ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with Best. Christmas. Ever! director Mary Lambert about Netflix‘s holiday comedy movie. The filmmaker discussed the actresses she worked with and designing Monkey Bob. The film is now available to stream on Netflix.
“Every Christmas Jackie sends a boastful holiday newsletter that makes her old college friend Charlotte feel like a lump of coal,” reads the movie‘s synopsis. “When a twist of fate lands Charlotte and her family on Jackie’s snowy doorstep just days before Christmas, she seizes the opportunity to prove her old friend’s life can’t possibly be that perfect.”
Tyler Treese: I really enjoyed the intro to Best. Christmas. Ever! You did a great job of setting up both families. Can you speak to doing the different manners? When we meet Brandy, we’re getting this nice overview of the family through this letter, and then when we see Heather’s family, it’s breaking the fourth wall and she’s talking directly into the camera. Can you discuss that intro?
Mary Lambert: It’s always a killer, how you open a movie. You’ve got to grab people. This intro was particularly well-crafted in the script by Todd and Charles, but I knew from the beginning that it was going to be kind of difficult to pull it off because we don’t really know who this kind of mysterious woman is who’s writing the letter, but we’re in her world. We’re in her voice, and we think we’re listening to her voice, but then Charlotte smashes in, and we realize that we’re not really with Brandy — we’re with Heather. We’re with Charlotte, who sometimes has problems with Christmas because it makes her feel insecure and inadequate.
She’s reading this letter from this woman who is the perfect wife and mother and always has the best Christmas ever. So I really love the way you think you’re with Jackie and then you’re with Charlotte. It was also fun to craft the little vignettes and to contrast Jackie’s perfect life as in the photographs that she puts in her newsletter with Charlotte’s slightly chaotic life.
I thought you touched on something really well, that Christmas can open insecurities for people. We see this with Heather’s character, who has this motive of trying to expose this perfect life we see on social media, where people try to project the ideal rather than what’s actually happening. It’s a very real thing that occurs, so can you speak to that part of the film?
Well, I love the opening of the film. But what really drew me to the script was that this character of Charlotte, who has flaws, doesn’t believe her friend. She sneaks around and tells fibs. She’s sneaky, and she’s doing it because she’s insecure. She feels like maybe her husband … everybody, everybody has these insecurities in their relationships and their marriages, or with their children, with their careers. Everybody has insecurity at some moment or another. You wake up and think, “I’m not good enough,” or, “She doesn’t love me enough,” or, “I’m not being the best mother I could be,” or whatever it is.
And I really thought it was interesting to see that personified in a really sympathetic character that Heather plays. Even when she’s been a little dishonest or sneaking around, she’s still … I think, as an audience member, you have to think, “I felt that way before.” I know how she feels, you know? So that’s what I wanted. What I wanted to happen there is for people to relate to her and think, “I felt that way before and I don’t have to hate myself because I felt that way. That’s just the way I felt.”
There’s an inherent charm to Heather’s performance, too. Even when she’s being sneaky and such, you’re still always wanting to see things turn out well for the character. I thought Heather [Graham] and Brandy had such a great chemistry. Can you speak a bit about the two leading ladies?
Absolutely. What I was trying to say about the character of Charlotte is that she’s not evil. She just has insecurities and ambitions and the emotions that we all share. Heather and Brandy had a great chemistry because they both, in a certain way, were their characters. Brandy just exudes this peace and happiness when she walks in the room. Heather has more of a bubbly energy, that infectious sort of energy that charms you and makes you laugh.
Then Brandy would start to catch that, and Brandy would get kind of bubbly and giddy. She would toss that back to, Heather, and they sort of started out being their characters. Then in the movie, they started this little tennis match of like, “Boom, I’m going to throw some of my character over on you!” “Boom, I’m going to throw some of my character over on you.”
I’ve got to ask you about Bob the Monkey. First off, where’d you find the creepy monkey?
Well, Monkey Bob was created from whole cloth. I designed Monkey Bob with our prop master. We hired a puppeteer to make him, because I wanted him to be floppy and to be expressive and be able to move his hand. I love props like that. I wanted him to be just a tiny bit creepy, because otherwise, he’s not scary, and they keep referring to him as “the creepy monkey.” We designed him from scratch and had it built. We had several Monkey Bob prototypes. I used to carry them around the office and see what people thought. That was fun. I love things like that.
What’s also great about this movie is Brandy gets to show off her singing talents, as she has two performances. How great was it to see Brandy getting to show her full range as both an actress and a singer in this movie?
I’ve actually directed quite a few music videos and a lot of really amazing female vocalists. It’s always really thrilling when you’re in the room with somebody that can really sing and is an important artist because of their ability to move people and to evoke emotions in an audience. Then you are in the room with them, like five feet away from them — the camera’s really close. It’s really thrilling. Singing is a different skill than acting. They can merge and they can support each other, but they’re different. Not everybody who can sing as well as Brandy can also act. But Brandy has a long portfolio of really great performances. Remember Moesha?
Yeah!
She’s so good in that. [Laughs]. I would watch it at night if I needed to just chill out. I watched a lot of Moesha when we were shooting, and sometimes Brandy would be over there and she’d be doing one of the serious scenes and I’d see a little flash of humor and I’d say, “That’s Moesha! Give me some more Moesha!” [Laughs].
I really loved Brandy’s daughter in the movie — the young actress is so fantastic. Can you speak to working with Madison Skye Validum? She plays a genius in it and has so many great scenes.
Madison was a dream to work with. First of all, she’s super intelligent, just like her character, but she had mouthfuls of dialogue. She had to memorize whole half pages of really complicated dialogue with tongue twisting words and technical stuff. Some of it was cut out of the film. I mean, I couldn’t believe her preparation. She’d come to the set and she would know every single word that was on that page, but she was still really open to adjusting her performance, and every once in a while, it would start to feel a little bit like a memorized page. But Madison was always able to work back from that and get back into it and be that joyful little genius that she plays. Madison’s going to be a big actress.
I wanted to ask you just about 1989’s Pet Sematary, because that film is still so beloved now. They keep trying to go back to the franchise, but that film is really the gold standard for that series. How do you view its legacy this many years removed?
Oh, wow. I don’t know, exactly. I feel really lucky to have been given that opportunity at that stage in my career, — to work with Stephen King, who’s a really amazing storyteller and dramatist. I, personally, have always been a storyteller, but my craft with narrative, I’m more of a visual person than a word person. To be able to work with a wordsmith like Stephen King and someone who knows how to craft a story arc and to craft the characters and to fit it all into this beautiful narrative structure … it was really an important thing for me to do, for me personally to do.
I feel like we came together in a collaboration, with his words and my pictures. I feel like I was able to achieve something that changes people a little bit when they see it, and hopefully … horror movies are there so that you can get your fears out in the open and laugh at them — that’s what they’re for. Or maybe not laugh at them, but at least give a nod to them and go, “Okay, I’m looking at you.” I’m dealing with it. I feel like with Pet Sematary, each one of the characters personifies a different fear that you, as an audience, can kind of walk through those fears until you can finally look the really horrible one in the face, which is the idea of losing someone you love, like a child.
