If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment, it’s all but certain you’ve been exposed to the glorious event known as the office Christmas/holiday party, where you’re usually buttoned-up co-workers have a few too many drinks and open themselves up emotionally or start making out with an equally hammered co-worker or engage in some form of office Olympics. The new film OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY is set in the heart of Chicago (weirdly enough, in the very office building where I last held a 9-to-5 job) at a company on the verge of massive layoffs, with only a few employees charged with the task of landing a big account and saving any staffers from losing their jobs.
T.J. Miller plays a sibling who helps run the company, along with his nastier sister (Jennifer Aniston), who only cares about hitting numbers. Jason Bateman and Olivia Munn must land this whale of a new client (represented by Courtney B. Vance) during the blowout Christmas party that might also serve as the company’s last hurrah. The film has a who’s who of great comic actors, including Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Randall Park, Vanessa Bayer, Rob Corddry, Sam Richardson, and Karan Soni, all of whom have their own personal dramas during the course of the night, which leads to a classic Chicago car chase
The ringleaders of this holiday circus are the directing team of Josh Gordon and Will Speck, who have previously brought up BLADES OF GLORY (which I liked) and THE SWITCH (which I really didn’t like), also with Bateman and Aniston. OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY is a great deal of fun, taking the controlled-chaos theme and injecting a sweetness to the mission at hand. I had the chance to sit down in Chicago (once again, in that building where I used to work, which now has a hotel in it) with Speck and Gordon, who were so much fun and had clearly given a great deal of thought to the method behind filming madness. Please enjoy my talk with Josh Gordon and Will Speck, and OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY opens this Friday, December 9.
Capone: First of all, thank you for shooting the movie in Chicago.
Will Speck: You’re welcome. Thank you for having us.
Capone: There’s another movie out right now that’s supposedly set in Chicago that was clearly not shot in Chicago. It was filmed in Montreal, and I understand the whole tax break thing, but still…
Josh Gordon: Just say it’s set in Montreal, and it’s fine.
Capone: Exactly.
WS: We would have shot the whole movie here if we could have, but we shot as much as we could. It’s a great city, great visually, and it was something that we always set out to do. When we were developing the movie, we could choose where it was set. It could have been anywhere. For us, it was really important to be here.
Capone: When did you shoot? Was it actually winter and was the snow real?
JG: Well, it’s interesting, we shot in April. And the first day that we shot, the studio had said “Look, we can’t afford to have snow through the whole movie, and it’s important in the third act, so let’s just make it no snow in the first act.” We were a little bummed, but we said “Okay that’s fine.” Then we started shooting, and it just started dumping snow, and we were like “Now we have to match.” And then literally we went inside, and the next day we were shooting on the Clark Street bridge, and it snowed all day, so it was like the universe was telling us “You’ve got to have snow.”
Capone: Even the universe likes that you shot Chicago for Chicago. How do you shoot chaos using the very controlled way that you shoot movies?
WS: We’ve been talking about our extras so much, and the background really did have a big role in this movie. Going into this movie, one of our big anxieties was how do we track our leads? What state are they at in terms of disheveled, how drunk are they, how inebriated are they? And what we realized, which was an important thing, and if you think about other movies like this it’s similar, you make them the center of the tornado. So for the most part, our cast was surrounded by the chaos, and we were able then to really go far with how much we push the background, then we could stay focused on the story.
For us, it was in the ingredients in creating a huge swirl around them that could just get dialed up or dialed down depending on what stage the party was at, then just making sure our leads walked in the center of that, parting the seas of the party. I think the way we tried to achieve it without monitoring everybody and saying to Aniston “At this point, Jason’s had one drink, but T.J.’s had two,” we just keep everyone very much on the message of the story. It’s still fun, and let their appearance be a little bit more disheveled, but really use the background actors as a way to flavor the chaos.
Capone: You said “movies like this.” Were there other movies you looked to for a little bit of guidance?
WS: A little bit.
JG: A little bit. When we first began developing this movie, there really were no party movies except for THE PARTY and BACHELOR PARTY in the ’80s. Since then, they made PROJECT X. But party movies are difficult, because you can’t, just from a script standpoint, have too much plot, or it takes over the movie. We did an early draft that had a whole espionage thing. It just became a procedural that happened to be set at a party. It took awhile to develop the right story that allowed the party to be front and center through the whole movie.
Capone: You do have to strike a balance between this plot about the company shutting down and the party. Is that balance done at the script stage, or is that an editing thing?
