Michael Showalter and the Reality of Rom-Coms in The Idea of You

For some people, Michael Showalter is a key member of the State and Stella comedy troupes. For others, he’s the director of the Oscar-nominated The Big Sick. And then there are the devoted fans of The Baxter “We few, we merry few,” he delivers with a droll deadpan.

That film didn't focus on the traditional romantic leads, but turned its gaze towards the other guy, the totally nice chap in rom-coms that doesn't get the girl, like Bill Pullman's nice but dull plastic surgeon in Singles, or Steven Ford as Sally's ex Joe in When Harry Met Sally. It seems a little perverse that the man behind a film that was seen as a riposte to rom-coms has now directed The Idea of You, the new rom-com starring Anne Hathaway as Solène Marchand, a divorced 40-something art dealer who finds herself in a relationship with pop star Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine).

But the reality is that Showalter is the perfect pick because of The Baxter, a movie that deals with rom-com tropes because he understands and loves them. “They teach me about the kind of person I want to be,” Showalter says, “They teach me about what being an adult is like. They teach me about life. … People are going to die, people are going to come in and out of your life. You’re going to fall in love, you’re going to fall out of love.”

What distinguishes Showalter’s rom-coms is that he doesn’t end the movie at the first kiss, but goes into the hard work that goes into making love work. He points to Tootsie, which ends with Julie (Jessica Lange) and Michael (Dustin Hoffman) just walking off together, with the clear intention of discussing their relationship. “I like the ‘let’s get a cup of coffee’ ending. ‘Let’s go just talk. We’ll take it from there.'”

For Showalter, rom-coms are “this interesting canvas on which to talk about what your life may look like, and how you’re going to deal with stuff.”: As a young man, he watched Four Weddings and a Funeral, When Harry Met Sally, Say Anything, and his all-time favorite, Crossing Delancey (“It all comes back to that for me,” he says) and saw his future self. “I’m probably going live in a city, I’m probably going to have a bunch of friends, I’m going to be looking for love, I’m going to be looking for my career, I’m going to be dealing with my family.” Put simply, he concludes, “I’m not going to know what I’m going to do with my life.”

Fortunately for him, Hollywood loves to pigeonhole people: and because The Baxter was perceived as a metacommentary on rom-coms rather than being a rom-com, Showalter wasn’t perceived as a rom-com filmmaker. “This is an ongoing thing,” he said, “There was no transition for me because that’s who I am, but I had to shed a skin that I never even knew I was wearing.”

If anything, he faced a double barrier because not only was he not seen as a rom-com director, but because of his comedy performances on TV “I was not seen as a director. I was an actor. ‘Oh, you’re just bored so you’ll direct a movie.’ I don’t know. But at a certain point you just tune it out.”

Showalter admits that he gravitates to other creatives who are “risktakers who aren’t willing to be seen in just one way.” Take Jim Parsons, who Showalter directed in one of his first post-The Big Bang Theory leading roles in romantic tragedy Spoiler Alert. “Jim is the same. Jim is someone who had great success playing Sheldon, a beloved character, but Jim has all these other parts of himself that he wants to explore.” Showalter saw something similar in Hathaway, who has spent years in the shadow of The Princess Diaries. “I did see that yearning in her, and I wanted be a part of it.”

However, he’s now undoubtedly a director, with films like The Big Sick and Hello, My Name is Doris. “That really was the movie that changed things for me,” he said. He credited producer Daniela Taplin for having the confidence in him that he could write and direct it. He also praised that film’s star, Sally Field, who – much like Showalter – had spent much of her early career being pigeonholed as a comedy actor. “She saw more of me than what I saw,” he says. “She could really identify, as someone who felt she had a lot more to offer than what the world was wanting from her, and she came from a place of really having lived very much the same obstacles that I was feeling were in front of me and feeling really discouraged and defeated at times, and she was the one to say ‘Fuck them.’ … On numerous occasions, she took me aside and said, ‘You’re good at this. You should believe in yourself. You’re a real filmmaker.”

Like Doris, The Idea of You played at SXSW, debuting as the closing night film at this year’s festival. In the rapturous reception in a packed Paramount Theatre, there was a precise moment that Showalter knew that the audience was falling in love with watching Solène and Hayes fall in love. “When they finally do kiss, there are audible noises happening in the theater.” That was when he realized that the audience had “got lost in this kind of very long and unlikely date that they go on. … You can only hope for an experience like that, where you feel so embraced and so seen, and it’s everything you could have hoped.”

The Idea of You is streaming on Prime Video now. Read our SXSW review here.