“We’re not great planners”: the Farrelly brothers on ‘Dear Santa’, ‘Dumb and Dumber’ and reuniting after a decade
The festive family comedy Dear Santa marks the first movie that comedy heavyweights the Farrelly brothers have worked on together in ten years, but under different circumstances from their previous dozen features, including Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, and There’s Something About Mary.
The film follows the misadventures of Robert Timothy Smith’s Liam Turner, who gets more than he bargained for in the run-up to Christmas when an unfortunate spelling mistake finds his letter to Santa ending up in the hands of Jack Black’s demonic entity instead, who descends upon the youngster’s home to pass himself off as jolly old Saint Nick and attempt to spread a completely different kind of festive cheer.
Bobby Farrelly directs the movie, his second solo feature after 2023’s Champions, while Peter – who won Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Original Screenplay’ after directing and co-writing Green Book – shares screenwriting credits with Ricky Blitt and Dan Ewen. However, the project dates much further back than the decade the siblings have spent apart.
Dear Santa was first announced in May 2012 with the Farrellys attached but didn’t arrive until more than a dozen years later when it began streaming on Paramount+ globally on November 25, 2024, as well as being made available to buy digitally, with a United Kingdom digital release to follow on December 18. It’s been a long time coming, but as it turns out, that’s par for the course when Bobby and Peter are involved.
“It’s very typical of our projects, believe it or not,” Peter admitted. “Dumb and Dumber took five years from the time we wrote it to get it made. There’s Something About Mary was a script that was ten years old that Ed Decter and John Strauss had written. Ricky Stanicky, that I just did, was ten years old. We’re slow moving! It takes a while to get there. And this script, the reason it took so long is because it really did take that long.”
“It took that long to get it right,” Bobby interjected of the 12-year development process. “This is kind of a delicate idea, and so it has to be done correctly, particularly being a Christmas movie. We wanted to make sure that it comes out like a sweet movie at the end, and that took a little doing.”
Armed with the knowledge that many of their movies take years to make it from page to screen, it would be reasonable to assume the Farrellys were confident that Dear Santa would always be made, regardless of how long it took. As it turned out, that sentiment was accurate to a certain extent but still somewhat complicated.
“This one was tough because we had done it over at Fox, which is sort of not there anymore,” Bobby continued, referring to the Disney takeover. “But our studio executive is a guy named Jeremy Kramer, and he actually brought it back to us years later and said, ‘Hey, the time might be right to this now’. Maybe it wasn’t right to do it in the old days, but it came back. And so we owe him a lot of credit.”
“At that time, I think it was harder to push through what we’re doing here,” Peter continued. “But Paramount was more open to the idea because we feel it’s got to have a certain edge to it, but it’s also a family movie, and it’s heartwarming at the end. It’s a really fine line, so it was tricky. It was always in the back of my mind that we’ll get to it.”
As well as being the first movie involving both of the Farrelly brothers in a decade, Dear Santa is also the first Christmas movie they’ve made, whether that’s together or separately. It wasn’t a bucket list item, though, with Peter again bringing up that neither of them is particularly great at looking ahead.
“We’re not great planners,” he confessed. “For one thing, people have asked me, like, ‘How do you do your movies? Do you have a thing you’re going to do: a comedy, then a drama, then this?’ We just… The universe brings something to us at a certain time, and we focus on that thing. I always wanted to make a horror movie; we’ve never done that.”
“Haven’t done that,” Bobby concurred, in what could be a potential tease of things to come. “We respond more to what we think is a really good idea. And in this story, we have a young boy who’s writing a letter to Santa. And instead of writing ‘Dear Santa’, he writes ‘Dear Satan’ and sends it off. And so when he gets the letter, Jack Black, it’s like, ‘Oh my god, I never get letters from kids’. And so he comes and visits, and hilarity ensues.”
