‘Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead’ Director on the Remake’s R Rating

[Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.]

As a fan of the 1991 movie Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, starring Christina Applegate and Joanna Cassidy, director Wade Allain-Marcus wanted to lean into paying homage in his remake, shooting in the original house, incorporating some of the key lines of dialogue, and even having a fun cameo moment. What results is a love letter to the original movie while also being a new and fresh take with a Black family at its center.

In the remake of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, the Crandell kids are looking forward to summer, especially 17-year-old Tanya Crandell (Simone Joy Jones) who’s ready to head off to Spain before starting college in the fall. But when the Crandell matriarch leaves the country to take some time for herself, Tanya has to stay home with her three younger siblings and an elderly babysitter (June Squibb) none of them asked for. Following that babysitter’s unexpected death, Tanya finds herself in the unexpected position of having to get an adult job with an adult salary, stretching the truth to go to work as an assistant to a fashion executive named Rose (Nicole Richie), but proving her worth to someone who turns out to be a mentor.

During this interview with Collider, Allain-Marcus talked about growing up with the original movie, pitching himself to direct the script for the remake, feeling like he accomplished the vision he had, being blindsided by the film’s R rating and the decision made to keep that rating in place, all the nods to the original, casting Jones and Richie, the most challenging scene to pull off, and focusing ahead to the next thing.

Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead (2024)

After their babysitter unexpectedly passes away, five siblings decide to keep her death a secret to enjoy a summer of freedom. As the eldest sister steps up to manage the household and lands a job in fashion, they all learn about responsibility and family unity in comedic and chaotic ways.

Release Date

April 12, 2024

Director

Wade Allain-Marcus

Runtime

99 Minutes

Main Genre

Comedy

Studio(s)

BET+ , Spiral Stairs Entertainment , Treehouse Pictures , SMiZE Productions

Remake Director Wade Allain-Marcus Was a Fan of the Original ‘Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead’

Collider: I was such a big fan of the original movie. When did you become aware of it? Had you seen it before doing this was even a possibility?

WADE ALLAIN-MARCUS: I grew up with it. It definitely was one of the ones for me that, once it came to our TV screens, I’m of the generation that it became a cult classic. It wasn’t precious to me like it is to a lot of folks, but for Chuck Hayward, who wrote our screenplay and is also in the same generation, he was really in love with it and that’s why he wanted to do this. So, I read his script and fell in love with his script, and then went back and revisited the original, and we went from there.

How did you end up being the one to direct this?

ALLAIN-MARCUS: This was a script that my agent sent to me. I directed a really small movie a while ago that was a $25,000 feature and ended up sending it to Netflix when Netflix was still buying tiny movies and took it all over the world. And then, I was working in television as a writer, but always figuring out what my next movie that I was gonna direct would be. This was one of those things where I had one that was about to go, it got pushed, and I was like, “I need a job. What’s going on?” This script came my way and my agent was like, “All right, this is a remake of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.” And I was like, “Remake? Really? Come on. I don’t know if that’s something that I’m gonna be interested in.” And then, I read the script and just totally fell in love with these characters and this humor. It was one of those things where I just started pitching on it. I was a director for hire, so I just started pitching on it and trying to fight my way into being in the chair.

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You have a background as an actor too. Is it worse to do auditions as an actor, or is it worse to pitch yourself as a director?

ALLAIN-MARCUS: The funny thing is that being an actor and doing an audition, it’s all so much faster. They’ll send you some sides and you learn them, and then you go in and you can immediately feel it a lot of the time, whether they want you or not. But as a director, when you’re pitching, there’s usually going to be a lot more conversations that happen and a lot more work has to get done on my side, with my vision for the movie. There’s a lot of pre-work, speaking on it, creating a whole deck, showing you some images, how I’m gonna move the camera, who I want to be in this movie. I have to think all of that through. So, the process tends to be a little bit longer and a little bit more in-depth.

What was the vision that you had for this? What were you hoping to achieve with this version of the story, and now that you look at the finished product, do you feel you actually achieved the vision you wanted?

ALLAIN-MARCUS: Yeah, I’ve gotta say, I do think that I did exactly what I set out to accomplish, which is the goal, but can be rare. We have these visions for what we want to do and we pitch them to different people, but there are a lot of different stages where that can change and your own vision can change. The vision for the movie was always, how do I make something really energetic, really vibrant, really youthful, really buoyant, in the ilk of Ferris Bueller, and allow that fantasy for these young Black kids. That’s really what I wanted to do. But there were also a lot of influences. Spike Lee’s Crooklyn was a really big influence because, ultimately, this movie is a sibling love story. And then, Mike Nichols’ Working Girl was a big influence for the story in general. Tonally, with the humor, I just really wanted to do something that was more absurd than broad. Those things all working together was the goal.

‘Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead’ Director Wade Allain-Marus Was Blindsided By the Remake’s R Rating

Were there conversations around the rating? Did you have freedom, as far as what the rating of this would be?

