Becoming Santa was a documentary that left a giant grin on my face (read my review to find out why) and I jumped at the chance to interview the filmmakers. What follows is a transcription of the two on one interview with director Jeff Myers and subject Jack Sanderson about their documentary. We discuss deciding to take this route, the pains and pleasures of being what is essentially a Christmas rock star, the differences between documentary filmmaking and narrative filmmaking, and even the lack of respect children are getting in the country at large. The film also won the award for Best Spotlight Feature at SXSW. Check out our talk below and I’ve included the trailer first for some background on the film.
The Film Stage: So, obviously I saw it and really dug it. Where did the concept come from?
Jeff Myers: Jack came up with the original idea from going to auditions and seeing that when there were calls for a Santa Claus, there were this men in their own costume, full white beard, and arrived with their own Mrs. Claus. Jack observed that there seemed to be an interesting sub-culture of Santas going on there, and that was the seed that started the whole process. From there, we looked for an actor we could put through the process for the entire Christmas season but there was no one really willing to commit to such an arduous task.
Jack Sanderson: We had been looking for and talking to people, but then came the Christmas where my father died and then June came around and I said to Jeff “it’s already June and I’m already dreading Christmas so I’m going throw myself into being Santa and get through the season that way.” So I went and got my hair bleached and Jeff came and filmed the bleaching process. I didn’t think about it at the time because of the pain from the bleach, but later Jeff came to me with the footage and said “we have a movie here because you’re insanely committed.”
Myers: It doesn’t show in the movie because it would’ve taken too long, but the bleaching process took five hours.
Sanderson: Yeah, the first time it came out golden and I looked like an Irish Setter and it freaked me out. I thought “what have I done? What have I done?” And then we just did it again, and for the next few days I had scabs in my beard from the bleach because it burned my skin. But once we got through that initial bleaching, I had to do touch ups once a month because my hair grows a quarter of an inch a month. The touch ups, thankfully, were much easier.
I know you wanted to get your Christmas spirit back after the death of your father, but becoming a Santa Claus is pretty extreme. Why go that route?
Sanderson: It’s at the core of the holiday. How do you have Christmas without Santa?
Jack, what did you learn in your experiences as Santa?
Sanderson: Santa is a rock star. In Los Angeles one of the things that people dread is having to go to the DMV and my license expired while we were making the movie so I had to go get a new driver’s license. And usually when you go to the DMV, you have to plan for three to four hours. So I go to the DMV and check in, and the lady says “do you play Santa?” I said “I do, and you’re on the nice list.” And she was beside herself with excitement. There were 80 people ahead of me in line, and her boss came over and brought him to the front of the line. I was in and out of the DMV in ten minutes. And then there was the time I was checking into a hotel for a fundraising event, and the hotel clerk upgraded me to a suite for free just because I was Santa. Those were the kinds of strange experiences I had and didn’t expect.
How did you two meet?
Sanderson: We had met in Chicago about…18 years prior?
Myers: Yeah, something like that.
Sanderson: We hadn’t seen each other since then, and ran into each other at the YMCA in Hollywood. And Jeff started talking to me about projects he was doing, and I said I wanted to do this Santa Claus thing and he jumped on board.
Is Susan Mesco as intense in person as she was on-screen?
Sanderson: Very intense. She’s a Santa force to be reckoned with; big Santa fan. She was overwhelming.
Did you talk to other Santa schools before deciding on hers?
Sanderson: We had talked to the Charles Howard school, which is the oldest Santa school in America located in Michigan. They were already full to capacity. I talked to the International Santa School around the country and he wasn’t interested.
Myers: He wouldn’t let us bring the cameras. They seemed to be pretty protective of each other, this whole Santa community.
Sanderson: They wanted to protect the “legend” and the persona of Santa, which is understandable.
Myers: I think every time we approached somebody too, they were hesitant because of films like Borat, which came up a lot. We had to explain we weren’t trying to play a trick on them, we just wanted to explore this sub-culture that’s going on out there.
Sanderson: Macy’s runs their own Santa school and they weren’t interested in any filming either. They operate under the idea that their Santa is the real Santa and they don’t want to do anything that undermines that idea.
So the Macy’s gig is the important gig to get?
Sanderson: That’s the Santa dream; everyone dreams to be the Santa in the Macy’s Christmas parade. And this was the first year I actually watched the parade in a long time and I kept an eye on the Santa. The Santa they had was really terrific and high end. He was pretty impressive.
Jack, are you still playing Santa every Christmas?
Sanderson: Well I did it the year we shot, and the year after that. I’m currently growing my beard back to probably do it again.
Are you going to do the Polar Express train again?
Sanderson: No [laughs]. No more Polar Express.
Was that the most difficult Santa-related appearance you had?
Sanderson: Yeah.
Myers: Jack was really worn out after that. He had just thrown his back out before that, I think.
Sanderson: Foolishly doing the hula hoop at the airport [laughs], which Jeff has footage of but was kind enough not to include that in the film. I’d never thrown my back out before, and there will children were there. My assistant said I needed to lie down on the ground, and I told her that I couldn’t because there were children there and they were going to think Santa was dying [laughs].
