Behind the Scenes: ‘Violent Night’—“Time for some season’s beatings…”

Imagine Die Hard—but with Santa Claus.

“I wanted to see him be this guy who was not an action hero [but] who had to spring into it.”

Action-comedy-Christmas film Violent Night sees a team of vicious mercenaries take a family hostage—but they aren’t prepared to defend themselves against a man with flying reindeer.

Violent Night stars David Harbour. “My contribution was much more about the arc of the character, which I was very interested in and I thought was a little undeveloped at the start,” David Harbour told Gizmodo. “It was more just like, ‘Oh, he’s an action hero.’ And I wanted to see him be this guy who was not an action hero [but] who had to spring into it. Then you saw the history underneath come forward from that.”

More info from interviews with the filmmakers below! Scroll down to go behind the scenes and to watch the trailer for the Christmas action comedy…

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Violent Night (2022) | Behind the Scenes | DVDXtras

VIOLENT NIGHT Official Trailer

Punch up the holiday spirit with 'Violent Night'

Violent Night stars David Harbour, John Leguizamo, and Beverly D'Angelo. The film is directed by Tommy Wirkola, and written by Pat Casey and Josh Miller.

“Obviously, we were fans of Die Hard,” writer Pat Casey told ComingSoon.net. “The idea of doing Die Hard with Santa … we did a thing like this back in high school. That was when we had the idea initially and did it for a local TV show we had when we were teenagers on the local cable access station, basically like Wayne’s World. We always thought it was really funny, and every few years, we’d be like, ‘could we do that Die Hard Santa thing as a real movie?’ But then we would think, ‘no, that’s way too stupid. No one would ever go for that.’”

Co-writer Josh Miller said that it finally turned out to be just stupid enough. “Decades later, people were always debating whether or not Die Hard was a Christmas movie. The only reason that debate could even happen is that it’s set on Christmas, but it’s not about Christmas in the same way that The Santa Clause is about Christmas. So we wondered, ‘well, I mean can you do a version [where] there’s not going to be a debate because it’s about Santa Claus himself?’ Our general feeling [was] that it had been a long time since anyone had made a real good R-rated action Christmas movie. The world was due.”

Violent Night star David Harbour talked to Collider about how he was initially nervous about the concept—until the filmmakers convinced him. “They pitched me this thing that they said was wild, and they said it was a big swing, but if we could pull it off it would be really cool. And they sent me the script and it did feel like a big swing. It felt like you have an action movie, but in the middle of it you obviously have a comedy, but in the real true center of it, you have a Christmas movie, like the best Hallmark Christmas movie or, in my mind, the top-shelf, which is Miracle on 34th Street, which is just like, ‘Is he real? Is Santa real?’”

Harbour said that a lot of scripts are hard to get through—but he got through this one. “At the end…it made me tear up and I was like, ‘Oh, this could be really special if we get it right.’ But I still, at that time, thought it was a big swing, and it was going to be real hard. We had to go to work real hard on it, and we did. But that was what made me want to do it, that it was so unique, and even though it was a big action movie, I got emotional at the end.”

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