10 Things You Didn’t Know About Fatman
Christmas time means movie time at my house, and there may be no other holiday out there that has more flicks dedicated to it than Christmas. For every good seasonal movie, though, there are about 60 terrible ones and I challenge you to search for Christmas movies on Netflix or Amazon Prime and find more than 10 that aren’t pure rubbish.
Fatman came out last year with a bit of fanfare due to the unique take on the jolly old fat guy in the suit and it probably took far too long for me to finally watch it. But now that I’ve watched it and shuffled my way through all of the special features, commentaries, and interviews I can tell you 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Fatman…
1. The character of Billy (Chance Hurstfield) was originally written to be 10 years old but they found they needed a slightly older actor for some of the lines and more complex emotions.
2. The temperature was 18 below zero while filming many of the North Pole scenes and actually got down to -36 degrees for the final shootout.
3. Walton Goggins ad-libbed a bunch of his lines. He also had a huge say in the hair and costume of his character as he did his best to inhabit the man who would quest to kill Santa.
4. The Nelms brothers wrote the script 14 years before they filmed the commentary track for the film.
5. They only had about 50 elf characters on set. They made it look closer to 200-300 with digital effects. For the size of the elves they hired only actors who were 5’5″ or under and all of the military actors were over 6′ tall.
6. They couldn’t blow up the building on the ranch because it was a functioning hay barn so they had to use digital effects for the flame.
7. The ranch they filmed on had been owned by a family for several generations going back to the 1800’s.
8. Most of the film was shot in Ottawa, Canada with several locals appearing in the film in different roles.
9. Mel Gibson approached his role almost like an old Western where Santa was an aging gunslinger who was set to face his biggest obstacle yet.
10. Directors Eshom and Ian Nelms were attending a Q&A with Mel Gibson during awards season following the release of Hacksaw Ridge when they saw him come out on stage with a big, bushy beard. He was worn out from all of the interviews and appearances and they felt that he fit perfectly with their vision of Santa.
