Interview: Tyler Taormina on the Shape and Sincerity of ‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’

The logline of Tyler Taormina’s third feature might make it sound like Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point has the trappings of a standard-issue holiday movie. The far-flung members of a large family descend on their ancestral family home in Long Island for what many realize could be the final time. That gradually beckoning awareness of tradition fading into transience provides the animating tension of the film, though it seldom rises to the level of standard narrative conflict driving the events of the plot.

Instead, Taormina’s mosaic-like approach to capturing characters and spaces coalesces into what he’s dubbed “ecosystem film.” It’s a cinema defined by his attunement to the vastness of experiences and energies contained within a space, whether a single home or an entire suburb.

Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point extends the tonal register of Taormina’s first two films about American alienation, the absurdist coming-of-age story Ham on Rye and the wordless mood piece Happer’s Comet, to show how such isolation can exist in tandem with a smothering sense of togetherness. It’s an expansive work capable of accommodating a wide ensemble of characters—all while still making room for an audience to see their own memories refracted through its wide-spanning exploration of Yuletide interactions.

I spoke with Taormina prior to the theatrical release of Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. Our conversation covered how the concept of “sonder” informs the shape and texture of his work, why he spurns irony, and what his practice of interviewing every single participant in the film contributed to making the project feel like a familial effort.

How do you approach writing your scripts? They all have a forward momentum, but they don’t operate according to a ruthless causal logic.

One of the things that interests me most in the writing process is the shape of a film’s narrative. To really understand the way a film moves, I like to draw it out to physically represent the space. Sometimes it’s actually the space. For this film, we drew the house, the fire trucks, the clearing, the overlook, and the parking lots on a diner placemat. It all had a visual progression for me. But in other situations, it’s just drawing shapes, shades and abstractly representing the way movements fit a chemical composition. I like to see the whole shape of the film in one view that really helps me to, as you say, avoid a sort of causal logic and conventional narrative propulsion. Instead, it’s a film driven by curiosity that carries the audience through a narrative shape.

How were you approaching the film’s setting, be that location or time? They’re both so specifically conjured, but this could be taking place anywhere or anytime.

So, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is a period piece, [as] it actually does specifically take place in 2006. And, of course, the location is very specific to Long Island. But I think that what was really important was to avoid those corny pitfalls of period pieces where they show you the brands at the time, or [when] someone parrots the news headlines. Things like that, I find really lame. I think that period and location come from the evocation of a moment and a space. The details are just a way in which we can conjure and sustain an impression, not to show you these were the songs that were on the radio. Of course, we use a lot of different time periods of nostalgia that are referenced to feed into an amalgamation of impressions.

Was that a conscious decision to hold off on a signifier like a cellphone until about 30 minutes in, then?

[Director of photography] Carson Lund and I approach this thing similarly. The only thing that was really conscious was that we didn’t want to see new cars. I think that’s the worst development of American aesthetics. Someone told me recently they heard a quote from someone saying, “Hey, if I could buy a ’74 Chevy, then I would believe in the American dream as well.” My production designer [Paris Peterson] and I really learned that the 2000s to 2010s are where the aesthetics at large, especially in the way we decorate homes, made such a nosedive. Oh my God, the 2010s are so, so ugly compared to everything proceeding!

Did designing the sound and the silences of Happer’s Comet prepare you to orchestrate the much more frantic mix of Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point?

Not exactly. I’ve really come to see my ideas as, “Oh, this is more of a sound movie” or, “Oh, this is more of an image movie.” I think that this is far more an image film than a sound film. The reason I say that, because obviously films are both, is because the creativity and world that I was proposing in Happer’s Comet allowed for the sound to be so unchained from reality that I could do whatever I wanted with it. Thus, I experimented largely with the sound, whereas for this film, it was very important that the sound was just honoring the reality. There’s little room for impressionism in the sound, I think. The movie is very expressionistic, and I think that the sound is where we can really depart the most. Even when you watch silent films and you’re just listening to a wall of orchestra, there’s such an artifice that’s present in sound. And I didn’t want to overdo my hand here, so the sound approach for this film was just really being very true to what was being experienced in the spaces. And, of course, the use of music was a big part of the sound in terms of the jukebox musical aspect of the film remaining exciting and compulsive.

Does your own background in music influence both your approaches to image and sound, or is it more just the latter?

I do the sound design for all these films, so my ability to work on these digital audio workstations is very important. A lot of the mixing elements, I know exactly now all the specs of the type of reverb I want for a specific moment. But really, the background in music is affecting my storytelling the most at the script level. I’m okay with experiencing a narrative that’s only felt instead of understood. I think that comes from years of going to noise shows and ambient drone shows where I just became very accustomed to sitting and floating in a tone for an hour. That became a very spiritual thing in my relationship with art.

