All good comedy has to start in a place of honesty. So when I offered a little icebreaker, a tiny warm-up, a wee introductory question to very funny filmmaker Will Gluck when we spoke on Zoom last month about his career and his upcoming rom-com “One Night Only,” I should have anticipated this kind of answer.
Me: “How are you feeling in the weeks leading up to the film‘s release?” Gluck: “Terrible. The worst. The last three weeks? Yeah, it’s the worst. It’s exactly what you think it would be. They always say being a director is the illusion of control. And then when you market the movie, there’s not even an illusion.”
Marketing for Gluck’s latest has already drawn plenty of attention.
Starring rising stars Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro, “One Night Only” is set in an alternate universe where all premarital sex is illegal… except for, well, one night only. Each year, the strict laws of this speculative state are loosened so that everyone can run absolutely wild. Over the course of the 12-hour getting-it-is-legal period, Turner’s Owen and Barbaro’s Allie just keep running into each other, pushing them to wonder if there is some greater romantic plan at play during a distinctly un-romantic evening.
Since the film’s first trailer was released in April, film fans have attempted to untangle the rules of the world, which are — admittedly — a little confusing and quite creative.
Gluck is pleased with what’s been out there so far, even if he is also eager for audiences to see the final film. “I’m very responsible for all this stuff, so it was a journey to try to figure out the best way to market this movie,” he said. “There’s a lot of chatter about people who haven’t seen [the film] first, which I guess is good. You’re creating chatter. But I have to bite my tongue when people who haven’t seen the movie say stuff, and I’m like, ‘No, no, that’s not what it’s about.’”
I mentioned that most people seem to be referring to the film as the “sex Purge movie,” which helps sell some of its bigger swings in quick fashion. He laughed, “Yes, we know all about that. The thing about ‘The Purge’ is that when you hear Purge, it always goes to lawlessness. And that’s why that’s not what this movie is.”
Like many of Gluck’s most enduring hits — the Emma Stone-starring “Scarlet Letter” twist “Easy A,” the wildly popular “Much Ado About Nothing” revamp “Anyone but You” — the film is very much a romantic comedy, steeped in the tropes and expectations of the genre. For Gluck, who has trafficked in both rom-coms and family films (the “Annie” reboot, two darling “Peter Rabbit” films), that’s familiar territory. It’s also a little misunderstood.
Over the past decade or so, stories about the “return of the rom-com!” have been much ballyhooed, even as someone like Gluck has never abandoned the genre. He’s been making these movies for years, and they’ve been doing well. So what does he think about the repeated cry that the rom-com has returned after, well, not really going anywhere, should you care to look?
Gluck, ever-curious, doesn’t answer my query, but asks me what I think about it. I tell him: they’ve been around. You just needed to look in different places for a while. Bingo.
“There’s more rom-coms now than ever before, they’re just all on streaming,” he said. “The real story are theatrical rom-coms. That’s the big thing. The problem with that is that when the studios [and] the advertising, say, ‘The rom-coms are back!’ I keep saying to them, ‘Guys, the only people that think rom-coms went away are sitting in this room. Everyone else thinks rom-coms have never gone away.’ The question is, how do you market this theatrically? I think that’s the challenge.”
Gluck, who fought hard for a theatrical release for “Anyone but You” — a great idea, as the film made over $220 million at the box office — doesn’t deny the challenges facing getting people into theaters. But he’s got a pretty smart approach to the question of appeal.
“And my movies, you’ve seen them, they’re fun,” Gluck said. “I like to have fun. I like to make movies that I want to watch. I like to have fun with other people, and they’re very fun and funny, and heartwarming and musical. It’s something that you want to talk about with your friends. I keep saying that a movie these days is a six-hour commitment: ticketing, talking to your friends, getting to the theater, going to the theater, coming home. So what do you want to spend six hours talking about and doing?”
And Gluck’s brand of comedy is on full display in “One Night Only.” While the film’s logline alone is funny, the director also finds the space for all sorts of positively Gluckian flourishes, from the antics of an incorrigible young neighbor that Allie’s roommate takes in for the night to Allie’s job as a jingle singer that haunts her daily existence (hilariously).
“It’s just things that make me laugh and things that I like,” Gluck said with a smile. “I’ve always been obsessed with those pharmaceutical commercials and that we’re the only country in the world that does them. Every other country knows that their doctor should know about the blood cancer drugs. We shouldn’t be tipping them off to it! But there’s also behind the scenes of who does it. That stuff fascinates me.”
And Allie’s nutty young neighbor, who holes up at her apartment during the night in question? Gluck isn’t afraid of “weird” subplots like that, “as long as it makes sense. There’s a reason why,” he said. “So many times I get notes from people who are like, ‘No, that’s not on story. Why do you spend three scenes doing that?’ I say, ‘But that’s what I enjoy doing.’ … I write new scenes every day, and half the time we’re like, ‘Wait, what is going on?’ I say, ‘I don’t know. It might not work. If it does, we’ll keep it. If not, it won’t.’”