Speaking of the star, Dear Santa is the first time Black has worked with the Farrelly brothers in more than 20 years. Unsurprisingly, his name was always at the top of their wish list. “We love Jack,” Peter said. “We had a great time with him. He’s fantastic. I think he was the first person we went to with this, which is very rare. Usually, we get shot down. We take a very zen view of casting because we get shot down all the time, and then we end up with the right person, so we don’t worry about it.”
On this occasion, when Black was sent the script, he responded within two hours. “He said, ‘I love this. I was born to do it’. Well, that was easy, right? Who we go to first is usually not the right person for the role because they didn’t respond to it. The right person always comes to us. And this was the first time that the first person we went to ended up being the right person, and that was Jack Black.”
The list of actors who could convincingly play both Santa and Satan is a very short one, but Black would definitely be on it, something that played into the Farrellys’ hands. “He’s got a loveability, and he’s so likeable no matter what he does,” Peter agreed. “There’s some heart in there. That’s why I always tell people Jack’s going to be around until the end of days. He’s going to be one of those guys. He’ll be 92 years old, still working.”
“That’s true,” Bobby chimed in. “He’s got that face, you know? With his eyebrows and the way he can move his smile. He can look a little diabolical, but it’s always in a really fun way.” Black’s signature energy is a difficult thing to harness, especially when he’s working opposite a younger co-star and relative newcomer like Smith, with whom he shares most of his scenes in Dear Santa. That said, the Farrellys were happy to encourage improvisation from both performers in equal measure.
“We were lucky that young Robert Timothy Smith could adapt,” Bobby offered. “If Jack went off the page and did a little bit of improvisation, Robert would go with him. He really surprised me at just how talented he is, and at a young age, to be able to do that. I was afraid he’d just be able to memorise his lines and deliver those, but if Jack did something different than what was on the page, he’d go right with him. It really amazed me. He had a sophisticated delivery. He was like a mini Albert Brooks!”
As mentioned, Dear Santa is the first Farrelly brothers feature in ten years but under different circumstances. Instead of co-writing and co-directing, Bobby was behind the camera, and Peter contributed to the script. There was a sense of inevitability that they’d work together again eventually, but does their latest collaborative effort double up as an evolution of their process?
“That’s a real good question,” Bobby ruminated. “I think that this one was an evolution, and it did use a lot of the things that we’ve learned over the years. We know one thing: that it always starts with a script, and this script took ten years for us to get it right. And so Pete and Ricky Blitt wrote the script, and there were many versions of it, but they weren’t quite right until they wrote this most recent draft. As a director, I wanted to take a crack at filming the movie, and the two of us produced it together. It really was a combination of all the things we’ve learned how to do.”
At the end of the day, Dear Santa is a family-friendly comedy about being the best version of yourself, but it’s also a fantasy film with some supernatural and demonic overtones. On paper, that doesn’t sound like the easiest tonal balance to strike without leaning too far in either direction, something Peter wholeheartedly agreed with.
“You’re right, we’re walking a tightrope on this one,” he conceded. “You’re appealing to kids, but also to adults. And the kids aren’t too little, but there’s a certain edge that we were looking for. It’s right on the line. I think the thing that really made it was Jack Black because he’s on that line. You know, Jack Black could be in School of Rock, and he’s dealing with little kids, but he’s also got an adult thing going.”
Elaborating, Peter suggested that because the Farrellys “knew we needed somebody like that,” the entire movie could fall apart if they didn’t nail the casting. “Jack was it,” Bobby chimed in. “Jack saved us.” With that in mind, knowing the duo have always wanted to make a horror film of their own, were they ever tempted to embrace the more devilish side of Dear Santa‘s premise to scratch that itch?
“There’s a lot of ways you could go with this,” Bobby acknowledged. “It could become very dark and become like a horror movie, but we didn’t want to go that way. It’s a Christmas story, so we wanted to make sure there was a family element to it, too, and that even though there’s this weird concept with Jack’s character, it ends in a way that is very satisfying and very uplifting. That was the challenge.”
