Sean Brown

Director's Statement

I love people. I love telling stories about them. I love figuring out why a person makes the choices they make.

I was inspired by the touchstone Christmas stories of It’s A Wonderful Life and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, both of which examine the power of community, love, and individualism.

Christmas Freak is a mash up of traditional Christmas stories with a peculiarly millennial perspective that spans generational experiences. In creating the character “Rudy”, I chose to explore alienation (which is something many of us feel more acutely at Christmas) through the negative template for Ebenezer Scrooge. Both characters have disconnected from society and both are sewing their own fates. But while Scrooge will not acknowledge Chrsitmas, Rudy will acknowledge nothing but Christmas.

Christmas Freak is a personal story about growing up with a giant emptiness in your life. We alienate. We isolate. We hope nobody notices how broken we are. We do our best to fill the void. But our best never seems to be good enough. Everyone else is obviously perfect. Obviously. No visible problems. So we try to be perfect too. But we fail. We decide it’s easier to shut off from the world and be angry that the “perfect ones” don’t understand us. Maybe they’re not so perfect after all…. Even more reason to push away and reject them before they reject us. But the funny thing about growing up with a giant emptiness in your life is that, in one way or another, we all have an emptiness. Even the perfect ones. It’s the process of discovering what that emptiness is, and what it wants, that makes us who we are. And nobody does that alone. Everybody needs somebody. Everybody needs to love and to be loved. Sometimes, that means trusting that our imperfections are no more or less imperfect than anyone else’s. Because together we’re so much more than imperfect. We’re perfectly imperfect.

I know you’ll love Christmas Freak. There’s something about Rudy and his misguided efforts to seem “cool”, despite an ache that will not go away, that is familiar to us all.