The film, written by Travis Braun, has plenty of elements that are indeed “on story.” Maybe too many?
“This is a movie to see a couple of times, because there’s so much world-building I did in the background,” Gluck said. “I didn’t want this movie to take place on the night this started to happen. Humans have to move on with stuff, have to deal with stuff. Even that last commercial, I had a lot of fun with that because there’s a lot of stuff in that commercial that is just bananas if you look at it closely.”
There’s a point in the film in which Owen and Allie reunite at a police station (no spoilers as to the how’s and why’s here), and find themselves sitting in front of a pair of posters that use stick figures to show us what is “ILLEGAL” (sex, in many forms) and “LEGAL” (dancing, hugging, and vigorous solo masturbation). It comes more than halfway through the film, at a point when audiences are eager for more information about how this all works.
“This drove some of the studio people crazy, because they’re like, ‘Tell everyone what’s going on,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t want to,’” the filmmaker said. “I think that people want to figure stuff out. I think audiences are much, much smarter than we give them credit for. Not we, but people give them credit for. But there are moments in the movie when, right at that moment when you’re like, ‘Wait, what is this?,’ then we just give it to you.”
When the film opens, the law around premarital sex has only been in existence for about three years. This is still new to our characters, and it’s also — ack! — timely, especially as we learn more about the politicians who pushed through the law and the massive financial windfall they’re getting from it. How did Gluck balance that with the more fizzy treats of its rom-com heart?
“A lot, a lot, a lot of thinking. A lot of calibration. A lot of trying to take it away from politics and making more social commentary instead of politics,” Gluck said. “There’s many parts you saw in the movie where people talk about it: Pro, anti, I don’t want to disappear from it. I want to talk about it, but I don’t want to make it the forefront of the movie. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that people are surprised [at] what happens at the end of the movie, especially for a liberal filmmaker. I tried very hard not to make it political, and then make it more about what do humans do when they’re faced with any situation.”
“What humans would do” is a theme that comes up frequently when speaking to Gluck. He’s a filmmaker driven by relationships and interpersonal dynamics, the kind of stuff that just so happens to be the bread and butter of rom-coms and family films. That thinking extends beyond the screen, too.
“I screen my movies in the editing process double-digit times to people, just constantly showing to people,” he said. “I really believe the most valuable part of showing it to people is not their response afterwards, but their response during the movie. You can sense it from the audience and how they’re reacting. You can feel it. That’s another reason why I want movies to be in theaters: watching a movie is a living, breathing organism. The entire theater becomes a breathing, living organism. And you can see when it’s broken, you can see when it’s having fun, you see when it’s not.”
©Sony Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Gluck admitted he doesn’t always listen to that test screening feedback “100 percent,” but he’s very tuned into it. Why wouldn’t he be? “I believe we’re making movies for people,” the director said. “And I have stuff in there that makes no sense and never gets a laugh. Believe me, all my movies, including this one, there’s stuff in there that just gets nothing, but I just smile. But then you [show it again], and one person really laughs. I’m like, ‘That’s why it’s in there.’”
Audience enjoyment and engagement have become top of mind for Gluck over his years in the business. Rom-coms and family films are the sort of fare that many people have gotten used to consuming at home. Movies about people, about relationships, about fun. Gluck’s interest in feedback, quality testing, real pressure? That doesn’t seem to be abating, no matter how many hits he has.
“This is a very tough business,” he said. “Amy Pascal, who I’m very close with, said, ‘Every movie you make, you’re back to zero. Literally you’re back to zero no matter what happened.’ Maybe except for Chris Nolan, but even so, Chris Nolan has to talk to all these people. I feel like every movie I’ve ever made is back to zero. Even after ‘Easy A’ or after ‘Anyone but You,’ it’s back to zero. I like to do movies in theaters that aren’t based on anything. There’s no IP. So it’s very hard. So it’s actually back to negative 10!”
Gluck’s not letting that stop his creativity, though. His next project is, by his own admission, “a weird one.” No, really. It’s a World War II movie.
“It’s my Trojan horse. It’s wrapped up in this movie, but it’s about people’s relationships. That’s what I love doing,” Gluck said. “The romantic comedy? It gives me an opportunity to discuss characters, and people and their relationships, and how they feel about each other, so anything I can figure out a way to Trojan horse that into… The next one, hopefully, is going to be [from] this incredible script that these two writers wrote about a true story that happened in the Laplands of World War II.”
He smiled. “I’ll do anything, any genre that allows me to keep talking about characters and real people dealing with real situations. That’s what I really love. I love interpersonal things. I love it so much. And then anything that allows me to do that.”
Universal Pictures will release “One Night Only” in theaters on Friday, August 7.