That made the physical aspect of the job much more difficult. You really don’t think of being Santa as a very physical activity, but it gets tiring picking children up constantly the whole day.
Any negative experiences with dealing with children we didn’t see in the film?
Sanderson: Honestly, not really. I didn’t deal with vomit or any sticky diapers or anything.
Myers: Honestly if we had dealt with more mall visits, we might have come across that.
Sanderson: Credit to the malls though for not letting us film; they also want to keep the experience sacred and not expose anything.
Another interesting thing about Becoming Santa is that you always go into a little of the history of the character around the world and how it’s changed. Did you learn anything new from delving into this area?
Sanderson: I had encountered the story of Zwarte Piet (“Black Peter”, a helper to Santa in the Netherlands who is played by a white person in black-face), so I definitely made sure we included that. I also searched high and low for black Santas, because I wanted audiences to realize that Santa is not culturally owned just by white people. We had some Hispanic Santas, black Santas. Santa Dee was just one of my favorite interviews, such a great guy. I asked him “do you ever get any white children who say you aren’t Santa because you’re black?” And he said “kids see the red suit, the big white beard, they know they’re getting gifts, and they don’t care about the color of his skin.” It made us really happy; that was pretty awesome.
Any issues with other Santas?
Myers: Not as many as we thought we would have. When we started this project, we wondered if we might find some bad Santas out there.
Sanderson: Ultimately it was just the pettiness of two or three people, and we felt it didn’t really fit into the story we wanted to tell; almost an unnecessary tangent. But it may end up on the DVD extras.
What’s the release platform for Becoming Santa? VOD? Theaters?
Sanderson: We’re in negotiations with a couple of different distributors. We don’t have a set answer for that. But we were always aiming for this Christmas. We didn’t realize when we started that there are no other Christmas-centered documentaries. One of things that is making the potential distributors excited is that it’s a perennial and can be shown every year. We had not thought of that when we started.
Jeff, you started in this business doing music videos.
Myers: Started with those as well as live concerts and directed my first narrative feature The Ride back in 1997.
How is the process of making a documentary different than those more controlled environments?
Myers: The thing I like about narratives and music videos is that you’re storyboarding and manufacturing what happens. In this situation, it’s unique because you’re chasing the action a lot of times. You know we have our own expectations going into it, what we think we want, and our ideas, but a lot of it was just following Jack around getting what you can get. We would have a meeting at the end of each day and discuss what happened and how we can shape what we got into something, and what we could do tomorrow. You don’t really have much control. We never wanted to manufacture moments but we were kind of hoping it would just be interesting. On the first day of shooting at the Santa school, we had ten hours of footage and we decided this couldn’t be; we had to think about it and pick and choose what were going to shoot and how we were going to show it.
Sanderson: We encountered maybe a total of two people who said “just tell me what you want me to say and I’ll say it,” which was a shock to me. I was like “I don’t want you to do that, I want you to just say what you’re going to say!”
Myers: The whole point was to explore the topic. We had our ideas in the first place, and then as we filmed they evolved and then once you get into the editing room, it evolved even more. It was constantly changing.
Sanderson: And another difference with making a documentary is the amount of time you spend shooting. We shot for almost two years on Becoming Santa. If you want to shoot a music video, you could do it in two days.
Myers: Well one day now, since the budgets are so poor [laughs].
Do either one of you want to keep doing documentaries or was this more of a “we’re interested in this, let’s do it and move on?”
Myers: We’d love to do another documentary. We have several ideas we’ve been kicking around. A narrative would also be nice.
Sanderson: We have a narrative script we’d like to get made, we just need to find funding for it. As for documentaries, there are three ideas we’re talking about doing. And I have a documentary TV series I’d like Jeff and I to do that would be like 8-10 episodes.
Anything you can tell about what the narrative script is about?
Sanderson: It was written by Brian Jun, who we think is a great undiscovered director and he will also handle the directing duties for this one. Jeff will be doing the cinematography and I will be producing it. It’s a thriller.
After finishing Becoming Santa, did you feel like you had a better appreciation and what Santa brings to the table?
Sanderson: Definitely.
Myers: Absolutely. And a bigger understanding of the responsibility that goes along with playing Santa Claus. These kids are confiding things in you that I don’t think either of us were prepared to hear, and the responsibility that goes along with that, how to answer their difficult questions…that was probably the most interesting we learned at the Santa School.
Sanderson: It also really feels to me that respect for children is dropping, as we slash education around the country. I think slashing education is such a disrespectful thing to do to children because they need one, and I don’t know how we suddenly began to undervalue that in the past three months and decided that was the best way to cut budgets. I don’t think we have much respect for children in the United States; they need medical attention they aren’t getting as well as education and we’re really damaging our future with the way respect is dwindling for children in this country.
What do you hope the audience gets out of watching Becoming Santa?
Myers: I’m hoping they come out asking themselves how they can be more Santa-like. We kind of feel like this movie gives Christmas back to the adults and reminds them of what they’re participating in and how important it is to the children.
Becoming Santa currently doesn’t have distribution, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it went to theaters at the end of the year. Possibly in December. Random month, I know.