Blanched Greens

An Interview With Eric Berger & Tyler Taormina

Orpheus' head floated down a river, still singing the hymn of his lost lover. I’m saying change is tough. AI, writers striking, and all the rest. But there’s a strain of Independent Film (sometimes American, sometimes not) that allows me to forget about this. Not in an escapist way, but in a pure way. To imagine a different path forward for the movies in the coming decades. Reminds me of the greats. My numbskull thought is: oh hey, humans are pretty good at this art thing, there are things left to express about family and pain and joy. The film Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point was directed by Tyler Taormina and co-written by Eric Berger. Maybe you’ve seen Ham on Rye or the hypnotic Harper’s Comet. Maybe you have not. Maybe you should. Maybe stop reading and go do that first. I chatted with the two of them from my kitchen table. I stacked my laptop on top of a hardback cookbook because I thought the angle made my chin look less fat. These guys are Making Cinema. That’s a Capital C. David Lynch is dead and that’s tough. But cinema goes on. Sorry, Cinema.

Keegan Swenson: Congratulations on this movie you two. Let’s talk about collaboration. What does it mean for you two in terms of meaning-making? And practically speaking, how do you collaborate?


Eric Berger: I’ve known Ty since I was eleven years old. When we were younger, it was goofier stuff.


Tyler Taormina: There’s a marked difference between how we approached Ham on Rye versus Christmas Eve [in Miller’s Point]. For Christmas Eve, we took a much deeper approach. We built a psychological portrait of an entire family—as a group and individually. We understood the interior lives and pasts of all the characters. We didn’t share this with the actors; it wasn’t about directing them with that knowledge but about enriching the world we were building. Moving forward, I think we’ll explore more projects like this, delving into psychological snapshots of systems and people. That said, we’re also drawn to other impulses. We’re obsessed with gag and farce comedies, and we want to exercise those muscles, too. We haven’t taken the Airplane route that is so inherent to us.


KS: Love the Airplane reference. I just recently watched Police Squad for the first time.

TT: I watched Naked Gun recently. I think we’re overdue to make a comedy of that nature.

KS: Back to Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, I saw somewhere you reference that the characters’ psychological backgrounds weren’t explicitly shared with the actors. How does the subconscious act in this film for you?


TT: Portraying subconscious experiences with these characters—where what’s on their mind is more in the background than the foreground—is really important to us. They move through their reality with this sort of superimposed layer, one they might not even be aware of. But I think what felt most subconscious to me about this film is the trajectory of the plot itself. The way the narrative unfolds wasn’t something we approached as an ideological or strategic choice; it just felt right. And now, having to talk the film to death, I’m realizing how much of it was really shaped subconsciously.

EB: It’s not surprising to me that you’d have surprises on either side, just because it’s such a nostalgia-driven piece. So much of it is about locating, re-experiencing, or re-expressing certain memories—ones you can’t always fully recall. You have fragments, forms of them. I think what we get is a certain expression of memory, of things past, and those shades at the back of nostalgia.



TT: Eric, I’m curious what you’d say about this because, at a lot of the festival talks I’ve been doing, you haven’t been there. So in a way, I’ve been developing a deeper relationship with the film just by talking about it. Now that we’re on this call together, one thing I’ve been realizing more and more is how much the narrative is, of all things, informed by sex. I really feel like the cops are a big way we introduce the theme, and then it becomes part of the teenagers' trajectory. A huge part of the film is branching away from the home—and for what reason. What struck me in all this exploring is that sex is such an interesting aspect of coming of age because it’s the one thing you truly can’t experience with your family. In a way, it’s what inevitably pulls you away from them to some degree. That’s been a fascinating thing to consider, and I’m curious what you think of that.

EB: I feel like, you know, certain people might have other reasons to go away from their family other than they can't have sex with them. No, no, I'm kidding. Or, I'm not. I don't know.

[All three of us laugh.]

TT: Well think about it. Eric, you probably have your family that gets together, and I’m sure you do too, Keegan. Over time, you might have noticed that the nuclear family had to change—it expanded, blended with other families. That’s what I’m getting at. It comes from this fundamental urge, which, in many ways, is sexual—pairing off and starting a family.

EB: I don’t want to discount that at all. But one of the first things that comes to mind for me is a certain kind of loneliness—one that pushes Emily [Matilda Fleming] out of one unit and back into another. She’s lonely in her family home, then steps outside of it, only to find herself lonely there too. It’s this subtle, shifting loneliness that keeps moving her, pulling her in and out of different spaces. It’s almost like a constant, quiet force leading her away from home and back again. You know?