JG: It’s a script thing and an editing thing. But it was a script thing for us. We wanted to make a movie about an office that you cared for, that you rooted for, that had ultimately heart and a Christmas message, and yet we wanted it to also be this ridiculous, outrageous, goes-to-11 party, so it was really about balancing the whole time.
Capone: I’ve seen T.J. Miller presented in different forms, from his stand up, which is more like insane performance art, and in a more controlled environment, but he actually made me care about him in this movie. He ended up becoming the focal point in the film. This really is about different families—the family you get stuck with 8 or 9 hours a day at work versus the one you’re born into.
WS: Yeah. I think we wanted that to happen, so we’re glad that it worked, for you at least. Audiences seem to respond to him. He is outrageous, and his standup is really bombastic, and he is in a great way a true kamikaze comedian-artist. But I think here, we wanted his character to be the heart of the movie and to give you a little bit of that christmas-y spirit, and the idea of putting him with Aniston and creating a family dynamic where he was living in the shadow of his father and could achieve greatness and be loved by his coworkers was just what we wanted to have happen.
Capone: Believe it or not, I used to work in this building when I had a day job.
JG: Want to know something funny? T.J. Miller worked in this building. This is actually the building that is in the movie. This was designed by Mies van der Rohe; t used to be the old IBM Building. When we were shooting the bridge scene, T.J. was saying, “I used to work on the whatever floor.” And then at lunch, he went upstairs and talked to his old boss. It was a law firm, I think. He was not a paralegal, but almost a paralegal.
Capone: But it was in these walls where I had my first office holiday party. What is it about these holiday parties that sets people free?
JG: I think for us, and this is what made the idea for this movie so interesting and sticky to us, is you spend 264 days a year working with these people. Often times, you spend more time with them than you do your own family, and yet, especially now, there are so many rules and so many regulations that, probably wisely, keep all of our passions and angers and frustrations in check, and one night a year you’re meant to be honest with these people in some way. Have a drink, the caste system breaks down. Theoretically, the bottom of the company can talk to the top of the company. It’s this very dangerous, charged night. So that to us was just a natural theater to explore.
Capone: Kate McKinnon never ceases to amaze me. Part of me wants someone to build a whole movie around the weirdness of this woman’s life. How did you even get her in this? Because she would have still been working on SNL at the time.
WS: We got really lucky. It was a moment in time. She had shot GHOSTBUSTERS in the summer, then it was the fall, she was back at SNL, and she had a week or two here and there for her spring season of SNL, and we got lucky to be her movie for her spring on her off weeks. She’s a force of nature and she brought a lot to this role that we didn’t expect. Like most of these actors, she came into the process and said What if? And then we sat with them and the writers and re-tooled and crafted the part. Kate’s idea about her being a bird enthusiast, somebody who’s in love with the rules, and trying to make the rules fun, but holds them very important and near and dear to her. Her idea was to file an HR complaint against herself, which was brilliant. So I think all of those were adds that we were happy to embrace, of course. And yeah, you’re right. It could be a whole movie. Maybe that’ll be the sequel.
Capone: Do either of you have a history in a corporate environment that you could pull stories from for this film?
WS: I think a little bit, but I think all of us, including the actors, always fantasized about working in an office and having an office Christmas party, so we all got to do that.
JG: My dad was a lawyer at a big firm in Los Angeles, and when we first graduated from NYU because we had day jobs, we would write at night on our scripts, and my dad would let us use his office. So we would go in as everybody was leaving and sit in my dad’s office and work. There was something about this corporate law office that really appealed to us. Sometimes we would pull all-nighters and leave as people were coming in in the morning, and I think there was just something funny to us about that concept of mayhem in an environment that was almost designed to repel mayhem.
Capone: One of the things that you do here is successfully breathe life into your supporting players. You give them each these things to do and personal dramas that have nothing to do with the main story.
JG: It was really important to us.
WS: I think we wanted to make sure that it didn’t just feel like three characters and a bunch of extras. That everybody had their moment. Because that’s the truth about your coworkers—everybody can be a hero, everybody can have an insecure moment, everybody can drink too much, say too much, make a move on somebody that they wouldn’t have expected to, and I think we wanted to reflect that somehow.
JG: For people to show up to a movie called OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY, we wanted for everybody in the audience to have someone that they relate to directly. “Oh, I’m that person in the office.”
