Go is totally a Christmas movie, confirms screenwriter of the Nineties rave classic

The endless argument about which movies qualify as Christmas flicks is as much a part of the festive season as mince pies and salmonella infections from undercooked poultry. Does Die Hard count? The Wizard of Oz? How about The Sound Of Music?

But for Gen-X cinephiles, one movie has quietly emerged as the ultimate seasonal slacker flick. Released in 1999, Go marked screenwriter John August’s (later to become Tim Burton’s writer of choice with Big Fish and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory) debut and was Swingers director Doug Liman’s sophomore effort.

An irresistibly propulsive, darkly funny episodic romp that follows a group of young, broke Angelinos as their lives interweave and collide on one highly eventful Christmas Eve, Go boasted a smorgasbord of hot or about-to-be hot stars including, Jay Mohr, Sarah Polley, Katie Holmes, Scott Wolf, Timothy Olyphant and Grange Hill’s own Desmond Askew. And despite having a slightly muted release it has since become a much-loved cult movie.

“My rule is pretty simple, if it’s set at Christmas, it’s a Christmas movie,” August tells Yahoo UK.

We chatted to August about how he came to write the film, its muted reception but gradual growth as a generational classic and why nothing says Christmas like a drug deal gone wrong.

Yahoo: Were you surprised that Go seems to have become Gen-X’s, ahem, go-to Christmas movie?

John August: There’s been this kind of online campaign to get it recognised as a Christmas movie. I think that a movie set at Christmas is a Christmas movie whether it has all the traditional trappings or not. With Go, when I was writing it, I think it just seemed a fun time of the year to set a story.

And there’s something a bit surreal about Christmas in Los Angeles to start with...

Yeah, I had moved to LA first from Colorado and then Iowa, so it was a snowy environment and much more traditional Christmasses. But LA still decorates for Christmas, the lights are up, even though it's not cold. But it always just felt like a strange place to to Christmas.

How did the movie come about?

It’s set at a supermarket based on a real supermarket in Hollywood called Rock 'n' Roll Ralphs. Actually, it's just ‘Ralphs’, but it's near all the clubs. I was in there one Christmas time, just thinking through what life was like for the younger folks working there. That first section was originally a short film, with Ronna [Sarah Polley]. And folks would read it and really enjoy it and say, ‘oh you should make it a full feature.’

I knew what happened to all the other characters over the course of the night, but if I tried to cut between those different storylines it was all going to fall apart. So I needed to keep the whole thing, the chunks together, and let each story tell itself in its own time. And that's how it was developed.

It’s kind of an outlier of millennial youth movies. But once people have been reminded about it, they remember they loved it, particularly if they were kids of the '90s...

We have to recognise that we made this film in 1998, and there had been a string of really successful teen movies, Can't Hardly Wait, Cruel Intentions and 10 Things I Hate About You. But they always came back to this kind of high school-type story where people ‘learn a valuable lesson at the end’.

There's a big transformative journey. And that just wasn't my experience of being that age. The thing about being in your late teens and early 20s is that a bunch of s*** happens and you pick yourself up and you go to work the next day. And I really wanted to write that kind of story.

I love the fact that it’s not ‘deep’, there are no BFFs in it...

I think a reality that you don't see enough in film is that they're ‘work friends’. The people they're hanging out with are not the people they have the deepest connection with, the most important people in their life. It's just about that night. Being out this one time, and that feels very true to being that age.

It’s packed with these shaggy-dog tales, a drug deal gone wrong, a closeted gay couple involved with the cops, how did you come up with them?

They’re little anecdotes, things that happened to me exaggerated or they happened to friends of friends. So I had a friend who was a manager at a hotel where the room caught on fire in a similar way to the hotel room fire in Vegas that happens in Go.

The experience with Gaines, the drug dealer [Timothy Olyphant], well I don't have that experience exactly. But that sense of trying to make a transaction with somebody you don't really know... it's a little unsettling, you don't know what the edges are of that relationship.

The cast is insanely cool. Was it this the hot screenplay every about-to-happen young actor wanted in on?

I think everybody in town did come in and meet with us on it. I loved the casting process, figuring out how things could fit together. And we had people right before they became giant stars. Katie Holmes had shot a season of Dawson's Creek, but it hadn't come out. Sarah Polley was off of The Sweet Hereafter, we knew she was going to be something but she wasn't huge yet. Timothy Olyphant had shot Scream 2 but that hadn't been released yet. So we were getting all these people at exactly the right moment. We made a lot of careers off the back of that movie.

Doug Liman was a hot director coming off Swingers. Were you happy he got the gig?

Go was considerably bigger than Swingers in terms of its scale and ambition, and Doug hadn't yet shown his ability to do some of the action stuff that he would do for this. But it fit nicely with what was interesting to him. There’s this sense in the movie of trying a bunch of things and then picking yourself up and dusting yourself off.

That's very much Doug's spirit. He doesn't want to play by conventional rules of how you make a movie. There are quite a few shots at the end where it is just like me driving his convertible, while he's got the camera on his shoulder leaning out the door to shoot something.

It’s a movie that, appropriately enough, really powers along. It never stops for breath...

And no-one has an arc. When they get into trouble the movie doesn't let them retreat. They just have to sort of go faster. That's the commonality of all the characters, there's no safe place they can slide back to.

Do you ever wonder what ever happened to them all?

[Laughs] I do. I think they're all alive and thriving and doing their own kinds of things. I don't know that they have any relationship with each other any longer. I don't know that Zack [Jay Mohr] and Adam [Scott Wolf] are still together.

There was talk about a sequel. It was called Going and it would have been set shortly after, in the Summer. It was all about Ronna trying to throw a party at this unoccupied house in the Hollywood Hills. Everything sort of crosses back over again with the same people. I knew there would be muppets involved but it was never scripted.

Its reputation has grown over the years. People in their 30s and 40s now remember it really fondly...

Yeah. My daughter's going to school in Boston and she sent me a poster for a retrospective screening of Go that's been happening near the campus. So, y’know, that’s weird. And sometimes I've met people who don't know me who say, ‘I saw Go 10 times in the theatre’.

It very much spoke to a generation that wasn't seeing themselves portrayed on screen, their lives and what they aspired to. So on those levels, I think it's held up.

Go is available to rent or buy on digital.

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