‘Anyone But You’ Director Will Gluck on His Romcom Return, Paparazzi Set Photos and Nathan Fielder “Feud”
Anyone But You filmmaker Will Gluck has returned to the genre in which he first made his name.
The New York native has spent much of the past decade making family films such as Annie (2014) and two Peter Rabbit movies, mainly because he wanted to entertain his own young family. Now that his children are older, Gluck has made his way back to the star-driven (and star-making) romantic comedy after beginning his romcom career with Emma Stone and Penn Badgley in 2010’s Easy A and then Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake in 2011’s Friends with Benefits. He’s currently taking the same approach with Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell in Anyone But You, which is loosely based on William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
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With the major studios all deprioritizing the comedy genre the last handful of years, Gluck admits that he felt a pressure to recapture the theatrical energy of his films in the early 2010s.
“I really did feel a huge obligation to maybe make the last romcom in the history of cinema and theatricality,” Gluck tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I really wanted this to feel big and epic and musical and funny and sexy and edgy and adult in order to get people to experience it in the theater with their friends and their dates. I sound like a pitchman, but I guarantee that when you walk out of this movie, you will have had a good, fun experience, which romcoms always deliver.”
With two rising stars in Sweeney and Powell, Australian paparazzi had a field day, as countless set photos made their way online. Gossip rags immediately jumped on the situation as well, but Gluck says that his two leads took all the interest and curiosity in stride.
“We were actually a little bit surprised with the amount of photographs that were taken of the set and how far they went,” Gluck recalls. “It got so broad that the studio would call me and have a question about a piece of clothing. And I was like, ‘You saw that from the paparazzi because we never put that in our movie.’ Syd and Glen embraced it. They didn’t hide from them.”
Gluck recently engaged in a Notes app duel with The Curse co-creator Nathan Fielder, as the latter accused Anyone But You of plagiarizing The Curse’s trailer introduction with their own identical pre-roll of sorts. The link between both creatives is Gluck’s former leading lady and Fielder’s current Curse leading lady, Emma Stone, and Gluck won’t say if she’s the one pulling the strings on this running gag.
“My attorneys have told me that I’m not allowed to speak about that, but all of us were very happy with the way it turned out. And it might not be over yet,” Gluck says dryly.
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Gluck also discusses his failed plan to turn Anyone But You’s paparazzi attention into a scavenger hunt, and how he pulled off additional photography in record time, post-strike.
So after making a few family films, can we call Anyone But You a return to your roots?
You can call it anything you want. I did those [family films] for my kids at that age, and now that my kids have gotten older, I’m going to move on, yeah. All the movies I make are where I am with my family and their lives, and they’re now at the age where they’ll hopefully enjoy it.
You and Sony seem to like each other, and I’m pretty sure they’re the only studio you’ve ever worked with. Do you have a deal with them, or just a firm handshake?
I’ve had an overall deal there for 14 years, so it’s been a long time. But I do like them a lot.
The last few years, we’ve all wondered what happened to studio romcoms and comedies. The streamers then wisely filled that void. But between your movie and Jennifer Lawrence’s No Hard Feelings earlier this year, do you get the sense that Sony is prioritizing the genre again?
I’m not just saying this, but I think Sony realizes that, at the end of the day, people enjoy going to see movies with other people. The romcom is great when you see it with other people: friends, partners, boyfriends, girlfriends, but also other people in the theater. That’s when the emotion rolls over you, and you have such a good time that you walk out and want to go do something with those friends. And recently, romcoms have been at home, so you watch them by yourself or with someone else, but you’re on your phone and doing something else at the same time, so you don’t really get the impact of the movie. If you put some of the streaming romcoms in theaters, we wouldn’t feel that romcoms have gone away.
But I really did feel a huge obligation to maybe make the last romcom in the history of cinema and theatricality. I really wanted this to feel big and epic and musical and funny and sexy and edgy and adult in order to get people to experience it in the theater with their friends and their dates. I sound like a pitchman, but I guarantee that when you walk out of this movie, you will have had a good, fun experience, which romcoms always deliver. We need a fun movie, especially now, and this is a fun movie.
As I was watching this movie, a number of the scenes looked very familiar. It was almost like I’d seen dozens of paparazzi photos of them already. Do you chalk all those set photos up to shooting on location with two lead actors on the rise?
There’s two young actors on the rise at a great location, in very little clothing, and they really, really like each other. So that makes for a very good photograph, and we were actually a little bit surprised with the amount of photographs that were taken of the set and how far they went. It got so broad that the studio would call me and have a question about a piece of clothing. And I was like, “You saw that from the paparazzi because we never put that in our movie.” So that’s how big it got, which was always kind of cool. Syd and Glen embraced it. They didn’t hide from them. Also, in Sydney, Australia, the paparazzi are so polite. If you asked them to leave us alone, they would. So it was neat to have everyone back home, and around the world, see what we were doing. There’s no source material for this movie except for William Shakespeare. So, if you haven’t read Much Ado About Nothing and the paparazzi photos are your only source material, then connecting the dots might be fun for some people.