Capone: It’s a nice reminder that like everybody’s the lead in their own movie.
JG: And that’s one of the reasons we were drawn to it was the idea of this big ensemble.
Capone: With T.J. and Jason and Kate, they have very different comic styles. Jason is very subtle and low key, and T.J. is not. You’re really throwing the dice on whether that’s going to work or not.
JG: Well, it’s also what we love. We find when you have people that come at their comedy from different places, it makes the scenes feel more alive. The worst thing you can do is everyone doing the same thing. So tonally we wanted them all to exist in a reality that we create, that’s grounded. I think Jason helps to ground that. But then you wanted to go bombastic, and you want it to be big, and you want it to have all these different instruments and sounds—it’s like an orchestra, but they all have to work together.
Capone: You mentioned before that once you cast a part, you had the actors work with the writers to modify the characters. Was that in leu of improv on the set? Or was there some of that too?
JG: No, it’s like you want to bring them into the process early so that they’re comfortable in the part that they’re playing and that they inhabit it. Great actors will always love their characters, and they’ll always come to you with ideas that even you didn’t quite have for them. So we wanted to incorporate them in the script phase. A lot of them are also really brilliant, funny writers in their own right. And then once they feel that ownership, when they’re improvising on set, they can do it in character because they know they’re fully fleshed out, instead of just dictating for them “This is your arc. Now be funny in it.” We worked for a long time on the script. You don’t want to have these people as your last Band-Aid on something that doesn’t work.
Capone: I was genuinely surprised by Courtney B. Vance in this film, who is not known as a comic actor. Again, how did you get him involved? Was he looking to do something different?
WS: I think he wanted it to be ridiculous. I think he put a lot of trust in us, which is great. I think he’s a big Jennifer Aniston fan, so that was helpful when she was attached. I think we had a great first conversation with him where he gave us one note that was important to him, which is that he comes back at the end. Originally, it was the idea that he had his accident and then you never see him again. We’re grateful that he had that note, because it made a big difference that he’s now going to be an employee at that ridiculous company. But he was really great and game, and he’s a great dramatic actor. I think we wanted somebody in the first act felt like they had a lot of gravitas, and they were very hard to woo or switch or change.
JG: Or read, even.
WS: Yeah, exactly. So then when he does flip the switch, it really comes out of nowhere as opposed to an actor you’ve seen be very comedic try to be serious. It was more important for us to have a serious actor be the actor that the audience doesn’t have an assumption about, so when he does make a comedic turn, they don’t see it coming.
Capone: You actually get to do a car chase through Chicago. Was this your first car chase?
WS: It was our first car chase.
JG: This was our first car chase, yeah. Yeah, it was a big undertaking, especially here in Chicago. But this is a city built for car chases. If you’re going to do your first car chase it has to be under the ‘L’ and then you have to jump a bridge. We wanted the party to expand out into the city.
Capone: I was going to ask you if you were hesitant to leave the building?
JG: No, because at a certain point, you want to start to infect the city as a whole, and we knew we wanted these characters early on to spiral out into the night, and a chase sequence was great. But also we wanted that character of Clay to go some place a little dramatic and ultimately be funny with it, but have it be that the office has to go and save him. He’s this unlikely boss who maybe they didn’t appreciate during the year, and now they finally get what he was doing for them the whole time.
Capone: You now officially have working relationships with both Jason and Jennifer. What do you like most about what they bring to the table?
WS: I think they’re both really gifted comedic actors, but they’re also good dramatic actors and they always ground their comedy, each of them. And I think that was important for us to take advantage of their skills in both, just as people that you relate to, that you identify with, that you trust as an audience, but that can both go to ridiculous places, whether it’s Jason on the eggnog luge, or Jen wrestling her brother to the ground getting spit on. They’re willing to go for it, but there’s a lot of credibility and intelligence that the audience gives them.
Capone: She does seem like the kind of person who will do anything for a laugh, even if it's something completely out of character.
WS: She’s really brave, and I think she likes to subvert the expected assumption about her, so that’s a good thing.
Capone: Do you have any clue what you guys are up to after this?
WS: That’s a good question.
JG: We’re going to hit some office Christmas parties.
WS: Yeah, exactly. I think there’s a couple of things brewing, but I think the most important thing we’re going to do next is sleep, because it’s been a long run.
Capone: Well, I appreciate that you guys have added to the Chicago comedy lexicon.
WS: I hope so, man. From your mouth to your reader’s ears.