KS: Why do they leave the house and go on this journey with their friends? They leave when everyone else is watching the home recording, right? Uncle Ray is sitting there, getting nostalgic, and everyone else is caught up in it. And they sneak out—chasing this needful, lust-driven fantasy. It’s interesting because everyone inside is almost trapped in nostalgia, while the teens slip away into something else. There’s this doubling happening—the home videos pull the family into the past, while the teens move forward into their own story. As a viewer, I was really affected by the home videos—trying to piece together relationships. Just from an editing and music standpoint, it crept up on me, and both times I watched, I felt almost teary. Then the teens slip off—not into another film, but a connected one. That collective memory element you both mentioned is really striking.

EB: We always knew—before we had a script, before we had anything like that—we always knew from the start that we wanted this adventure, this sneak-out, to take place. And I think it worked perfectly when we started writing it, that it would happen at a moment when the family's attention was elsewhere. Everyone is soaking back into these memories, their attention truly in another place—about each other, about themselves, and also about nobody really, because it’s all back in memory. And then we have these kids who are looking for their own thing. Maybe they don’t feel connected to that nostalgia in the same way. They’re out for something that, to a teenager, is just natural. You don’t even really have to explain why you want to sneak out and be with your friends. But of course, we understand the deeper reasons behind it.

KS: Right, and then we deal with how it affects maybe my favorite character in the movie, played by the great Maria Dizzia. She’s so good—I could’ve watched a whole sequel from her character’s perspective. Sometimes I would feel anchored with her performance. Her fight with her daughter—I’d catch onto it and think, I understand this dynamic. And the moment she talks to her mom in the EasyChair—the dialogue, the pacing—it’s funny but difficult to watch. When the mom is looking out the window, is she in the same chair or in a different room?

TT: Different room, but probably a similar relationship to these chairs—just totally sunken in with their body.

KS: Not to draw out the analogy too overtly, but let’s talk windows. When we see Cousin Bruce [Chris Lazzaro] through a window at the end playing at the piano, it’s a bit Dickens, a bit Christmas Carol. What are windows? What do reflective objects mean to you?

TT: I'm glad you mentioned that because no one has said it, but I really think the windows serve, more than anything, to draw the line between the inside of this house—so loaded with associations of family, the bosom of youth, the coddled safety net of home—and the outside, which offers something completely different. Self-exploration is really how I see the film presenting the outside world. It’s where you go on an adventure to learn things you couldn’t inside the house. But there are stakes, and I think that’s important to say too. I love that it all takes place on a cold winter night. We originally had a detail—one we didn’t end up using—where Emily rips her sweater when she’s alone, making her even more vulnerable to the outside world, to everything it represents.

EB: Paris Peterson did such a phenomenal job with the production design. So every philosophical thing we’re talking about, with the chairs and windows, a lot of credit is due to him.

KS: I know Carson Lund did cinematography on this and Ham on Rye correct? Is he responsible for the batshit psychedelic nature of the firetruck scene?

TT: Carson and I didn’t overly talk about this film. We have a lot of commonality and reference points in how we grew up. It’s like Coco-Cola. It’s like Home Alone.

EB: Those cookie tin cans. I don’t know what they are called.

TT: Those were big, yes! A lot of the chintzy things, shitty, Christmas ephemera. And past that, it feels like an almost wordless collaboration. I write the shots and I like the way he interprets them.

[Someone coughs, there’s a moment of silence on the zoom.]



KS: The next thing I have written down is: I thought you would appreciate what I did with the green beans, blanched. So that’s not a question.

TT: [Laughs] Yeah I love that. I think Steve Alleva, who delivers that line, is such a great example of an actor who is good at being in his own world, their own glass encasing. And we, the viewers get to see that, and they of course, don’t.

EB: There’s something weird going on there—I think it’s just intuition that led us to those performances. It’s so funny to know that and to love it. You know, I talk about the film the same way you have, and we all see it as having this warm, celebratory thing in the house. But at the same time, when you start discussing some of the actors or characters, it’s almost like trying to connect the same poles of a magnet. They just won’t connect. You bring them close, but they can’t get close enough. There’s always that automatic distance at the heart of it.

TT: Who? Who? What?

EB: Like, if you try to connect two positive sides of a magnet, they just push each other away. They get close, but they can’t touch, constantly moving around each other.


TT: Of course. I think that might be why—one thing I was so relieved to hear when we started showing the film to people is that they remember who the characters are and actually care about all of them. That’s not obvious at the script level. We always intuited it because we knew how we’d photograph it. But when you just read a bunch of names in a script, it’s hard to tell if you’re going to care about all these people. It’s difficult to convince anyone of that. But I think part of it is the characters’ lack of awareness—we get to experience them in ways they don’t experience themselves.