Instead of trying to combat it, it sounds like you just viewed it as free marketing.
You can’t combat it. I learned that when I made Friends with Benefits in New York City with arguably two of the biggest stars [Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake] at that point. So we embraced it, so much so that we would do certain things. This never really got picked up, but whenever we went places, they would have an umbrella because it was hot. So we put a telephone number on the umbrella, saying, “Call me,” and we had Syd and Glen on the number’s answering machine. So we did this scavenger hunt for people to see if they could figure it out, but it never took off because those pictures were never photographed. Still, we very much embraced it.
Speaking of marketing, did you and your Easy A star Emma Stone orchestrate your blood feud with her current The Curse collaborator, Nathan Fielder? Or did you “yes, and” him in real time?
My attorneys have told me that I’m not allowed to speak about that, but all of us were very happy with the way it turned out. And it might not be over yet.
Your other favorite marketing subject is the teaser trailer. Because it didn’t address why Ben (Powell) and Bea (Sweeney) don’t like each other, I briefly wondered if this was going to be a Clueless-type situation where they were former stepsiblings. Perhaps it was something taboo for you to play your cards that close to your vest, but that’s obviously not what you intended. Did anyone else bring up Clueless or anything like that?
Nothing as creepy as stepsiblings, but [Clueless] is an interesting movie when you find that out. Good movie. Here’s the real answer: our movie is a full-on musical like Wonka and Mean Girls (2024), but the studio doesn’t want us to show how many songs there are and we don’t have very much content that’s not musical. So we cut together all the non-musical numbers, and all we could get was that teaser. Now, once the studio allows us to tell the world that it’s a full-on, 25-song musical, then we can put out a new trailer with the songs, but we could only use the parts of the deer that aren’t musical. How’s that for an answer?
The timing of this bit is funny because THR literally just wrote an article about musical marketing and how studios are hesitant to market their musicals as such.
Did it really!? Listen, Sony does not want us to tell you that it’s a full-on musical with dancing and Busby Berkeley stuff and the whole thing.
You joke, but the closing credits are kind of a musical. You seemingly had the cast sing the closing credit song [Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten”] for at least one take in the majority of the movie’s scenes. Was that the case?
It was a 45 or 50-day shoot, and for 42 days of it, once we finished a scene, we were like, “Now we’ve got to do the song.” So, yes, we did it every day. By the end of the movie, the entire crew of 200 Australians were all singing the song alone. In the beginning, people were like, “Ah, it’s a little bit of a drag,” but by the third or fourth day, everyone really got into it as you can see from the end. That only works if people were having a good time doing it, and so they really enjoyed themselves. We did it all the time.
Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” has a prior association [as the theme song for The Hills], but you had to have a catchy song that people already know. So any pop song is going to have some degree of baggage, I suppose, and that’s why it’s funny that Glen’s character relies on it so much. But how much debate was there over what song to use given that prior association?
There was debate in my head between that song and another song, and the song had to fulfill the requirement of what you just said. It had to have baggage, and maybe people don’t like it, but really, people do love it. I just needed to give them permission to love it, which is what I did in another movie [Easy A] with another [Bedingfield] song [“Pocketful of Sunshine”]. But when I started playing [“Unwritten”] and the other [potential] song for people, I very quickly realized that everyone knows [“Unwritten”]. No matter how snarky or how much of a curmudgeon someone might be, you can’t not love that song. And we knew we were right when we started playing it out loud in the bar scene with 300 extras. They all knew the song, and I was like, “Oh shit, everyone knows this song.” So we were very happy, and Natasha was really great in supporting us and letting us use it. So I hope it comes back again, which I’m sure it will after this.
During the closing credits singalong of that song, there’s a quick shot where they’re at a stadium. Was that a deleted scene?
No, it was shot just for that. When they’re picked up at the airport, the airport was actually the lobby of the Sydney Cricket Ground. That’s how big that building is. And when we were shooting there, behind us was the most famous stadium in all of Australia. And I said, “Why aren’t we filming there?” So we asked them for their permission to quickly shoot there, and they said yes. We subsequently found out from our Australian friends how rare it is for anybody to shoot there. If we had asked [ahead of time] to shoot on the Sydney Cricket Ground, they probably would’ve said no, but because we were there, they said yes. So that was not a deleted scene. It was added at the end of the day. [Syd and Glen] went out by themselves in the middle of it, and we were way back on radios talking to them. So they had a really good time doing that.
And how did you pull off additional photography so quickly? Did you basically have your bags packed for whenever the strike ended?
