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Features
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Casting His Lot in Hollywood
Fresh off the success of Calendar Girls, filmmaker Nigel Cole did what any upstanding Brit in Tinseltown might. He went for the script written by an obscure American actor.
Friday, April 22, 2005
By Todd Gilchrist
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Filmmaker Nigel Cole
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If nothing else, the new romantic comedy A Lot Like Love represents a giant generational leap forward for its British director, Nigel Cole. His young leads Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet put together barely add up the age of a Brenda Blethyn, Helen Mirren or Julie Walters, the stars of Cole’s quirky comedies Saving Grace and Calendar Girls.
During a recent interview with FilmStew, Cole admits he enjoyed considerable freedom to make any number of projects after Calendar Girls’ success, but waited until he found a project upon which he felt could put his particular stamp as a director. “If you’ve made a movie and it opened, and it had a beginning, a middle and end, you get sent a lot of scripts,” he acknowledges matter-of-factly. “Most of them are by people absolutely desperate, who have been flogging the same old script for years, so you try and avoid those.”
“I was really keen to do a romantic comedy,” he adds. “So I went off looking, deliberately, for one and couldn’t find it. In romantic comedies these days, the drama and the characterization tend to be just there to serve the comedy, and they tend to be kind of comedy sequences strung together with a bit of a plot. I was looking for something that had real drama and kind of felt recognizable from my own messy, complicated love life.”
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Theo Wargo/Wireimage.com
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Box office king Kutcher
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Cole weeded his way through more than fifty scripts, turning down in the process several $100 million plus box office hits. Eventually, he stumbled upon a script written by Colin Patrick Lynch, one of those actors who makes his living by playing the role of Attendant in Terminator 2: Judgment Day or ESU Technician in Phone Booth. In fact, Cole’s best know role within Hollywood may well be his turn as Steve Seagal in the 2002 short My Dinner with Ovitz.
“Colin’s script was just great,” he insists. “It reminded me of Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally and Annie Hall, the kind of old-fashioned romantic comedy where you took the characters seriously, the dialogue was witty and it wasn’t just a series of comedy stunts.”
Cole is well aware that he has just reeled off the names of three of the most beloved romantic comedies of all time, and so is quick to explain that the familiarity of genre formulas ultimately provides a cushion for those comparisons to play out. “What’s interesting is that these days - and I have to say that this film is no exception - pretty much everything is given away in the trailer,” he admits. “I mean, you can’t see a trailer anymore which doesn’t show you the entire movie, beginning, middle and end. And of course all directors, and I’m no exception, complain bitterly about this to the studios.”
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Jeffrey Mayer/Wireimage.com
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The very lovely Amanda Peet
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“They go, ‘You’re giving my movie away!’ And what the studios say, and I have to presume they are right, is that audiences don’t mind. In fact, they say, it increases their enjoyment because it increases their expectation of how they are going to get to the happy ending. So I think it turns out that it doesn’t really matter.”
In spite of the well-rehearsed expectations of today’s movie audiences, Cole agrees that they won’t buy what they glimpsed in a romantic comedy trailer unless there is real chemistry between the two leads. And that magical ingredient, he says, was evident from the start. ‘
“Ashton was a big fan of Amanda’s and kept talking about her; I was a big fan of Amanda’s, so we thought we’d better give this a try,” he remembers. “We had a reading in a hotel room in New York, and Ashton flew in - Amanda was already there - and it started brilliantly, because the casting director (The Starlet’s Joseph Middleton) opened the window in order to get a bit of fresh air in the room, and the entire window frame fell on top of him.”
“I thought, ‘Okay, that’s a good start,’ and they started to read together and immediately you could tell,” he remembers. “It’s just one of those indefinable things. They made each other laugh, they kind of caught each other’s interest, and they started playing with the script immediately, just in the room, a cold reading. But immediately, there was something kind of going on between them.”
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Co-star Aimee Garcia
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Ironically, Cole says this natural born chemistry occasionally undermined his efforts during production to maintain a balance between the bitter and the sweet of romantic comedy. “If you are trying to make a movie that is genuinely romantic and is going to move people, sometimes you’ve got to say, ‘No, we’re not going to make this funny,’” he suggests. “So part of my problem was to kind of calm them down a bit, because they were just making us all laugh the whole time.”
Ultimately, with so many formulas to either embrace or avoid outright, Cole feels it’s truly difficult to distinguish a romantic comedy from the ever growing heap. “I think things have to feel authentic,” he says of his own style. “I just will not allow anything that is just there for effect, so it’s hard sometimes, because actors come up with something that’s really funny and it’s making the crew laugh.”
“You probably know how hard it is to make the crew laugh, and sometimes you have to say, ‘No, that’s not authentic,’” Cole continues. “If I do anything, it’s that I insist that audiences believe that these two people would say that thing or do that thing or behave in that way.”
And as far as Cole’s own behavior is concerned, A Lot Like Love was all about the promise of stylistic liberation after the welcoming but somewhat stuff comforts of Saving Grace and Calendar Girls. “I was very worried after Calendar Girls,” he reveals. “I’d made two films about middle-aged women getting their rocks off. I thought, ‘I’d better do something younger and sexier,’ not that Helen Mirren naked isn’t sexy, you understand.”
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