Ben Stiller cries uncle in “Nutcrackers.” When a family tragedy puts him front and center in a parental role in this comedy, Ben discovers talents he never knew he had.
Ben wants to tickle your funny bone in the David Gordon Green comedy “Nutcrackers.”
David Gordon Green: “It was kind of the movies that I just loved going to on the matinees, you know, going to see ‘Uncle Buck’ and ‘Home Alone’ and so many of the movies of my childhood in the ’80s and early ’90s that influenced this particular movie. This is my first family movie. This is my first happy ending movie. This is the first movie I made that my kids can see.”
Ben Stiller: “It just felt so organic and so not cynical. Again, he wanted to make a heartwarming, kind of old-school comedy, the kind that we remember from, you know, years ago.”
Ben has to look after his nephews when their parents die, and let’s just say they’re a handful.
Green is best known for scaring the bejesus out of you with films like “The Exorcist: Believer” and the “Halloween” trilogy, but he was glad to get away from the genre to shoot his very first Christmas movie.
David Gordon Green: “It was a palate cleanser in a lot of ways, to be able to do something light and lighthearted, and strip it all down to something that was leaning into the charms rather than the horrors.”
Talk about a family affair. Ben’s movie nephews are played by real-life brothers Homer, Ulysses, Atlas and Arlo Janson.
Arlo Janson: “The first day we ever met him, we became friends with him, and it was crazy how we got to have that little surprise.”
Homer Janson: “Everybody was just so loving and excited to be there in that place when we were shooting.”
Ben Stiller: “This experience for them was new. They’d never been in front of cameras doing this, but they also were totally open to whatever was going to happen.”
“Nutcrackers” marks Stiller’s first leading role in seven years and is a step in a new direction for filmmaker David Gordon Green. The film starts streaming on Hulu Friday.
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