Regarding the voiceover over the Christmas Eve or Christmas night: that take was about eight minutes. And I did that not because I wanted it to last eight minutes of the film, but because we had prepared gifts for them. I mean, I had set up a whole little scenario for them. And I figured, “This is so wonderful to watch. I’m just going to let them go and do what they feel that they can do for as long as possible until they finish opening all of their gifts. And I want to be able to select the most interesting part to pair with the voiceover.” But I wasn’t reading it aloud during that time. I was so transfixed watching the monitor, because here I was—sitting in the house I grew up in, that my father still lives in, watching people dressed as my relatives in the same spot in this apartment they were in the VHS tape from 1988 doing the same thing. It’s a ghostly thing, not a thing any healthy person should ever want to go through. But why not let the repressed be returned by watching it on a monitor for eight minutes?

An interview.