We may not be getting new movies in theaters at the moment due to the ongoing pandemic and industry-wide lockdown, but that doesn’t mean that the creative juices are taking over filmmakers. Among the many scripts being written during the lockdown, Dave Franco and Alison Brie wrote what Franco describes as an “elevated version of a romantic comedy” inspired by classics like “When Harry Met Sally.”
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That’s right, we’re still not done with the whole “elevated horror” debate and now Franco comes and throws “elevated romantic comedy” at us? While promoting his feature directorial debut, “The Rental,” Franco talked to Discussing Film about the script he wrote during quarantine.
“We want to approach that film in a similar way that we did in this film, in the sense that we want to make a smarter, more elevated version of a romantic comedy,” Franco said. “We were inspired by classics like ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ and ‘Pretty Woman,’ which are all films that are grounded, where the acting is really strong and they are all shot like dramas, so they look good. We were just wondering why people don’t really approach the genre from that smarter point of view these days, and so that’s what we tried to accomplish with this script.”
Franco at least expanded on what he thinks the genre is lacking while talking to Variety. “When we looked at the landscape of rom-coms over the past decade, it feels like the bar is set really low,” Franco explained. “There’s a trend where rom-coms have an overly bright aesthetic and the concepts are really silly and the acting isn’t grounded.”
So you better prepare yourself for A24 to start making a series of elevated rom-coms soon enough.