Cathy Schulman must really love something if she’s even going to try to make it happen. As an independent producer in an increasingly restricted market, filming something is an elusive endgame. “It used to be that producers would hand a book to the studio or a network and say, ‘Will you buy this for me, develop it, and make a movie out of it?’ “, explains Schulman, who opted for Robinne Lee’s novel. The idea of you alongside fellow producer Gabrielle Union years before putting him on trial. “That wasn’t going to work here.”
Fortunately, Anne Hathaway’s interest in the romantic comedy-drama about a single mother who embarks on an unlikely relationship with the lead singer of a boy band (Nicholas Galitzine) helped ensure that Schulman’s efforts weren’t vain. Amazon MGM Studios joined the project in 2021, and it is now streaming on Prime Video and appearing in select theaters. Over Zoom in April, Schulman spoke about the making of her latest feature film and looked back on some of her most notable credits (Accident), offered her take on Hollywood’s current aversion to greenlights and discussed the mandate for top 10 Oscar-nominated films — the latter of which she’s definitely not a fan of.
Not knowing how much this movie cost, it certainly seems like the kind of low-budget movie we don’t get a lot of these days. How did you get the green light?
The more my career progresses, the more I realize that I really have to take a lot of risks and develop projects internally for a good while. Then, when I go to market, I ask a company to make the film and not develop it. On the one hand, it makes for a very non-controversial period of development because I’m my own boss. On the other hand, what happens if you do all this work and don’t actually sell it? For this, since we went to Amazon with the script developed and Anne already attached, the path from there was not difficult.
Tell me about joining Anne Hathaway.
I imagined her from the beginning and we tried to write the script for her – to channel her energy into the character. Even though I always tell my collaborators: “If there’s one thing you should never do, it’s develop for just one actor. Because we will never have this actor. Having him was something of a miracle. But she had mentioned to me that she wanted to make a film that could announce loud and clear that she is 40 and that she is here to stay. She can still shine and be sensual and sexual and everything. And we shot it the year she turned 40.
Do you consider this a romantic comedy?
Well, Amazon calls it a “romance finder,” that kind they have. We call it a romantic comedy.
Yet there has been a resurgence of interest in romantic comedies lately. To what extent were you thinking about this service for this genre in a new way?
A lot. When I read the book, the fact that it was essentially a romantic comedy is what…
