American excess of late capitalism.

How did you approach lighting the film, especially with the outdoor scenes at night?

Tyler Taormina: Carson Lund, the cinematographer, and I wanted to stray away from a naturalistic lighting approach and really play with an artifice that we took inspiration from cheesy Thomas Kinkade paintings or 50s Coca-Cola advertising. Also Christmas cookie tins, those circular things with corny-ass artwork on them—those were a huge reference point for Carson and I as well.

The movie feels almost surreal even though everything happening is extremely normal. Was that a quality you were aiming for?

Tyler Taormina: It’s surreal in the manner of it—the movement and the style is imbued with my intentions to feel like something of the mind. Things in our memory expand and they become so different over time, and I think that’s a beautiful spot. In actuality, if we were to go back to 2006 and experience the holidays that I experienced, it wouldn’t really look anything like this.

Were there any interesting audience reactions?

Tyler Taormina: What’s funny is that most of the people I’ve talked to who’ve seen the movie cried during it, and that to me is completely surprising—I didn’t know that it was that kind of movie. I think that’s the only verifiable way that I can know people liked it, or that it moved them.

Has your understanding of the film evolved?

Tyler Taormina: Having been editing it for the past year, when characters are on screen for the last time, I get a feeling of “I’ll see you next year.” I think that this film, if watched throughout the years around this holiday time, will grow in our minds. I think it will become very interesting in this existential sort of context that is the point of the film.

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