“We always did want to make a horror movie, and we still do,” Peter doubled down. “One day, we will. Like I said, we’re bad planners, but we will eventually get around to making a horror movie. This isn’t it. This is a horror movie like Damn Yankees is a horror movie; it leans more towards comedy.”
In the modern age, plenty of Christmas movies – and comedies in general – tend to have an air of cynicism about them. Dear Santa, meanwhile, places its heart on its sleeve from the first scene and keeps it there until the credits roll. Although the Farrellys didn’t go out of their way to intentionally avoid the more cynical side of the festive formula, it came naturally when they were putting the pieces together.
“I don’t know that we thought about what everyone else is doing with their movies, so much as we just wanted to tell a really interesting story in our way, and do it with a lot of comedy, a lot of heart, and a lot of twists and turns,” Bobby said. “And maybe when you go into the movie, by the time you get to the end, it’s a little bit different than you were expecting. So that’s always been our formula, and that’s the main thing.”
“We’re not analysing other movies and then coming around to think, ‘Well, how can we do it differently than that?'” Peter reiterated. “We’re just doing our thing and hoping it’s different and following what’s in us.”
Speaking of doing their thing, December 16th, 2024, marks 30 years to the day since the Farrellys’ debut feature, Dumb and Dumber, was released. A modern comedy classic and a beloved multi-generational favourite, the brothers remain amazed that their first movie has continued to enjoy such a long-lasting life and legacy.
“It makes me happy; it’s definitely a surprise that it’s still going,” Peter admitted, and Bobby was in the exact same boat: “I have young kids coming up to me all the time who are just watching Dumb and Dumber for the first time. It was silly enough and funny enough that they still relate to it. And it really didn’t outgrow its welcome. It’s been the gift that keeps on giving for us, and people come and quote lines and all that. It’s just been a joy for us.”
Dumb and Dumber capped off a remarkable star-making year for Jim Carrey, and while the Farrellys couldn’t speak highly enough of his role in making the movie happen despite Hollywood’s disinterest, Peter pointed towards another unsung member of the creative team as being instrumental in the film’s success.
“We wrote it with Bennett Yellin, the two of us, and it was a long time coming. It took us five years to get that movie made, but we had the exact same script, pretty much what we shot, and it got shot down at every studio. And there’s a point where you’re, like, ‘God, maybe we are insane’. This seems so funny to us, and yet the whole town is saying no. And thank the lord for Jim Carrey because Jim Carrey was the one who got the movie made.”
“Jim Carrey was hot, and he read that script and said, ‘This is hysterical. Let’s make it’. And then, of course, we begged the studio to get Jeff Daniels because Jeff Daniels is a genius. We always wanted him in there. But this movie does not get made without Jim Carrey. And then we’re not sitting here right now, we’re probably back in Rhode Island.” Selling themselves short, perhaps, but Bobby couldn’t have agreed more: “That’s true, that’s very true.”
Having finally made their first Christmas movie and being fans of the annual subgenre themselves, if the Farrellys could only pick one Yuletide favourite to watch every year for the rest of their lives, they each opted for a completely different answer, with one being much more expected than the other.
“I think you probably have a different answer than me,” Bobby accurately guessed of his brother. “But I’ll go all the way back to It’s a Wonderful Life. George Bailey was just so real. You totally believe that person, and it did have that magical element, just like our movie does, where he was able to see his life had he never been born. And so his guardian angel gave him that opportunity. He realised that each life is so important and that he didn’t realise how much good he had done in his life just by doing little things.”
“I just thought it was a beautiful story, and I actually thought about it quite a bit making this movie because this is kind of a flip on that,” he explained. “It’s 180 degrees different, but with the same uplifting ending.” Frank Capra’s classic is a staple of the Christmastime viewing schedule for a reason, but Peter prefers his festive flicks to have a touch more modernity about them. “As much as I like Bad Santa, if I was going to have to watch a Christmas movie, it would probably be Elf.”
