New York Love Stories: A Conversation with Peyton Reed

Some say there’s no better place to fall in love than New York City. Human interaction is constant here but connection is rare, and yet everyday existence amid the hustle and bustle can feel enchanting, especially when heightened by the thrill of infatuation. The city excites the senses, and the local history of romance, as immortalized in countless works of art, is palpable. When you’re walking down a street or in a park, it’s easy to imagine the strains of Dinah Washington’s “Manhattan” playing in the background, or hear the words of Frank O’Hara’s love poems ringing in your ears.

The Criterion Channel’s New York Love Stories collection captures this spirit with a group of films that make us believe the possibility of romance really is just around the corner. Spotlighting movies made between the 1970s and the 2000s—starring such icons as Cher, Al Pacino, Liza Minnelli, Chow Yun-fat, and Cate Blanchett—this selection takes viewers on a tour through the ever-changing five boroughs and their many neighborhoods, from Woodside, Queens, to Brooklyn Heights. Though each film presents a different view of the city, all of them are about how love can change the lives of ordinary people, whether they are down-on-their-luck waitresses whose worlds are transformed by the sweetness of a new flame (It Could Happen to You, Frankie and Johnny) or married commuters whose predictable lives are upended by chance encounters (Falling in Love, Carol).

One longtime favorite that I’m thrilled to be showing in this collection is Down with Love (2003), Peyton Reed’s effervescent homage to the golden age of the Hollywood sex comedy. Starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, the film centers on an author who becomes the toast of the town after writing a feminist manifesto and the lothario men’s-magazine journalist with whom she finds herself in a cat-and-mouse game of seduction. Although not initially a box-office success upon its release two decades ago, Reed’s movie has since acquired a cult following. On the occasion of New York Love Stories arriving on the Criterion Channel, I had the pleasure of speaking with the director about Down with Love, as well as some other films in the lineup that he adores.

I’d love to know more about your relationship with romantic comedy and if this is a genre you’ve always been drawn to as a filmmaker and a viewer. It doesn’t always get the respect it deserves, despite having had such a deep cultural impact.

I’ve always been a fan of romantic comedies, but they’ve frequently gone in and out of favor. I’m a huge Frank Capra fan, and a movie like It Happened One Night swept the Oscars and still really holds up and gives you everything you want out of a romantic comedy. It’s genuinely romantic, which is not something you can say about every movie of its kind, and it’s so clearly of its time. I find that romantic comedies are the best genre of movie to give you a window into attitudes of the era in which they were made.

Down with Love is a love letter to the sex comedy. It was written by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, and their script was so particular about every reference and visual detail. They’re also both creatures of New York, and you could just feel that on the page. There was such passion in the writing, and I knew exactly what they were after. I bonded with them over our love for this subset of the romantic comedy, and I wanted to figure out what this kind of movie meant to modern audiences in 2003.

How did you go about injecting that contemporary sensibility into an ode to the films that Rock Hudson and Doris Day made together in the 1950s and ’60s?: I decided to make the movie the way they would have made it. I was fortunate enough to get Jeff Cronenweth to shoot it. Before we worked together, he was known for darker movies, like David Fincher’s Fight Club, but he’d also shot these amazing music videos in an old-Hollywood style. I felt that the best visual palette for Down with Love would be designed in a way that evoked what someone in the studio system would have done at the time. It was such a beautiful era. There was this particular feeling of optimism—right before the Beatles arrived in the States, John F. Kennedy was in office, the space program . . . and you could also feel that optimism in the design. We wanted to cram all of that culture into the movie.

The New York backdrops that you see out the windows were all painted canvas backdrops that were actually used in those old Hollywood movies. We found them in warehouses and, in some cases, restored them. All of the driving scenes were shot using green screen but made to look like rear-screen projection, which they would’ve used at the time. We also utilized original driving background plates from movies of that era, some of which were actually in the Doris Day and Rock Hudson movies. We wanted it to feel like a fifties Fox movie combined with a sixties Universal movie, with elegance and romance. It’s not the real New York, so of course there’s a strong sense of artifice, but we hoped people would connect with it.

With its arched performances, mannered dialogue full of witty repartee and double entendres, and highly stylized design, the film has a musicality to it. It feels like the characters might break into song at any moment.: That musicality really appealed to me. Bring It On and Down with Love are both movies that are almost musicals. They aren’t technically musicals, but there’s a rhythm to the dialogue, the performances, the editing, and the fluidity of the camera work. So much of that was already on the page. Also, when I started working with Renée and Ewan, they’d both just done musicals [Chicago and Moulin Rouge], so they recognized the style of acting that was necessary. Ewan often talked about how you usually approach a character from the inside out, but for this film he approached his character from the outside in. He started with the surfaces and then found the truth in the moment. It’s a very particular acting style, and if you don’t have actors who are willing to embrace that, it would just never work.

It also works in large part because of the cast’s offscreen chemistry. We shot almost all of the film on a soundstage, and we had dressing rooms instead of trailers, so there was a real communal feeling to it. David [Hyde Pierce] had a piano set up in his dressing room, and people would gather around there and sing songs. Talk about musicality—David is like Fred Astaire in terms of his verbal facility and rhythm and what he does with his face and body.

I love the idea of elaborately designed montages, which were a big part of movies in that period. They’re very fun to create and put together, and they were all in the script. Eve and Dennis were so specific, down to what comedians would be playing at the clubs the characters went to in Greenwich Village, or which Broadway shows would have been on the marquees at that time.

A good score is also key to the pleasure of those montages. Do you find that music is essential in establishing the tone of a romantic film?: I think any good romantic movie has to have its own song or a really strong score—or a combination of both. That element defines the genre, and it gives you a sense of time—whether it’s through sweeping Gershwin music or the delightful yacht rock in Arthur. The latter actually has one of the greatest songs in any movie [“Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)”], as far as I’m concerned. I love it.

The Arthur theme, which was cowritten by Burt Bacharach and sung by Christopher Cross, really sticks with you. Arthur was definitely a repeat-viewing movie for people who saw it during its first theatrical run. I saw it three times at least. If I liked something, I would go see it again and again, both for the joy of it and to study it a bit. I wanted to know how it worked and why it had that effect on me.

Arthur is very romantic, but it’s also the most aggressively funny of the films in this collection, in an almost vaudevillian way, where the comedy doesn’t let up. It’s a movie that couldn’t take place anywhere else but New York. There are so many great Manhattan moments, like when the limo cruises through the city or Liza Minelli rides on the bus. But those moments also speak to the film’s relationship with wealth and how it plays with the contrast between high and low status in New York at that time.

Dudley Moore and Liza Minelli were perfectly cast, and I love them in these roles—everyone is such an oddball in this movie. To this day, whenever someone starts talking about something mundane that they’re going to do, I feel the impulse to quote John Gielgud’s character’s famous line: “I’ll alert the media . . .”