When will you see Cruel and silent night, from today December 1st in theaters (and you should if you don’t want to be put on the naughty list by Santa Claus!) you’re probably wondering where Pat Casey As well as Josh Millerstill known as screenwriters of films Sonic, came up with this crazy action/horror Christmas comedy. And the answer may surprise you and encourage you to disregard your… cultural influences. Here’s how Casey and Miller talked about the film’s origins.

Stormy and Silent Night: Origins

On the eve of the release Sonic – MovieFebruary 2020 Pat Casey As well as Josh Miller, who had been working on low-budget projects for a decade, started thinking about what they could do. “We thought that Sonic was coming out, that it was the most important movie we were working on, and it was time to propose something,” says Miller, “We discussed our best ideas and presented them to our agents and manager, and each of them had their favorite.” At the end of the presentation, they talked about the idea of ​​a film that they had been hatching for many years and seemed too crazy to get financed. The story was in the spirit crystal trapthe first tenaciouswith Santa instead of John McClane: “At the time we were talking again about what we called Die Hard Santa, a plan we didn’t have a name for yet. right movie!

Three years later, this sketch of an idea turned into a film that it comes out today December 1st in Italy and December 2nd in America. But the seeds of this crazy action hero “Die Hard with Santa” were sown a long time ago when the two, high school friends, were high schoolers together in Bloomington, Minnesota. “We always say that we met while we were under house arrest, so everyone thinks about the Breakfast Club, but our punishment was severe: we couldn’t talk to each other.” “We did it anyway,” Casey continues, “and they were furious. When we met, Josh told me about his movie ideas and the novels he was working on. Right from the start, he said, “I’m going to Hollywood and I’m going to see crazy movies.” Something that I never thought was possible. He had crazy ambitions, and I thought: “If this idiot can do it, then I can do it.” In the course of their friendship and collaboration, they came up with the idea of ​​a mashup between Santa Claus and Die Hard while writing sketches for a local TV channel: “Like many cities in the 90s, we had our own TV channels and we had our own show. It was like a Saturday Night Live show for high school students, like joining the football team or something. We were a group of nerds who wanted to put on a TV show. We did a lot of Die Hard parodies. One of them, in fact, included “the idea of ​​Santa Claus facing criminals, although in this version he was a classic comedic idiot”. After graduating from high school, the two friends came to Hollywood and wrote the right script for the film. Cruel and silent night. If you ask us, it was worth the wait.