Director Wade Allain-Marcus On Working With Nicole Richie & Simone Joy Jones In ‘Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead’

Director Wade Allain-Marcus reflected on his experience directing his new film, Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead, in his new uInterview.

Inspired by the 1991 film of the same name, the movie follows a teenager whose summer plans are canceled when his and his siblings’ babysitter unexpectedly dies.

Allain-Marcus thought back on the process of remaking a film, “For me when I read the script, being aware of the original but not necessarily holding it precious, was just sort of like, ‘Oh this could be a really interesting remix of the original by using some of the tent-poles from the first one and then being able to kind of take off from there.'”

When asked about the experience on set, Allain-Marcus revealed, “We shot this film in 22 days, in the midst of the writer’s strike, so a lot of that, emotionally and physically, was quite challenging. A lot of this prep was kind of fast and furious but so much of the film was just like incredibly fun and joyful, if not all of it.”

Simone Joy Jones stars as the film’s protagonist opposite Nicole Richie. 

Allain-Marcus recalled his experience working with the dynamic duo: “Simone Joy Jones just embodied this ingenui and this buoyancy that this movie really called for…we haven’t had a black John Hughes-ian feeling, and she just reminded me of characters then, where it’s so funny and so juvenile in ways, and yet also there’s a real deepness there and there’s a real kind of intensity that she was able to bring to the emotions of this teenager.”

“Whenever I’m approaching making something, I like to ask, ‘What if this director directed this movie?’ And so for me, I was like, ‘What if John Singleton directed Ferris Bueller? What would that look like?'” he added. “And that was sort of a jumping-off point of being like, how can we do this?”

He continued, “Some of the influences were like, Spike Lee‘s Crooklyn, you know, for the sibling aspect, but Ferris Bueller was really the thing that I think was kind of the north star in the sense that this was a movie that was always a fantasy. I mean, it’s like these young black kids who have to deal with this dead white lady’s body, and we have to never worry about them as an audience, not once.”

Allain-Marcus elaborated, “You know, we don’t get that usually, black audiences, black actors in films, we don’t have that that much because the truth is, the sad reality is, that probably wouldn’t turn out very well. But to be able to explore that feeling and that sort of youthful joy is the thing that I was sort of going for.”

Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead is in theaters now.