So I went to Sydney four days before the strike ended, hoping that it was going to end. And every day, we would location scout, choose locations and then lose them the next day because the strike wasn’t over yet. And every night, Sydney and Glen were ready to get on an airplane. And when the strike ended at 4:00 PM, I believe, Sydney and Glen both jumped on airplanes to Sydney, and they went right from the airport to the set to start shooting. I think we were the first movie or TV show back after the strike ended, so it was pretty exciting.
I appreciated the movie’s self-awareness. You pointed out how inefficient it was for Harbor Rescue to constantly use helicopters instead of boats, and then you made a couple of jokes about the real-life age difference between Glen and Sydney. That led to my favorite line courtesy of Michelle Hurd’s character: “Honey, no one’s 29.”
(Laughs.)
Did you do a self-aware pass on the script at a certain point during production?
Well, if you asked the head of the studio, every page has self-aware lines, and all I’d do is cut them down. I write and have [the actors] do very self-aware stuff all the time, and then when you get in the editing room, it gets cut down more and more when you realize that it takes away from the story. So there were tenfold more self-aware lines than what’s in the movie. Movies are the only medium where the characters don’t realize that they’re not the first people to go through something. Everyone else in life goes: “Oh, that’s not going to end well.” But for some reason, movie characters are like, “Hmm, this is interesting. I wonder how this is going to end.” So I have this compulsion. One of my huge writing flaws is to constantly point out tropes and things that don’t work, and then I have to cut them down until it’s just enough to not get people angry. It does take you out of the movie, sometimes. Some people are like, “Oh, I didn’t even realize that about the helicopter …” But I have a need to point out stuff like that.
How purposeful was the My Best Friend’s Wedding reunion between Dermot Mulroney and Rachel Griffiths?
It was acknowledged, let’s put it that way. We thought it might be cool, and early on in the movie, we took all the cast to see My Best Friend’s Wedding in a movie theater. It was an incredible experience, and Dermot hadn’t seen it since the beginning. He then passed the torch to Glen, and it was actually a really touching and moving experience to show that movie to everybody with Dermot and Rachel there.
The traditional romcom formula is boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, but Anyone But You had the boy lose the girl in the first ten minutes. In your return to romcoms, was it a priority to shake up that formula?
Yeah, but I would say that they mutually lose each other, which is interesting. This movie is loosely based on Much Ado About Nothing, and William Shakespeare created all these tropes that we now think are just romcom tropes and sitcom tropes, like fake dating and enemies to lovers. It’s all from Much Ado About Nothing and his other work. He’s the one that started all these tried-and-true things, and we thought we were honoring that. So we are just the last in a long line of retreads of Shakespeare. That’s why there’s Much Ado About Nothing references and quotes hidden throughout the movie.
It reminds me of that one romcom that honored The Scarlet Letter [Easy A].
Yeah, I just do the same thing over and over again. (Laughs.)
I’ll always remember seeing Friends with Benefits in a theater because it was the first time I told someone to stop talking during a movie. That film is also one of the most famous examples of Hollywood developing similar material at the same time [Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher’s No Strings Attached release six months earlier]. Did that experience make you paranoid moving forward? Would you survey the landscape before proceeding with a project in order to not repeat that situation?
I’m not just saying this, but I really believe that anytime they let you make a movie, you should go make a movie. So if I were to keep trying to second guess everything and try to game the system and make sure something wasn’t happening and check what’s in development, I think you’d just die with your secrets. So I don’t think about that at all. Was it a pain during that time? A little bit for the marketing of it all, but it didn’t affect us as much as people thought it did. The funny thing about it is that Ashton and Mila got married after being in these competing movies. So I thought that was a good ending to that story, but no, I don’t look over my shoulder. The movies I make also don’t have very specific plots. The plot in our movies is secondary at best. It’s more about if you want to spend time with the characters. So, if you want to spend time with Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell and watch them fall in and out of love and all that, that’s most important. I love doing the character stuff most. So I don’t spend much time thinking about, “Oh, is there another movie like this out there?” but I probably should.
It relates to something I’m occasionally asked by friends. They’ll question why THR or any other trade reports on a movie that is merely in development and nowhere near greenlit, and the reason is partially because producers want to plant their flag on certain material so that no one else comes along with similar material.
It’s true.
So we’re surveying the landscape for you.
In the grand scheme of things, the amount of stories about things in development that actually achieve fruition is very slim. You can read an article in The Hollywood Reporter and go, “Oh my God, I’m not going to do this anymore,” but you shoot yourself in the foot because the odds of that movie going are just as much odds as your movie going. Literally, a million miracles have to happen before a movie gets made, so don’t handcuff yourself on the way.
I mentioned Emma Stone earlier, but have you seen Poor Things yet? Oddly enough, it makes for a fascinating double feature alongside Easy A. There’s some thematic overlap.
We’re seeing it Tuesday night, and we’re very excited. I heard she’s so great in it.
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Anyone But You is now playing in movie theaters.
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