The Night Before—a new comedy about three friends (Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anthony Mackie) and their Christmas tradition—is a R-rated Christmas movie. A R-rated Christmas movie!? What child is this? one might think. Or rather, What will the children watch if the adults are preoccupied by a Christmas movie that features a misguided shroom-venture and a mysterious dick pic as its central plot points?
The Night Before never claims to be fun for the whole family. It’s a friends Christmas movie, not a family Christmas movie. Both the script and the very existence of The Night Before target this often unacknowledged tension of Christmas time: the friends-and-family time split. Especially for people who live away from their hometowns, visiting for the holidays is a precious time to reconnect with both groups, and every hour seems to pit imaginary rival factions against each other to compete for your time. Sigh, being fraught about our holidays, what a fun American pastime.
As is its goal, The Night Before builds that tension to a super-funny exaggeration. Directed by Jonathan Levine, the movie was written by Levine, Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, and Evan Goldberg in a renovated synagogue in Alphabet City that Seth Rogen was renting, "with a 50-foot ceiling with a stained-glass star of David in the living room." When he meets me for lunch, several blocks away from this for-rent-livable synagogue, Levine talks about messing with genre expectations, magical realism, and his favorite Christmas movies.
GQ: The Night Before revolves around this central, magical, secret, exclusive party. Have you ever been to a party like that?
I don't know if that exists. It’s a kind of legendary thing that I think you kind of imagine would exist, but no, I've never encountered. We were scouting just some bars in the East Village, and we were scouting one bar, and there was like a secret room in the back. And we were like "What's that?" And they were like, "That's nothing." And when we pressed them, they were like "That's the ultra-secret bar for like famous people or whatever." You can't bring your phone in and all that stuff. That felt like kind of like a gimmick, like it wasn't really a real thing. But I think if that party exists, I probably wouldn't be invited to it.
It’s fun to imagine that there is a secret bar within the speakeasy behind the laundromat. It's exciting to think that there is always somewhere—
Cooler than you're at. Totally. Within the movie it's sort of becomes this kind of metaphor for like what these guys think they need for their lives. Then you get there and you’re like, Yeah, it’s cool. There are a couple of famous people here. But it’s not gonna change my life.
Have you ever had a moment of complete party satisfaction?
Yeah, but it’s never at a party like that. It’s like friends hanging out in a kitchen or something like that. Mostly it's more like drinking cans of beer than like drinking fancy cocktails at a party.
When people talk about your movies, they praise a general tonal nimbleness—wow, it's funny and sad; it's gentle and bold!— and everyone's always surprised that a movie can be more than one thing.
I love subverting expectations or playing with the sort of unspoken kind of connections that the audience has. This is probably the most straightforward movie I've done, but in many ways that makes me more, even that much more proud of the kind of sad stuff and the kind of tonally interesting stuff you might not otherwise see and like.
Christmas is a great genre in which to work because like people are you know the holidays are so inherently emotional that you can get away with all sots of different things. Christmas is a time of happiness and joy, but it's also a time of reflection, and it's obviously it gets dark early, and people get really bummed out around the holiday. Joe's character turns out to be an orphan. We decided that if we're playing within the tropes of the Christmas movie you know you kind of push it in that Dickensian way. People won't get mad at you for pushing those buttons.
Tell me about how you showed this tension between wanting to be supportive to friends and family.
For me I just value my friendships so much. I mean I love my family too, but my friends, I have a really special connection with my friends. I just got married a year ago. I have a two-month old child. I'm staring out a new family, I'm realizing how important it is to hang out with my parents. And also I'm thinking about what a dick I was to the friends who already had kids when I didn't have any, how I did not empathize really in any way. I didn't do enough to like nurture those relationships. The point is: It’s all like this big jumble of ambivalence and conflict and it all kind of comes to a head around the holidays. I think that what this movie is trying to say is like your friends can be there for a way that your family can't.
You use phones well in the movie. They’re plot-points, but it’s also not a boring thing where you have to watch people texting all the time.
It’s easier to avoid them because you can also put people, in like a horror movie it's horrible because you're always like "Why can't they just call the fucking police?" So it's much harder to graft a plot around a world in which everyone is connected all the time because you don't get lost. You don't you know lose other people. You can't even get in a debate about who was in what TV show or whatever. It's like if you want to have a lot of the conversation like in The Last Detail this big conversation about The Human Torch, someone would have just Googled it, and their conversation would be over. So it's not very cinematic.. But like anything else you just erase the challenge and try to make it different.
Usually "last hurrah" movies seem to have such false stakes. How did you keep this from not being cloying or insistent?This falls into a genre of movie I really like: the hangout movie. It was so much more about capturing a vibe, of what it was to be with these guys on this night and not so much hanging on this is our last Christmas or whatever. We did have that, and we cut it out because it felt like we were forcing. The stakes should be more existential than anything else. There's a version of this that's much more like a Richard Linklater movie, which probably would make no money. This is geared to be like an event movie for people. It's meant to be like a pop culture thing because that's how I feel about Christmas in general, you know. It's a communal experience and you want as many people to get into that experience as possible. So we put like for me the bare minimum of plot and stakes in to keep your attention when you might otherwise tune out if it was just people talking the whole time.