Capturing the energy of a big party is a delicate and difficult task. Practically, how did you and Carson Lund pull off shooting these in a way that captures their spontaneity without making it impossible to film?

A lot of my decisions in the way I shoot and write scenes, although they’re premeditated, aren’t extremely conscious. Someone was like, “Oh, you’re gonna have the camera going in between all the rooms and roving around?” And I was like, “Oh, no, absolutely not!” I like the idea that we really partition and compartmentalize all the different family members, people, rooms, corners, and objects so that it could be as kaleidoscopic as possible. I was much less interested in having a tactile camera than I was in creating a carousel of images. And at the same time, Carson and I had a lot of fun in certain moments, being flexible with our schedule, taking scenes that were once six or seven shots and doing them in one. [We were] taking the lead from someone like Hou Hsiao-Hsien, where the composition of the scene evolved with the mise-en-scène to do the work of coverage. It’s something I really just feel out a lot more.

The film’s visual echoes of Sirk by calling back to All That Heaven Allows highlight a tension between irony and sincerity. How do you think about these two competing registers within Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point?

I don’t appreciate irony. In fact, I think it’s sort of an elitist tool. It really shocked me when the trailer for this film was released that a lot of people online were expecting the film to be a slasher. They couldn’t understand a lack of irony. They couldn’t understand sincere nostalgia or earnest earnestness, which really depressed me. In terms of the way I approached the spectrum you’re speaking of, it’s pretty simple, in a way. It boils down to my relationship with my own country. I’m extraordinarily critical of it and even averse to American living and our story. And yet, I have all the love in my heart for this place. Really, I love it so, so much. It lights me on fire, even. I see all the beauty, but the thorns I feel. And I’m communicating both of those things. I’m communicating the romance that was intoxicating us in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s in Hollywood and how that same romantic dance has guided us into this late capitalistic nightmare. I love this expression of Americanism, and yet I see full well the devastation just below it.

At what stage in the filmmaking process are you finding the center of gravity within your large ensembles? Is that something you’re working out in the script stage, on set, or in the edit?

It’s definitely the script stage. A big fuel of this film is having a curious camera that’s able to capture this chaotic feeling that all these people are in their own universe, and that they’re not able to see past their own bubble. I love how cinema, I think above any other medium, can illuminate this experience that we have of the inherent alienation from just being. I like these big ensembles to really explore that experience, which has been named “sonder.” It’s a word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and it’s what I’m describing in terms of finding the chemical composition and making sure that this is a balanced affair with all these different subplots. It’s a gradient of attention that gives the illusion that the amount of life around us is unending and boundless. It’s not just a sitcom where there’s A/B/C/D story. It’s more the fact that some things will remain unresolved, or some things we only will see a little bit of and then we’ll be left to wonder. But to make sure that everything is balanced in this ensemble, I think it’s really something that you feel. Every art form deals with composition. Just the ability to say, “That feels right there, and that feels right next to it. I don’t know why, but it does.”

Is it important or necessary to echo the sonder that you’re seeing on screen in your production ethos? I’m thinking about how the opening credits of Happer’s Comet say it’s a film produced by you and your family, and you listed everyone who provided the Christmas decorations in the end credits of Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. Is it important to have that synergy?

For Ham on Rye, it was more practically implemented. We didn’t share the script in its entirety with anyone in the cast. They were left to be alienated from the whole piece, and that excited me for that film. For this one, it was no mystery to us that we were ambitious to make a film way, way past our means. So I wanted it to be a very familial affair. I wanted it to feel opposite of alienating. I wanted to bring people together to just enjoy the entire experience. For me, it takes the form of interviewing everyone who comes onto the film. What I’m saying these days is that the key grip and the dolly grip are as important as casting the lead role. Because when everyone shares the same energy and lust for life, the lead performer—if there was one—I think they’re free. I don’t know how else to put it. I think that’s why this seems to be a real family when you watch the film and not a bunch of actors or people. I think it’s because of the dolly grip!

The more I do these interviews with directors, the more I become interested in the role as a people manager rather than as some singular auteur. I think those kinds of things are just as important, if not more important, to achieving a vision.

I agree. The films are reflected in the vehicle and the apparatus that brings the films to life. It’s not a coincidence—and it’s not conscious either—that we [Omnes Films, a collective that includes Taormina and Lund] make films out of a collective about building things collectively.

This is your third feature working within what you call the “ecosystem film.” How have your perceptions of how to cultivate and create these environments changed?

This film is special because it’s the first time I actually dealt [with professional actors]. It didn’t make a lot of sense for a learned actor to be in either of the first two films. For this film, we were really creating characters, and that was a really interesting progression in the form of something completely ethnographic versus something that delves a little bit into traditional filmmaking practices. That’s probably the one difference I could see as a path that I’ve been taking.