EXCLUSIVE: Jake Kasdan & Hiram Garcia Talk Creating ‘Red One’
Director, Jake Kasdan and writer, Hiram Garcia sat down with BB and other members of the press to talk their new Holiday movie, Red One. Starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, the pair team up to save Chritmas after Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) is kidnaped by the Christmas witch, Grýla.
During the chat, the pair talked filming the scene in Krampus’ house, CGI, and so much more. Check out what they had to say below.
On what it was like creating a Christmas movie and diving into some of the more well known Christmas lores?
Kasdan: “That was absolutely one of the most exciting aspects of this movie, was sort of looking at a way that we could tell Santa’s story that we’ve never quite seen before, right? You’ve seen him in a certain way your whole life, and we always thought that the great exciting idea for this is what if you could sort of pull back the curtain and see what he’s really like. And so all of those aspects of this came from that sort of seed idea. Hiram Garcia came up with this. This was his brainchild, and he brought Chris [Evans] and I on board early with DJ [Dwayne Johnson], and that was the idea that got us all going right in the very beginning.”
Garcia: “When we did start working on this, one of the goals was, and actually when we were going around pitching it, we always ended the pitch with saying our hope was to tell a story that really inspired people. We wanted to turn Christmas on its head in the mythology, but also to create the definitive Santa Claus. There’s been so many good Santa Clauses, but to find one that really took a connection with the audience to the next level and brought a coolness out to Santa that, as a big Christmas fan, I always knew Santa’s got, and I feel like we did that with JK [Simmons[ and especially the way Jake envisioned it onscreen. JK’s performance as Santa is everything we dreamed and more.”
On why they choose to film the scene at Krampus’ house with prosthetics and on a real set?
Kasdan: “We never even considered doing it CGI. We always wanted to do it that way. I had never really done that kind of work before. I’d never had anything in a movie with that level of kind of complex makeup, character makeup like that, and we’ve found one of the world’s truly great guys to design it with us. It was so gratifying that everybody in that sequence, it’s a big sequence in the movie at Krampus’s house and there’s all of these characters. There’s a whole bunch of these very sophisticated makeup characters walking around. And the effect of it is you walk on set and you’re just surrounded by all these incredible looks, right? They’re really standing there. Then these guys walk in and they’re really looking at them. And so in a lot of times when we make these, a lot of these movies, there is a lot of CGI, there’s a lot of CGI in this movie, but not there.
Usually when you’re doing that kind of work, it puts a lot of additional acting work on the guys, right? Like what are you looking at, imagine what you’re looking at, trust me that it’s going to line up with what they’re playing, and all of those things. But when you go in and you actually see all those faces there, it just energizes everybody in the best possible way. And then when you get an actor like this who’s takes on the challenge that Kristofer [Hivju] did of, ‘How do I make this performance shine through so that it’s not eaten by the suit, so that the character isn’t really the suit?’ We’ve spent months developing that look, but then he’s acting it and it’s just this explosive, energetic thing that lights everybody up. So it was one of the great kind of fun sequences I’ve ever had a chance to do.”
Red One is now in theaters!
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity