The co-creator of Ali G may seem an unlikely bedfellow for Working Title, makers of Love Actually. Rather than meet cute, these characters seem destined to split ugly
It's probably fair to say that the word "romcom" means different things to most men and women. For a woman, it's a chance to spend an hour and a half without seeing anybody murdered or bludgeoned to death. For a bloke, it's a genre that's supposed to induce fear at the prospect of jokes about buying pants and discussion on how shit men are.
I am a man. I am shit. But I also love a good romcom. When Harry Met Sally is my favourite film. Yet over my years of writing comedy, I have come to the conclusion that most romcoms are the same. Take two people who are never going to get together, ever. Two people for whom the idea of romance is preposterous. I mean, how could it ever work between a rugged sewage worker and the glamorous wedding planner? But wait! Here they are, and they're bonding over drainage clearance!
That unlikely encounter is known in Hollywood speak as "the meet-cute" and I've heard it hundreds of times. I won't mention the names, but I've been employed to work on numerous toxic romcoms where you have to force this quirky and odd situation into the movie. There has to be a mix-up of luggage, or a row about whose cab it is when they get into the same taxi. You have to set up immediately that the couple are never going to get on, and the whole thing is so predictable it's almost plotted to the page. Page 78 in fact: the act two/three turning point where they realise that actually they love each other. It's formulaic and, frankly, depressing too.
So when I was offered the chance to make my own comic romance, I wanted to do the complete opposite. I wanted to make a romantic comedy about people splitting up. A film that took all these incredibly familiar stereotypes and reversed them. My film I Give It A Year begins at the point most romcoms end – when the couple say "I do". Our lead couple Nat and Josh have had all the romance; they've kissed in the rain, danced in the dark and all that malarkey, and they've now come to the point where they have to face real life; the honeymoon is literally over.
This struck me as being a better set-up for creating comedy. Because the truth is that romance and comedy are very strange bedfellows. Dysfunction is much funnier than function, and that includes romance. When you sit down with your mates, nobody has brilliantly hilarious stories about how they got together with their girlfriends. It's always, 'We got together, it was nice, let's talk about the football now.' But people do have hilarious stories about breaking up and it was those I wanted to tap into.
I watched a lot of movies for research and found they split roughly into two types. First was what I would consider the very traditional, slightly rubbish romantic comedies: things like 27 Dresses, Leap Year, Monster In Law, Just Friends. I wanted to see what the tropes of romantic comedy were so that I could fuck with them. Then I watched some more raucous stuff that still had romance running through it – There's Something About Mary, Meet The Parents, Knocked Up. I love Knocked Up. I hold it up as the first sophisticated, modern look at relationships we had in the last decade. This is partly because Knocked Up felt authentic, it felt real, and they were voices that I understood. They didn't seem manufactured or synthesised according to what a movie executive thought a 28- to 34-year-old within the ABC demographic would want to see. It was about real people with real problems, and it showed that at the same time as being funny. Its first port of call was to make people laugh.
'The basic concept comes from the fact I've been to roughly 100 weddings and I can tell whether the marriage is going to last or not'
I wanted the same things for my film. I wanted to talk about romance and relationships, but I wanted it to be a happy corollary to the film being funny. So that meant creating couples who reflected relationships which exist in real life. Romcoms aren't about two entirely compatible white thirtysomethings getting together and having two children any more. Marriage isn't the be-all and couples come in all shapes and sizes, following their own rules. The more we embrace different types of unions - whether that be same-sex unions or relationships across generations - the more they become the new reality.
I Give It A Year had to reflect that reality. It also had to, in the words of my erstwhile co-creation Ali G, "keep it real". And be based in Egham. (Not really, though there is an Egham joke in the film, for those who are looking.) The difficult thing to do when trying to create authentic comic situations is not to push things too far. Doing Borat and Brüno was brilliant for that because, by performing with real people, there was a ready-made safety net. If things ever became too ridiculous, somebody would end up saying so on camera. That enabled us to push things further than you would in a scripted film. In a scripted film it's about taking reality and ratcheting it up by 10%. So a lot of the stories in I Give It A Year are slightly exaggerated versions of true stories, things that have happened either to me or to friends of mine. The basic concept, for example, comes from the fact that at this point in my life I've been to roughly 100 weddings and I can tell whether the marriage is going to last or not. I can sit there in my cynical holier-than-thou way, look to my wife and make a call. I've got an excellent hit rate. I went to a wedding where the groom was trying to give a lovely speech about his wife and the best thing he could think of to say was "the thing I love about her the most is how difficult she finds it to find her mobile phone". That wasn't even a challenge. I think it lasted two months.
Another scene in the film is based on a row I had with my family when we were playing Scrabble and I put down the word "queef". Queef, in its strictest definition, is a fanny fart, but I was the only person in the room who knew that. The thing was that there were 103 points on offer; I think there was a triple letter score on the Q, and I wasn't about to give that up. I had to explain what the word meant to everyone in the room, and that included all of my wife's family. When it came to putting it in the movie, Scrabble wouldn't let us have the rights to the game, so we had to change it to charades.
It wasn't the only thing that didn't go my way. I Give It A Year is a Working Title film and they have pedigree for making some of the biggest romcoms in the business. The Richard Curtis movies, especially – Four Weddings, Notting Hill, Love Actually – helped to redefine the genre. I love the Richard Curtis films. I think he's brilliant at what he does and whatever you say about them they are genuinely funny. But they also have scenes and passages that are mainly about tugging at the heartstrings. At the beginning of the process, I wasn't into that. I wanted every scene to be funny. I didn't want a serious scene, I didn't want to let the air out of the balloon. Working Title, however, didn't agree.
They have been down the road so many times that they know the rules. They know what works. So, in the final cut there's a scene where Josh goes to the flat of his ex-girlfriend Chloe with a bag of fried-egg sweets. That wasn't in the original draft. But the producers at Working Title insisted on adding it. They would say, "You need this scene to cement their relationship and for the audience to feel for them." It went in, and the film is definitely better off for it. Bizarrely, it's some people's favourite scene. It's not mine, mind, but if I have learned one thing from this process, it's that in a romantic comedy, a little heart goes a long way.
I Give It A Year is out in the UK on Friday 8 Feb
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/feb/02/i-give-it-a-year-dan-mazer
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