SUBMITTED BY Timbo

December 1, 2003 — The New York Times interviews Terry Zwigoff, director of "Bad Santa", about what attracted him to the material and the nature of his vision.

How'd you come to cast Billy Bob Thornton?

When Bob Weinstein called me and said who do you want to star in this, I said, I think Bill Murray might be good. There are very few actors who can be funny. Peter Bogdanovich quoted somebody like Tallulah Bankhead at John Ritter's memorial, and she said something like: `It's easy to make someone cry. An onion can make you cry. Try finding a vegetable that can make you laugh.' But I was told, well, Bill Murray will never read your script. It will take him a year to get back to you. Actually, they heard back from him in a week saying that he wanted to do it, just tell him the time and place and he'd show up. Then he did this thing of disappearing. It got to the point where I left a couple of messages saying, if you want to do this thing, great, and if you don't just let me know, because I have to move on. But he just disappeared. I can't blame him. If I had that kind of money, I'd be doing the same thing: "I'm just not in the mood today, sorry, find somebody else." Then I met Billy Bob, and he was very quick, very smart, very funny.

Though not the first person you think of when you think of Santa. Did you look at other Christmas movies?

I don't like most Christmas movies. They're pretty bad, though they seem to make tons of money anyway. Like this movie "Elf," I got the script for that, and I turned it down right away. Against my wife's better judgment. She said: "This film's going to make a million dollars. It's got Will Ferrell in it." And I said, "Yeah, I like Will Ferrell, but the script is just based on this contrived silliness." The last Christmas movie I really liked was "It's a Wonderful Life," probably. It's sort of a schmaltzy movie, but it's not without its dark moments. It still gets to me every year.

Read the full interview at the link below.