What reaction were you hearing when you told people you wanted to do a romantic comedy?
Juliet was so supportive of this the whole time. I felt like everybody really wanted to find a way to make it work because everybody loved romantic comedies so much. Producers and different studios I spoke to, sometimes the answer was, “We’d love to do this, but we just don’t see a way for it to work for us.” I believed that they wanted the genre to come back because they loved it. That was inspiring in its own way. I think I wrote the kind of movie that I wanted to watch and hoped to figure out somewhere to make it. But I do feel like when we were talking about the project, everyone’s reaction was, “We love rom-coms,” even if the second part of that sentence was, “but we just can’t make them right now.” I felt a lot of love for the genre, even if some of them were saying it under their breath like, “Don’t tell anyone I love rom-coms.”A girl Zoey Deutch’s age has never lived in an era of big rom-coms.
I know! I feel like I’m the last generation who got to see them in theaters being truly celebrated. Maybe not the last, but when I was growing up, they were the big movie of the summer. You went to see How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days or You’ve Got Mail — even movies I love like What Happens in Vegas or Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist or Man Up. When I was first starting to love movies, people were psyched about them. I feel so lucky to have been a kid watching movies in that time period, to be of an era when people used it as a compliment instead of under their breath.Last month, Silberman’s Set It Up premiered on Netflix to swoons as romance-starved audiences rooted for aggrieved personal assistants Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell to successfully hook up their horrible bosses Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs — or at least fall in love themselves. Set It Up was Silberman’s first hit rom-com, and next year, she’ll have two more: the girl-nerds-unleashed Booksmart, directed by Olivia Wilde, and the ultrameta Isn’t It Romantic, in which a cynical Rebel Wilson wakes up inside a warped world of rom-com clichés.
Meanwhile, Silberman’s just returned from her own honeymoon to a Hollywood that, after a decade of swatting down passionate blockbusters, might finally be ready to fall in love again. But how does the rom-com fit into a culture that’s reexamining gender roles and bewailing Tinder? And are we finally done writing scripts about cute blonde cupcake bakers with zero personality?
Congrats! You got married the week Set It Up premiered, proving love is for real.
It was crazy. It was especially fun because Zoey and Glen were at the wedding. They were such good sports to come to my rehearsal dinner with my entire family who had all seen Set It Up that day and all wanted to talk to them. They were bigger celebrities at the wedding than I was. But it was a really, really extraordinarily fun weekend. It was the highlight of my life and it will all be downhill from there.You were an assistant. Is that where the idea came from?
I developed the script with Juliet Berman, our producer, who is a good friend of mine in real life as well. She and I both met when we were assistants, and she and I both had terrific bosses who wound up being terrific mentors. But we knew some people who were assistants to people who weren’t as great. She was more connected to the general assistant world. I was an assistant to a writer, so it was a little more isolated. She had heard so many stories about terrible experiences and great experiences and she came up with the idea that two assistants could try to set their bosses up because they know so much about them and control their schedules. Once she came up with that great idea, she and I were able to develop it and come up with a story and speak with all of our friends who were assistants, and some of our friends who had assistants, and come up with their backstories that helped inform that world. I’ve only had one boss and she was the greatest boss in the world, so getting to research all the situations that weren’t as great, I got to go, ‘My boss was awesome!’Were you worried your former boss might think a detail in there was about her — or that people who knew you worked for her would?
I wasn’t! Her name is Dana Fox and she’s truly the kindest, most beloved person in Hollywood. I don’t think anyone would believe that, but I’ll also shout from the rooftops about how wonderful she is forever for the rest of my life, even if this movie hadn’t been made.You were on set the entire shoot. Was there a moment when you saw the director, Claire Scanlon, add a beat that made the romance bloom?
Claire talked a lot about her experience on The Office and how they were taught to lean into the emotion of things and not always try and make a joke or be cynical. I think she had a great sense throughout the whole thing of making sure we kept the heart alive. The night that we shot the engagement party was really fun. We were on a beautiful rooftop in New York and playing the kind of music we were dancing to in the scene so they whole crew felt a little bit like we were at a party. The transition from the goofy dancing to the slow dancing, to watch Claire find those moments of them looking at each other in such an already-romantic setting. Obviously, the pizza scene was fun, seeing the two of them as they were quite literally inhaling pizza at a rate I’d never seen in my human life.Ad
Zoey eventually threw up from too much pizza.I was jealous. I was trying to eat the prop food the entire time and that was the one night I thought there was enough pizza no one would notice. But they were going through it at such a clip, even I couldn’t sneak a piece because we were going to run out. I think Claire was always very aware of moments that wouldn’t seem romantic, but if you catch the right look between people as they’re behaving in a real way and feeling grounded, you can start to develop those romantic moments even earlier. I learned a lot watching her find those moments in places I hadn’t expected.
Zoey said she stole you for the character: the way you talk, your hair color.
That’s true! I love romantic comedies and I grew up watching all of the old screwball ones, all the Katharine Hepburn movies, all the Rosalind Russell movies. I was hoping to write in that kind of rhythm and it was such a miracle to find Zoey, who I feel like you could put in The Philadelphia Story or Woman of the Year or Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday. She could take over any one of those roles so easily, her rhythm and her delivery and her timing are impeccable. It’s very kind of her to say she tried to talk like me. I also had to teach her about sports because she wasn’t as familiar with a lot of them, so that was fun to give her a crash course.(Excerpt) Read More at: Vulture.com
