‘Violent Night’ Director Breaks Down Final Fight Between David Harbour’s Santa and John Leguizamo’s Scrooge (Exclusive Video)

thewrap.com:

brutal. The only thing that was more brutal than the fight itself was filming it.“It was by far the hardest fight to shoot, and only because it was minus 25 to 30 Celsius every day,” director Tommy Wirkola told TheWrap. “We shot outside at night in Winnipeg.

The actors were grumpy, the crew was grumpy, everybody was uncomfortable. But it made it look great. And obviously the snow, the ice, the trees, all that’s real, and you can see it and feel it with the actors.

And it was a scene that David and John trained together for a long time. And normally they train with the stunt performers separately and bring them in, but here they trained together.”Wirkola said that he wanted the fight to be a real “showstopper,” especially after the sequence earlier in the film where Santa kills a bunch of mercenaries in spectacularly violent fashion. (Yes, there is a woodchipper.) “I really want this one to have an emotional drive to it,” Wirkola said.

The subplot in which Scrooge hates Christmas (for reasons too good to give away here) was not a part of the script. Wirkola added that bit. “We really tried to give him a backstory and hate for Christmas and reason for it, and not just as a joke, but as really a serious character moment for him,” he said.This added character motivation meant that the final fight, for Leguizamo’s character, would have even more weight. “While others are starting to believe [Santa is real], he’s still hesitant,” Wirkola said.