The Farrelly brothers have had a long career both collaborating (“Dumb and Dumber,” “There’s Something About Mary”) and helming projects individually (Peter’s “Green Book,” Bobby’s “Champions”). They’re coming together again for the holidays with the new Paramount+ film “Dear Santa,” a naughty but sweet Christmas confection starring Jack Black as Satan, who is accidentally summoned by a boy named Liam (Robert Timothy Smith) who can’t spell when writing a letter to Kris Kringle.
Peter and Bobby Farrelly spoke with Variety about their favorite Christmas movies, the power of underdog stories, and which of their movies would be worth revisiting.
Where did the idea for “Dear Santa” come from?
Peter: Pete Jones and Kevin Barnett, who we work with a lot, brought us the idea and they said, “A kid’s writing a letter to Santa, but he misspells it and instead writes it to Satan.” We’re like, “We’ll buy that. Ok, let’s do it.” It was like the “Snakes on a Plane” pitch. But what we didn’t realize is it’s a nice opening, but man, this is a complicated thing. This took us ten years to get right, ten years we’ve been developing this thing because it’s a fine line. You need to have the right Satan — Jack Black in this case, which is a blessing, and it has to have the right tone, and it’s PG-13. It was complicated.
Bobby: Yeah, it’s a Christmas story, so we didn’t want it to be a horror movie or anything like that. It had to have a lot of comedy and heart and an uplifting message to it.
Your movies are often focused on an underdog character. What keeps drawing you to these stories?
Peter: People have asked us, “How do you write? Do you just think of jokes and gags first?” I say, “No, it’s the other way around. The first thing we think about is making a character that’s so likable and relatable that we can put our jokes on them. If you really like a character, you can get away with murder, and if you don’t, you can’t.”
Bobby: We do think about it quite a bit. We do like telling the underdog story because it’s important to us that you care for the characters we’re writing about. In this one, Liam is a sympathetic character and an underdog and, hopefully, you go along with him for the story.
You both work together, but you also go do your own projects in between, and it seems like it’s always good vibes between you two. When you approach an interesting project, how do you decide if you’re going to work on it together or if you’re going to do your own thing?
Bobby: For most of our career we’ve worked together on everything, but we did it for 20 years or more and eventually we just thought it might be time to go off and do some individual projects too. Once we started doing that, Pete went out and made “Green Book” and won an Oscar or two, so that was very satisfying. But it’s also possible we’ll come back and do things together. Like in this one, Peter and Ricky Blitt wrote the script, I directed the movie and the two of us produced it. So it was a combination of all the things that we’ve done.
Peter: We’ll do more stuff together, but we’re very, very similar in our sensibilities. We grew up together. We’re a year apart. We had twin beds in the same bedroom forever, and the same group of friends. So when we direct, we’re kind of like one mind. So why do we have to both be there when one guy could do it?
Director Bobby Farrelly and Jack Black on the set of “Dear Santa”
Jessica Miglio
Jack Black has mentioned that your last project together, 2001’s “Shallow Hal,” “didn’t turn out as I’d hoped.” Have you all talked about the movie together in the years since?
Peter: No, first we’re hearing of this. (laughs) I think I heard that from [his co-lead] Gwyneth [Paltrow]…
Bobby: I think the movie was always coming from a good place. “Don’t judge people by what they look like. Look what’s inside of them — that’s where the real beauty is.” That was the point of the movie, and I think if you watch it now, It still says that.
What are some of your all-time favorite Christmas movies?
Peter: I’m a big fan of “Bad Santa,” but if I was gonna sit there with the family, I’d probably go to “Elf,” which is, again, a classic. When we were doing “Green Book,” we were shooting in December, and Viggo Mortensen rented out a movie theater to show us “Elf.” He brought the whole cast and crew. It’s just one of those movies that’s never going to go away. I love that.
