The Toronto Film Festival kicked off its 2024 edition on a slightly different note Thursday, featuring a live-action holiday family comedy, Nutcrackers, starring Ben Stiller in his first toplining feature role in seven years.
The movie, directed by David Gordon Green and written by Leland Douglas, follows Stiller as a Chicago real estate exec who must oversee his four wild, rambunctious nephews on their Ohio farm after their parents tragically die.
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Green said he took on the project because he had “taken on a dark run of movies” with the Halloween pics and last year’s The Exorcist: Believer.
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“We’re in a comedic drought,” said Green about big-screen comedies, which have been sidelined to streaming. By hopefully doing more of them, Green said he wants to “feed my intuition as an artist and what an audience has an appetite for.”
Stiller said he refrained from acting for a while as he was looking for the right script. In recent years, he was a director and producer on the Apple TV+ series Severance as well as Showtime’s limited series Escape From Dannemora. Green emailed him the Nutcrackers screenplay, and an added plus for Stiller was they hadn’t worked together. It was more meaningful for Stiller to make a movie that was nostalgic and could return moviegoers to theaters.
Green added that while he “respects the business models” in the industry, his job as a filmmaker is to also “challenge it, not just a distribution and marketing department but an audience as well; have them seek out the theatrical experience.”
“I watch movies at home all the time, but I like to go out of the way [to see them],” said the filmmaker.
“Even something I hate,” he emphasized.
Stiller sounded the horn for theatrical as well, telling TIFF boss Cameron Bailey and the crowd, “David made the movie for an audience to hear.”
Stiller and Green appeared onstage with the kids of the pic: Homer, 13, Ulysses, 10, and 8-year-olds Atlas and Arlo Janson. It was the foursome’s feature screen debut.
Stiller and Green appeared after the 8 p.m. ET premiere screening at Roy Thomson Hall. They weren’t booked to attend the first 6 p.m. Princess of Wales screening, which wound up being interrupted by a pro-Palestinian protest inside the theater. A group of protesters called for TIFF sponsor Royal Bank of Canada to stop funding Israel’s attacks on Gaza, disrupting Bailey’s speech before being escorted out of the theater.
Last year, TIFF did go the family route on night one with Hayao Miyazaki’s North American premiere of The Boy and the Heron, which went on to win Best Animated Feature at the Oscars.