KS: Do you think there’s something inherently voyeuristic in how we experience these characters? Like, they’re revealing subconscious parts of themselves without even knowing it, and we, as viewers, are almost forced into this deep analysis of their internal dynamics. But then there’s the scene where we get to hear part of Uncle Ray’s novel—where he’s deliberately exposing himself, ruminating on 'all the things in life that never happened [going] past him like footsteps.' It feels raw, almost overly revealing. Were you thinking about that contrast—between unintentional exposure and deliberate self-revelation?


TT: And then once we put it together in the edit room, we were able to really see how beautiful the words are—how truly splendid this text is. It makes me think, could Ray really have written that? Is that really in him? And what’s so beautiful is how it offers the perfect parallel—completely unintentional—with the player piano, where it’s like these people who have these urges to create, not necessarily misguided, but dangerous ones.

EB: People looking in on their wishes.

TT: I also wonder, are the family responding to the text because they're considering the words? Are they even that accustomed to reading things that are not like the most hears how to think novels or are they responding to her who, for sure has a lot more capability of recognizing the struggle within it and it becomes a moment of someone getting real for the first time.


EB: Much of it is about everyone circling around an underlying feeling in the house without confronting it. For example, they’re watching Ray’s wedding video—which is obviously tragic—and yet they just keep going. There’s so much emotion they’re avoiding. Ray’s moment with the book, through Joanne, really pulls the rug out and creates space for all of that to surface.


KS: Is it scary to make movies like this? To let meaning build in this way?


TT: I feel like, you know, when you’re on set and directing people, if it doesn’t feel right, you kind of know—you just know. And I think what’s really exciting is creating meaning through very subtle moments. The way I like to make films is with facial expressions that aren’t directing the viewer too much. I really like to see how much we can have the audience project onto less explicit, less emotive expressions.I’m a believer that you can go a long way with that. Maybe that’s something I take from Bresson—there’s a whole world going on within people, and it’s much more interesting to think about what’s behind someone’s gaze than to be directed as an audience member. So, to me, it’s an exciting opportunity more than anything else.


EB: Yeah, and I think also there's something in the basic subject material of these films that we've done that has that unspoken searching quality that I think doesn't require an explication. Our audience sees a sort of joy in searching, I think.

TT: I think that’s definitely why Eric and I have been making these films—because they allow both us and the audience to search. I think that’s also part of why the films tend to be more praised overseas than they are here. It’s just not the way audiences in the U.S. are used to relating to cinema, among other things.


EB: Thank you Richard Brody for protecting us.


KS: Can you speak more on that? What’s it like existing in a film community in 2024?


TT: I feel like we’re very blessed to have had the success we’ve had with these films, which are pretty counterintuitive from a Hollywood executive’s perspective. At the same time, I really believe in the quality of films like No Sleep Till and Eephus, so it’s a little frustrating that I see films that aren’t as ambitious–with challenging The Medium–being rewarded. But how I see it: we have each other at Omnes Films. I often think of my friends' minds when I feel isolated or confused by the, I don’t know if this is too strong a word, but schizophrenia of some U.S. culture. And there’s a blaze of excitement around something. We are fighting for these expressions to be taken seriously and enjoyed, and not just by a highfalutin crowd either.


EB: I don’t know if I would be as dogged and stubborn about continuing to work in this way if I didn’t have the people around me who believe in the material. It could easily become an isolating experience where you think there isn’t a home for this kind of art. But there are so many people who believe doggedly in the material.


TT: Of course, and I don’t think we are the only Americans making interesting films. I would include people like Bingham Bryant, Ricky D’Ambrose, Whitney Horn.. there’s a bunch.


KS: Thanks for those names. I needed to say how much I loved seeing Greg Turkington in this. He needs to be in more films.



TT: Greg and Michael [Cera] characters are actually based on poodles.


KS: Oh yeah I see that. What does The Suburbs mean to this movie?


TT: I think the suburbs are such a continually fascinating expression of American ideology because they were built for a class that’s now shrinking. So now it’s like—what are they? It’s this strange conundrum of how America concretized its ideals in a way that no longer fits anyone. There’s so much to study there. But in terms of the past, Carson and I always joke that we don’t want to make films set in the present because the cars are ugly. Like, really, it’s as simple as that. Someone once said, ‘If I could buy a 1970s Chevy, maybe I’d believe in the American dream too,’ and it’s funny because there’s some truth to that.


EG: I don’t want to see a fucking iPhone, you know?