Bad Santa: Not Your Typical Christmas Movie

Terry Zwigoff:
I received the script from my agent, who sorta warned me ahead of time it was a film that would never get made. So I got the script, read it in one sitting actually I was on a plane I think when I read it, and I was laughing so loud sorta getting embarrassed about the whole thing and it was really funny the dialog was really great and I called her and said "Yeah I wanna do the film". and the said pretty much "Good luck" ya know, "Good luck finding anybody to make it." We took it to a couple of studios, got turned down by all of them. About a month later I got a call from Bob Weinstein saying He and Harvey just seen 'Ghost World' finally, loved it and wanted to make a Terry Zwigoff film. "Did I have a script?" and I said "Yeah, I have this script, its called 'Bad Santa'". "Send it to us right away Federal Express for tomorrow morning." So I sent it to him, uh about 11:00 the next morning Bob called and said he wanted to make the film. And that was it. Billy was on that short list after that if people I thought could do it.