Saying Goodbye to 2020 with One ‘Last Christmas Party’

For Julian Santos, having “interesting things to film just right around the corner” was one of the benefits to studying the magic of movie making in Manhattan. As a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, he continues to keep the city at the heart of his work. His newest endeavor, “The Last Christmas Party,” was taped entirely on the Upper West Side, where he currently resides, with many actors students and alumni of his alma mater.

This “jaded Christmas holiday love letter,” which was produced in 2019 for $30,000, was a collaborative effort, crowdfunded with financial contributions from family, friends and strangers who believed in the indie project. The San Francisco native and self-proclaimed “romantic at heart,” who has a penchant for writing screenplays based on relationships, used his experiences and those of his friends to tell this story of three couples on one fateful night in New York City.

One of Santos’ hopes for the film, which reached number one on the Amazon New Release Holiday Film charts, is that it will provide some entertainment during the pandemic. Although he does acknowledge that the quarantine has posed a challenge for artists, he has been quite productive, using the time to write scripts with his creative partner and NYU classmate, Kevin Nittolo, and even conducting a read through for his new horror film over Zoom.

On your Vimeo profile, you wrote “film surrounded my upbringing.” Did you always know you wanted to go into film?

Well, actually, that’s kind of a funny story — that I didn’t. In fact, for a while I thought I wanted to be a stage actor. I grew up with film in the sense that my father always showed me a bunch of films and it was something that I very much was into. Like I always loved movies and thought they were just magical from a young age, but I never really made that connection in my head that “I want to make movies” until sometime in high school when I did my first short film. It was somewhat based on a little one-act play that I’d done, and it just kind of all connected. And I was like, “Oh wow, this is actually what I’d like to do.” And I’ve been doing film ever since.

You created the first draft of “The Last Christmas Party” in one weekend while living in London.

It was a study abroad program. In fact, it was a class assignment where you need to write a feature-length screenplay. I actually started on another screenplay and I worked three months on that other screenplay and it finally just hit me that this was not a story I wanted to tell. It was not interesting enough for me. And so, just one fateful weekend I told my professor, “Give me a weekend and I can prove that I can write something better than what I have been submitting so far.”

What was the casting process like?

We went through a pretty rigorous casting process on Backstage and sorted through about 1,500 applicants. It was all in a kind of quest to find the perfect six leads for the film, because we knew, as an ensemble cast, they really needed to play off of each other well and not only be good actors, but really right for the part. And also right for each other in terms of ... we made sure the couples had good chemistry.

I thought they were very natural, all of them.

Thank you, they’d be so glad to hear that. I love the core six actors. We rehearsed for two months before actually shooting the thing, kind of like you would for a play, just because we really wanted these people to feel as if they were in relationships, as if they lived together. That it wasn’t just like six strangers meeting. So I think that sense of camaraderie, I hope, really shows in the final film.

Where did you film?

In New York, everything is totally on location in Upper West Side apartments. It was very important — I was talking with my director of photography — that we never once in this film used a set. We wanted to always be able to show a ceiling or one room to another. I felt like a lot of why this piece worked or didn’t work would bank on that fact that you believed this world. That you believed it to be actually, I guess, pre-pandemic New York now, but we didn’t know that then. That version of New York.

Was the fact that it was the same scene shown from different perspectives difficult for you to do?

I think it was an interesting challenge, editing-wise, especially. Just because how do you show a scene multiple times, but communicate different things with a different perspective? And I also think it’s fun. The non-chronological idea was developed fairly late into pre-production, almost right before we were shooting. And I’m really glad that we had that idea, just because I feel like it’s a different way to show that night and also structuring it out like that, helps you get closer to each of the couples.

Why do you think you tend to write romantic stories?

Oh, I don’t know, I guess I’m just a romantic at heart. [Laughs] Well, I think that it really just is what interests me a lot. That kind of moviemaking, to me, is a lot about showing, very intimately, that connection between a couple, between two people. In a way, it’s hard to express even in theater, just because there’s a certain distance there. My favorite films of all time, like “Vertigo” and “Before Sunrise,” are very romantic, so I can’t get away from it is the short answer.

Who are some filmmakers you admire?

My favorite filmmaker of all time, and you’ll forgive me that this is such a cliché answer, is Orson Welles. Just because he was a genius. He really was able to create these ensemble pieces that are still interesting and revolutionary in terms of acting, cinematography, editing. And he really was also one of the pioneer independent filmmakers. Like he didn’t work for a Hollywood system, really, past his first few films. He really did the projects that he wanted to, and I just really think that’s cool. I could put one of his films on in the background anytime.

As for your future plans, you’re making another romantic movie in New York as well as a horror film.

During the quarantine, Kevin, the cowriter of “The Last Christmas Party,” and I have been working on some scripts. One of them is kind of a more straightforward romance, but the other one, which we’ve been, frankly, getting more into, is called “Inkblack,” and it’s a horror film set in the 1960s. It’s a pretty abrupt pivot from what we’ve done so far. At the same time, we just had a read through of it, and we’re really just interested in the story. Just because it’s kind of got this “Stranger Things” vibe, but it’s still got the very naturalistic ensemble feel we tried to have for “Last Christmas Party.” I think these are very cynical times and it’s a very cynical movie.

“The Last Christmas Party” can be found on Amazon Prime.

To learn more about Julian’s work, visit juliancsantos.com.