In Red One, a new Christmas action-comedy, Santa (J.K. Simmons) gets kidnapped from his high-security base in the North Pole. His team including head of security Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson) launches a high-stakes operation to get him back before Christmas. And they’ll do anything including recruiting “Level 4 Naughty Lister” Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) to track him down. In an exclusive conversation with Filmfare, director Jake Kasdan opened up about creating a holiday movie with enough festive cheer and without the overdone tropes.
J.K. Simmons has done some iconic roles. What went into casting him as Santa?
He’s been wonderful in so many movies. Everybody brings their own association with what he is. He’s somebody I’ve always wanted to work with. As soon as we started talking about how we were going to portray Santa in this movie, he was the natural first choice. He’s got all of that warmth and integrity that you want, but also toughness that’s not usually associated with Santa Claus. But we thought, “How would it actually work to be in charge of this massive operation?” So we thought we would portray him as part commander as well as an unstoppable force of good and hope. JK was the perfect guy to do it.
How are Chris Evans and Dwayne Johnson at taking direction?
I love what both of those guys do in the movie. I’d worked with Dwayne twice before and have had great experiences. He’s got the best possible attitude for an actor walking into a movie which is just like full commitment all the time. And I could see that from when we first started working together on the first of the Jumanji movies. He was playing a 16-year-old boy with a lot of insecurities. You could just see from day one that he was game for anything. In Red One he plays an incredibly different kind of character but it is still the same thing. He walks in, and says “How can we make this scene the best it can possibly be?” He’s like that every minute of every day. I had never worked with Chris before, but I’ve been a fan for a long time since before he was Captain America. He’s somebody that I’ve always thought had a really unique screen presence and he’s really funny. But it was a part of him that I think was underappreciated. It was a blast to be able to do something completely different with him here than what people expect of him.
Did you factor in the audience’s reception since Chris and Dwayne have played some iconic characters?
They’re both the kind of movie stars who bring a tremendous amount of persona to whatever they’re doing. So you have to start there and figure out how you’re going to apply that and what direction you’re going in and people’s expectations. I love working with actors like that. There’s a great depth of character that they bring just by showing up. They both have a total commitment to telling the story in every way they can.
Christmas movie tropes are overdone. What does it take to give it a fresh spin?
I love Christmas movies and we always talked about, “What if we could make one that was a little bit different than any that had come before, but still be a Christmas movie?” We wanted to deliver on the promise of that in terms of the emotional arc and the holiday spirit. We wanted to keep the recall for other Christmas movies that put people in that holiday frame of mind. To do it in a new context we were trying to figure out how we were going to do this differently every moment. Hiram Garcia, one of the producers of the movie, came up with this idea of how we were going to showcase the North Pole and the reindeer, rethinking the imagery and how it would really work. When we chose that approach, suddenly we applied that to everything. And it was total fun doing all of that work. I had the benefit of this amazing team of collaborators working with me. Everybody was able to get excited about that idea. And we just got great stuff from people.
Red One is currently streaming on Prime Video.