Bobby: I don’t know if the Rankin/Bass shows are considered movies — “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “The Little Drummer Boy” — but I really did enjoy watching those and still do. As for a full-length movie, I don’t think you could beat “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stewart. It had such a profound message about how one man’s life got very despondent, about how he thought his life was worthless. And then his guardian angel lets him see his life had he not existed, and how different his world would be. I thought it was really well done, and in fact, I thought about it a lot making this movie because it’s kind of a 180° flip on that. Liam doesn’t have a guardian angel, but he has the exact opposite — this guy over here on this shoulder comes to visit him. Then he gets caught up in the Christmas spirit. The similarities aren’t quite obvious at first glance, but there’s a lot between “Wonderful Life” and “Dear Santa.”
Are there any more movies in your catalog you could envision an interesting sequel to?
Peter: I still take notes whenever I hear something that I think would be a good “Dumb and Dumber” joke. I keep a list because I could easily see us doing another “Dumb and Dumber” someday.
Bobby: We did it on the 20th anniversary, and right now we’re at the 30th anniversary. So in 10 years… Those guys are so much fun to work with. If we’re all still kicking around, I’d love to do that. Any of those movies that we’ve done … Look, “There’s Something About Mary.” We love those characters so much that if we ever thought of a way to bring them back and retell a story using those characters again, we’d be up for it because we love the characters. If we weren’t passionately in love with those characters, we wouldn’t want to do a sequel.
Are there any genres you haven’t tackled yet that you would want to try someday?
Peter: Absolutely: Horror. I want to do a horror movie that’s going to scare the hell out of people someday, but we don’t plan. We’re not good planners. That’s why we were horrible students in school. So we kind of do what the universe drops in our lap. I always talk about Rob Reiner and how he did his first four movies: Did “Spinal Tap,” then he did “The Sure Thing,” “Stand by Me” and “The Princess Bride.” The four movies, they’re all different, and he’s showing the world, “I can do whatever you want. You want it? Come to me.” We did comedy, comedy, comedy, comedy, comedy, and then we started doing dramas, but only because it’s not completely in our control.
Bobby: We wouldn’t want to do a horror movie just to do a horror movie. We’d do one if the inspiration comes to us, to tell one that we find interesting.
What kind of horror movie would you be interested in making?
Peter: I want to scare people.
Bobby: For me, it probably wouldn’t be a slasher — more like an M. Night Shyamalan-type thing where you have these incredible twists and turns. Psychological thrillers, those kind of things … that’s what motivates me.
Peter: Like “The Sixth Sense,” that’s maybe the greatest horror movie ever. Something that’s not as gory. It’s just got an undercurrent, it scares you another way.
Peter, what can you share about your upcoming film about Sylvester Stallone and the making of “Rocky,” “I Play Rocky“?
Peter: It’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. The guy who wrote it, Peter Gamble, came out of the blue. The guy teaches at USC. Toby Emmerich gave it to me, he’s a producer on it, and he said, “Hey, read this script. I think it’s special.” It’s about the making of “Rocky” and there’s a lot that I didn’t know. Stallone was homeless when he wrote that script, he was living in Penn Station, and he was doing softcore porn. He was broke. He had to sell his dog. He wrote this script and he gave it to the studio, and they were like, “This is phenomenal. Here: we’ll give you 20 grand and go away. Because Burt Reynolds plays Rocky. You’re not playing Rocky.”
He goes, “No, I play Rocky.” And they said, “OK, we’ll give you 50 grand.” This is a homeless guy. And there is a “no.” It got up to 350 grand, and they said, “Take it and walk away.” “I’m not doing that. I want this movie.” So they gave him the movie to do it, but he had to sign a contract that if he got one day behind on the shooting, he’s out — and he agreed to that. So they kind of sabotaged him. On the first day of the shoot, the studio said, “We need the exterior shot,” so they did every running shot in that movie on day one. He ran 18 miles. He ended up in the hospital. Day 2 was punching the meat. The meat is supposed to be cold, but no, it was frozen rock solid. He said, “No, this has to be thawed out.” They said, “Well we could thaw with hair dryers, but it’s gonna take three hours.” He’s said, “Let’s do it” and broke both of his hands. He went to the hospital four times while making this movie, and he had four weeks to make it with $1 million. He did it. So this guy went from homeless to winning the Oscar. The character Rocky had a job at the beginning and he didn’t win the fight. He lasted in the fight. To me, this is a better story.
“Dear Santa” is now available on Paramount+ and on digital.
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