ALLAIN-MARCUS: I’m so glad you brought that up. To be honest, we were all blindsided by the R rating. I’ve seen horror movies out there with a PG-13 rating. There’s some weed smoking and one sexual reference in the movie, but this is a movie for families. Maybe don’t take your eight-year-old because there’s some language and stuff like that, but your 13-year-old absolutely can go see this movie. To be honest, it felt a little bit like, “Well, what’s different about this movie than the last movie? Is it because we’re Black? Is that why we got that?” I don’t like to play that card, but it was quite shocking to get an R rating. We wanted a PG-13, but there were curse words in this movie and there was always gonna be smoking weed in this movie, like the original. When we got the R rating, our distributor, Iconic, didn’t want to compromise the film, so they were like, “You know what? We’re gonna just take it and run with it because we don’t want to change anything.”

I even wondered if it was the music and somehow the language in the music that got the rating.

ALLAIN-MARCUS: The explanation that we got is that parents and, I guess, America has gotten much more conservative over the years. They used the movie Bad News Bears and said that movie, which got a PG then, would be R today. I don’t know. Are there some punchy things in this movie, with the use of the N-word in the music and how some of them speak? Yes. Is that authentic to us? Yes. Does that make it so that it shouldn’t be allowed to be touched? I don’t think so. So, I’m so glad you bring that up because I do think that is something that should get rectified, to be honest, and talked about.

I was delighted to see Joanna Cassidy make a cameo appearance in the film. How did that come about? Was there a lot of conversation about how many nods to include and what was too many?

ALLAIN-MARCUS: Chuck Hayward wrote the script and he and the producers made the really intelligent decision to have, “I’m right on top of that Rose” and “The dishes are done,” knowing that anybody who had the cult classic in their head would want those lines there. And then, we also shot in the original house. That was something where they came to me and were like, “Would you be interested in that?,” and we were. From the very beginning, we wanted to be in conversation with the original. A lot of remakes try to be so different and don’t even want people to know. We were like, “Look, let’s do this meta thing where we’re in cahoots and lock arms with the original,” because there’s so much love for it, but also because we’re building on it. This story was always about young kids who are forced to be adults before their time. Personally, I felt like this story makes more sense Black because of the adultification of Black kids. We wanted these temples that were always there to be part of it, so that we could make sure that the people who loved the original felt like they were seen, and because we love the original, but also be able to make it fresh and make it new and make it Black.

Christina Applegate Gave the ‘Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead’ Remake Her Blessing

Were there any nods that you couldn’t do that you wanted to do, or that you tried to make happen but that didn’t work out?

ALLAIN-MARCUS: We pretty much got to do all of it. Of course, we would have loved to have Christina [Applegate] in the movie, and that just wasn’t possible for a myriad of reasons, but she’s given us her blessing. We are just very grateful that the cast of the original passed the baton, and some of the original producers were involved in this version of the movie, like Michael Phillips and Tova Laiter. And so, I’ve gotta be honest, there was nothing that we needed to do that we didn’t do in this movie.

Can you talk about the casting of Tanya and Rose? What was it like to find not only two actors who were great on their own, but also the perfect pairing together?

ALLAIN-MARCUS: As an actor, that’s where some skills come into place, just getting a feel for somebody’s temperament and how certain temperaments will work together. This entire film was cast on Zoom. We had a phenomenal casting director, Kim Coleman, and she put Simone [Joy Jones] in front of me and we had conversations around who could fill the role of Rose and be able to rise to the level of what that is. We never really knew what was gonna happen between the chemistry of the kids or the chemistry between Simone and Nicole [Richie], but they felt right as their roles and that was the most important thing. I always felt like they were gonna feed off each other in an interesting way.

Which Scene in the ‘Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead’ Remake Was the Most Challenging to Shoot?

You have a lot going on in this film. You have the chaotic family scenes, house parties, what’s going on in the office, a date in an arcade, and a backyard fashion show. Any one of those things alone would be a challenge, but what was the most challenging scene to pull off?

ALLAIN-MARCUS: The original film and the structure of the original film was a mash-up of different things. You have the fact that it’s horror adjacent with the babysitter and the death and moving this body, and then it’s this Working Girl other kind of movie, all of a sudden. Chaos is built into the story of this movie, so we wanted to lean into that and just have fun with that kind of energy. I will say the most difficult scene for me to shoot was the fashion show. We shot this film during the writers’ strike and it was very difficult to navigate a lot of different things. We didn’t break any rules. I didn’t write the script, I directed it, and the DGA had signed their [contract]. We had to lock the script and basically not touch it, aside from what a director is able to casually do. That meant that a lot of things were rushed in the pre-production stages of this because we just didn’t have much time to all get together. And so, the fashion show was deceptively a big task and it required all the departments to be working together. It was a costume thing, a production design thing, a cinematographer thing, and the actors. That was probably one of the most challenging two nights that we had, of pulling off the fashion show. Chaos was the name of the game. I knew I wanted to have a lot of music. I knew I wanted the camera to move a lot. I wanted to feel that youthful energy. In our youth, there is a lot of chaos, inside and outside, so to reflect that was important.

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Simone Joy Jones also talks about shooting an arcade scene in a Dave & Buster’s while they were open for a regular day of business.

Do you know where you go from here? What do you want to do next?

ALLAIN-MARCUS: I’ve been fortunate in that some of the projects I had in development before the strike survived the strike, so now I’m back on course with some of those things. There are some TV shows that I’m excited about. In the film space, because this was something that came out of the blue, after I’d done a lot of work in television, so the idea is to just see what comes. There are absolutely things that I’m interested in doing in movies, but I’m also interested in what happens.

Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead is now playing in theaters. Check out the trailer:

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