Nancy Meyers was a very hot commodity in the early aughts with a crowd-pleasing formula that resulted in “What Women Want,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “The Holiday,” “It’s Complicated” and “The Intern.”
Meyers is back to her roots of all-white women in pretty mansions with an untitled Netflix romcom. Puck News is reporting that the film is set to enter production in May, and that Scarlett Johansson, Owen Wilson, Michael Fassbender and Penelope Cruz have been cast in main roles.
Meyers actually wanted $150 million to make this movie, but she’ll have to settle with $130 million. What?! How did that happen? I bet half the budget went into her consistent fetish of cobblestone luxurious kitchens.
Meyers has mentioned her main influences being screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. Her films usually center on the experiences of middle-aged, successful women facing conflict between the personal and the professional.
Her films are actually now studied in film school, if you can believe it, mostly for her consistent redirection of the male gaze and a constant obsession of zeroing into the female gaze.
Is she what one would qualify as an auteur? Yes, I think so. There’s an aesthetically pleasing nature to her films, one that does in fact lend well to the visually-driven nature of screwball. She also seems to really love featuring beautiful kitchens in her films.
Meyers is also known for shooting many takes of the same scene, having infuriated a few actors over the years, but the success of her films speaks for itself.
Her last film was 2015’s Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway-starring 2015 film, “The Intern.” I believe it’s available on Netflix as we speak. That one surprised me in how sweetly gentle De Niro’s performance was. No, really, it was fabulous work from him.
The timing is interesting. The settlement talks will occur nearly a month after the $7 million-per-day ticking fee start tabulating, which puts real pressure on Paramount to get this done.