As the holiday season approaches, I find comfort in watching holiday classics, especially an all-time favorite of mine, Elf. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview David Berenbaum, the screenwriter behind the film. Berenbaum’s Elf depicts the story of a man named Buddy—played by Will Ferrell—who accidentally gets transported to the North Pole as an infant and is raised there by elves. As an adult, Buddy feels out of place among the elves, so he travels to New York City in search of his biological father. Since its debut in 2003, Elf has received major critical and commercial success, grossing $220 million, and inspiring a Broadway play, animated special, and multiple video games.
Berenbaum grew up in Philadelphia and attended NYU before later moving to Los Angeles to pursue screenwriting. To Berenbaum, sunny LA was not the best place to experience a traditional Christmas season, so he decided to watch Christmas movies to provide more of the holiday mood. One of those films, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, gave him the inspiration to write Elf. “What if instead of being a reindeer with a red nose as a misfit, he was a six-foot-three guy who was adopted and didn’t know it, living in the North Pole and he was a misfit,” explained Berenbaum. He did not have any particular actors in mind while writing the script, but modeled it after the movie Big, starring Tom Hanks. “I loved Tom Hanks’s performance as a child in a big city trying to fit in. I sort of used that as a paradigm. I had finished this script in 1996 and I did not really know Will Ferrell at that point.”
The process of getting his script to Will Ferrell and from page to screen was a “long and windy” one. Berenbaum elaborated, “It was optioned twice by different companies for almost a year. Those options had come together and fell apart with a lot of ideas of who could direct it. After that, I met a guy named John Berg who became my manager, and he thought of getting Will Ferrell attached. John got it to Will’s people and Will liked the idea. It was Will’s people who thought of Jon Favreau.” Jon Favreau, who directed Elf and would later direct the Iron Man movies, was “a very talented guy,” Berenbaum expressed. “He was the right guy at the right time and we were very lucky to get him.” Berenbaum stressed that most of the time, “things don’t come together,” but they were exceptionally “lucky that the right people came at the right time during their careers and everyone just knocked it out of the park.”
While one might imagine creating an all-time classic and successful movie to have many challenges, Berenbaum remembers very few. “I had the nugget of the idea of a child being adopted and raised by elves. I knew that was a funny hook and I knew it was physically funny to see a big guy in a small person’s world.” Berenbaum continued, “I knew it wasn’t a movie yet, but once I got the idea of him going to Manhattan to look for his dad who never knew he existed, then I knew it was a movie and it could have an emotional through line [to hold the story together] and really go somewhere. It could go to an emotional place. Once I got that idea, it went pretty fast.” The movie opened many doors and opportunities for Berenbaum. “We’re always hopeful that these scripts can lead somewhere but often they don’t. It has clearly exceeded anything that I could’ve possibly hoped for.”
The script constantly evolved over time, with jokes changing and several rewrites. Actors were also free to improvise. Berenbaum was on set for about a week and witnessed his characters actually come to life. “To see these characters living and breathing was just crazy.”
Like other Christmas classics, I asked about the possibility of a sequel. “It has been discussed many many times but I do not think there will be a sequel,” Berenbaum disclosed. “A second movie is just not meant to be and I think it’s a good thing that stands by itself. In today’s world, it is very rare that you have something successful and there is only one of them. It makes it special. Even though we have gone down many roads of where that second one could’ve gone, I think leaving it as is, is probably for the best.”
Writing screenplays is already a challenge, but getting them to the next level is even harder. Berenbaum affirmed the hardship it truly takes, and the “tough skin” necessary to get one’s work onto the screens. Nevertheless, when I asked him for advice for aspiring screenwriters, Berenbaum stated, “If you love movies and if you love telling stories and that’s all you want to do then I would say absolutely 100 percent go for it. We need more people to tell more interesting stories out here and if it’s really inside of you then nothing is going to stop you and you should leap in with two feet.”
