In David Gordon Green‘s “Nutcrackers,” Ben Stiller is forced to look after his newly orphaned nephews, four long-haired hell-raisers who run wild on their family farm. As Stiller’s character, a lonely city slicker named Michael, works toward finding the boys a foster family, he comes to the realization that he needs them just as much as they need him.
It’s a rare feel-good comedy without much snark or darkness, and it charmed TIFF on opening night. As the film searches for a buyer, Stiller and Green expressed a strong desire for it to be shown in theaters as opposed to streaming, and they pondered why heartfelt comedies have been largely absent from Hollywood in the past decade.
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“There’s a cynicism over the last decade of comedies, and it’s been a few years since we really had that film drive audiences en masse to go to theaters and just laugh out loud, that had that simplicity,” Green said at Variety‘s Toronto Film Festival Studio, sponsored by J.Crew and SharkNinja.
As “Nutcrackers” searches for a buyer at TIFF, Stiller and Green have been vocal about their desire for the family-friendly comedy to open in theaters, rather than on streaming.
“The movie business has evolved in a very unpredictable way that none of us would have imagined 20 years ago, due to streaming and everything else. At the end of the day, what people like to watch, what they like to feel when they go to the movies, hasn’t changed,” Stiller said. “It’s the same reason people have gone to plays for thousands of years. It’s the same reason why we need to experience storytelling and art in our lives — it’s essential. It’s just about making a commitment to going back to that.
Stiller added, “The marketplace will go up and down and change. But I think people are always hungry for this kind of movie, and a theatrical experience for this kind of movie, because you don’t get this kind of movie in the theaters that often.”
Green, who returns to the comedy genre after helming the new “Halloween” trilogy and 2023’s “Exorcist: Believer,” added, “A lot of what I learned from my friend Jason Blum in the horror genre is you don’t need big explosions and huge special effects to scare the crap out of people. And so taking some of the lessons that that I learned with him in the horror genre and trying to apply it to comedy … I think it could follow the same rules of: people that make you glow on the inside when you watch them … that doesn’t need to cost a tremendous amount of money. That needs to come from a place of intentions and humor and warmth that I feel like we can deliver economically.”
“And then the pressure is not on us so much to make something feel like it has to appeal to everyone,” Green added. “We can start curating things that we respond to from a personal level, from a self-indulgent level, and then slowly integrate that audience that we know could be significant for these films.”
As the film takes place on the child actors’ real-life farm, Stiller looked back on the challenges of dealing with Ohio weather in the winter.
“It was cold when we were shooting the movie. I remember the first day … the mini trailer we had on the set lost power, so there was no heat, and it was like 5:30 in the morning,” Stiller said. “I’m getting makeup and hair done with a blanket around me. I was like, ‘This is gonna be a different experience.'”
Stiller then recalled shooting a scene early in the movie in which the Kicklighter boys convince him there is cell reception in the middle of a pond, so he goes out on a paddleboard to make a call, ultimately falling into the water.
“The day I was supposed to fall into the pond, it was frozen,” Stiller said. “In the morning it was frozen … I said to David, ‘OK so we’re not actually going to do that today, right? We should push it back in the shoot.’ This is Dec. 1.”
Green agreed to have the stunt man shoot the scene, but as the day went on, the temperature creeped up to 39 degrees.
“By five o’clock in the afternoon, it was like 42 degrees, and I was like, ‘All right, I guess I gotta do this, because he’s going to let the stunt man do it but then my ego is going to really be like, ‘I gotta go for it,'” Stiller added.
“Nutcrackers” charmed Toronto during its world premiere on Sept. 5 at TIFF, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a surprise appearance to introduce the film.
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