By Gregg Shapiro

Contributing writer

After making serious dramatic films such as “Back Soon” and “3-Day Weekend,” gay filmmaker Rob Williams puts his delightful sense of humor on display with the hilarious comedy “Make The Yuletide Gay,” screening Nov. 7 at 7:15 p.m. at the Landmark Century Theatre, 2828 N. Clark, as part of Reeling 2009.

A farce about college student Olaf (Keith Jordan), who is out and proud on campus and thinks he’s closeted where his family and neighbors back home in Wisconsin are concerned, that is until his boyfriend Nathan shows up to surprise him for Christmas. “Make They Yuletide Gay” is that rare combination of funny and sexy, and I spoke with Williams shortly before the movie made its U.S. premiere at the Film Out San Diego film festival.

Gregg Shapiro: I recently interviewed gay filmmaker Casper Andreas about “Between Love & Goodbye,” a movie that took him out of the comedy genre into drama, and after a couple of serious films, you have made the move to straightforward comedy with “Make The Yuletide Gay.”

Rob Williams: I think that first and foremost it was the story that came to me and that I wanted to tell. I don’t try to limit myself to any specific genre—drama or comedy or anything. I just want to tell the stories that I want to tell. This one happened to be a comedy. I think that for me, after doing a couple of dramatic pieces, I really wanted to do something that was fun and has a happy ending and is a very hopeful and accessible film for a lot of people. Especially with this one being about parents and kids, I wanted something fun that parents and their gay children could watch together and enjoy.

GS: I think that you achieved that. How much of Rob, if any, is in Olaf and Nathan?

RW: Practically none (laughs). This is certainly not autobiographical in any sense. Any writer who says that there isn’t a little piece of them in their characters is lying.  So I’m sure there’s a little bit of me in a line or two. But this is definitely not my story at all.

GS: So, the Wisconsin setting…you’re not a cheesehead?

RW: No, not at all. Where that came from—Kelly Keaton who plays the mother Anja is a good friend of mine and she is a total Wisconsin cheesehead. That character is really based on her. Through the years of knowing her, I’ve picked up on all these sayings from Wisconsin that she uses. I took her and amped her up about 1000%. But it was really inspired by her.

GS: You worked with Derek Long, who plays Sven in “Make The Yuletide Gay,” previously in  “3-Day Weekend.” What was about him that made you want to work with him again?

RW: He’s an amazing actor, period. I think he did a really great job in “3-Day Weekend,” and, on top of all that, is just the nicest person in the world. But it was also the situation where when I introduced him to Kelly Keaton at our Guest House Films holiday party about a year and a half ago, they started talking and realized that they were both from Wisconsin. So they started doing the accents and everything. We had just finished “3-Day Weekend,” and I adore Derek Long anyway, but then seeing them together, it was like, “Okay, this will work.”

GS: It was serendipitous.

RW: Yes, absolutely. If they hadn’t met and started doing that right in front of me, this movie probably would have happened, but the parents might not have been from Wisconsin. It would have been a completely different film.

GS: How does working with actors with whom you have a working relationship effect the process?

RW: I find it easier. You know each other’s working styles and there’s a certain shorthand that you can get. Derek, I’d worked with before. Kelly had been in my film “Back Soon.” Then there’s the comfort of level of people such as Steve Callahan, who plays the professor in the movie, is a friend of mine. I find that it helps, but at the same time, having all sorts of fresh blood on the set, the people that I haven’t worked with before, like Adamo (Ruggiero), Gates McFadden, Ian Buchanan, and Alison Arngrim—all these people brought so much to it that it was such a joy. They’re all amazing and wonderful professionals. It didn’t feel like work. We were celebrating Christmas for 12 days.

GS: I’m glad that you mentioned Alison (Arngrim, Nellie from “Little House on the Prairie”) and Gates McFadden (Dr. Crusher from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”). What was it like working with such well-known actors?

RW: It was wonderful. Gates and Alison are wonderfully lovely women who were a joy to work with. It was something that I had to think about because I was going onto the set for the first time with well-known actors. And there was no attitude. They responded to the script. They wanted to be there. It was just so much fun. Alison Arngrim is pretty much game for anything. She’s hysterical. She’s been an activist and a favorite of the gay community for years.

GS: Would you say that Alison’s bitchy Heather character a 21st century version of Nellie?

RW: You could say that, yeah. It’s funny, we were trying to come up with casting ideas for that (character) and it was like, “she’s such a bitch, she’s so unlikeable, she’s so Nellie Oleson.” And there you go!

GS: Really? It was that simple?

RW: It was that simple. We needed someone like that and we looked at each other and said, “Why do we need someone like that, why don’t we get that?” We wanted that bitchiness and that rivalry between the moms. Those two went all out and it was so much fun.

GS: What can you tell me about your upcoming projects?

RW: Well, we just finished this (“…Yuletide…”), so we’ll be spending this year promoting it. Hopefully it will be out on DVD by Christmas. We have a couple of projects in active development. One is a novel which we have optioned called “Van Allen’s Ecstasy” (by Jim Tushinski) and we’re in the process of adapting that for the screen. If everything works out, we’ll shoot that in 2010. We’re also working on a project with Matthew Montgomery, a producer on all of our films, who also starred in (my movies) “Long-Term Relationship” and “Back Soon” and all sorts of other gay films. He has written a film titled “Stick Figures” and has formed his own production company, and jointly with Guest House Films we’re going to produce that. We’re raising funds for that now and hope to have something to announce very soon.