‘Huge fans’ of original film go back on Vacation
Directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley team up for comedy spinoff
LOS ANGELES — Before Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley landed their gig on Vacation, they paid their comedy dues by mixing it up.
They collaborated on the screenplays for the R-rated hit Horrible Bosses and the animated family movie Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2.
The one-two punch earned them the job as writers and directors of Vacation, an updated version of National Lampoon’s Vacation from 1983.
But the filmmakers think of their new movie as a spinoff, not a redo.
“If they had said ‘remake’ to us, we would have run screaming from it,” Goldstein says. Adds Daley: “We are huge fans of the original so it was a fine balance for us.”
In their Vacation, Ed Helms plays Rusty Griswold, the grownup son of Clark (Chevy Chase). The misadventures begin again when Rusty takes his wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) and their two sons (Skyler Gisondo and Steele Stebbins) to revisit Walley World.
The assorted ill fortunes may be familiar, but Helms’s unwitting Rusty and Chase’s devilish Clark are decidedly different.
“Clark had a slyness in his mischievousness and Rusty definitely doesn’t in our movie,” Daley says.
The Griswold kids are different, too. The younger, more aggressive son Kevin (Stebbins) relentlessly picks on the older and passive son James (Gisondo).
“We needed a fresh dynamic,” says Daley, who was the kid actor who played the lead in TV’s Freaks and Geeks.
The new Vacation does include Chase, who shows up briefly as Clark, and Beverly D’Angelo as Clark’s wife Ellen.
“It was a stamp of approval,” Daley says of the cameos.
A few classic sequences recalling the National Lampoon’s Vacation film series are also used as setups for sight gags. And the Holiday Road song punctuates the new movie like it did in the old one.
“We had to put it in,” Goldstein says.