Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead arrived in theaters Friday April 12, and we got our chance to speak with the director about remaking the 90’s classic film.
Source: Courtesy / BET+
In the updated Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead, seventeen-year-old Tanya Crandell (Simone Joy Jones) can’t wait to spend the summer living it up with her friends in Spain before heading to Howard University in the fall. But when her mom (Ms. Pat) decides to head to a much-needed wellness retreat in Thailand, Tanya is forced to stay home with her three siblings instead. Following the unexpected death of their elderly babysitter (June Squibb), Tanya gets a job working for the confident and ambitious Rose (Nicole Richie). Juggling work, family, and a complicated romance, Tanya faces the responsibility of adulthood at the cost of her summer of freedom.
We spoke with Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead director Wade Allain-Marcus about why the risks of doing a remake and learned why he thinks the film actually works better this time around.
“This movie just works better Black,” Allain-Marcus told BOSSIP. “The original was always about kids who were forced to be adults before their time and we know that’s true for all young Black kids, so when I read Chuck’s script, I was just like, ‘This this movie absolutely just makes more sense with a Black family at the center… In reading it, it was just one of those scripts, like sometimes it’s not necessarily about timing, it’s just like, I got this script, I read it. I fell in love with this sibling love story that I related to personally. That was very surprising to me. I’m the oldest of four siblings also and so it was just very much being like, ‘Yes of course let’s get this story out there.”
“To the remake stance, of course I had reservations about making a remake,” he continued. “But when you think about Black people and Black culture and what we do — which is like remix things a lot of the time. I started thinking about remaking from that kind of standpoint and being like, ‘Look Biggie did ‘Juicyfruit’ and gave us ‘Juicy,’ and so, why can’t we kind of think about it as that? We can remake this old white story to be honest and make it feel Black and make it feel fresh and new and specifically for us.”
Source: Courtesy / BET+
The cast of Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead is primarily comprised of kids and young adults and Allain-Marcus has also written and produced for Grown-ish and Everything’s Trash. He told us he felt extremely fortunate to find natural chemistry between the actors because the production relied on virtual casting.
“For me the chemistry of this movie between the siblings is everything,” Allain-Marcus told BOSSIP. “That’s one of those things where, we cast this whole movie on Zoom, we didn’t get to do any chemistry reads or anything like that, which would have been wonderful. Kind of just like taking a shot in the dark hoping it works, but seeing those four siblings come together — like they just immediately took to each other. They all fell into each other’s roles. They were playing and hanging out and laughing off camera all the time. Then the other big cornerstone of this movie is Nicole Richie, who I was familiar with, not necessarily as an actor, but more as a personality. When I spoke to her, she just had such an incredible insight into this movie. Obviously she’s a fashion mogul and icon in and of herself in her own life, and so she just brought so much to the role. I was floored by how unbelievably funny she was. It’s a lot of kind of difficult jargon that she spit out really quickly and she was just wonderful. So yeah we got lucky.”
Nicole Richie is really amazing in her role but honestly the kid actors knock this out the park. We can’t wait for you guys to watch this one.
Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead is in theaters now!