Jordan Weiss was ready for somebody to direct her screenplay.
She and her finest pal, Dan Brier, had offered their joint effort, the coming-of-age comedy “Sweethearts,” to producers at Picturestart, an organization with a deal at Warner Bros. Discovery. They spent the higher a part of a yr looking for administrators to take the helm, and when it turned clear that they weren’t going to land an enormous identify, Weiss’ group, together with Brier, inspired her to provide directing a shot.
“Hey, are you really sure you want this to be someone else’s directorial debut, or do you want to throw your hat in the ring?” Weiss, 31, recollects producers telling her.
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Weiss, then in her late 20s, had not thought of directing the movie. She already had some success in Hollywood, creating and showrunning the Hulu comedy collection “Dollface” just some years after graduating from USC’s Faculty of Cinematic Arts in 2015.
However her? Working a film set? Who did she suppose she was?
“As soon as the conversation shifted to that place, and I made a deck of what my vision for the movie would be, then I became completely obsessed with the idea of, ‘Oh, I have to do this,’” she says. “And realizing it was a lack of confidence, of [me] saying, ‘I finally made it as a writer. I can’t now also say I’m a director. Surely, that would be asking for too much.’”
“Sweethearts” streams on Max starting Thanksgiving Day and marks an auspicious debut for Weiss. It’s heartwarming and raunchy, an homage to each “When Harry Met Sally” and “Superbad,” with a contact of John Hughes. It has a stunning twist — no spoilers right here — and it’s the work of a filmmaker whose confidence has earned her success.
Nico Hiraga and Kiernan Shipka star in “Sweethearts,” streaming on Max on Thanksgiving Day.
(Antony Platt / Max)
5 years in the past, Weiss and Brier hatched the thought for “Sweethearts” after embarking on a cross-country highway journey. The movie stars Kiernan Shipka and Nico Hiraga as childhood finest mates Jamie and Ben, who go off to school collectively however stay tethered to their respective highschool sweethearts. As an alternative of getting enjoyable and assembly new individuals, the freshmen have self-isolated, persevering with long-distance relationships that stifle them. Jamie is unfulfilled by her boyfriend Simon, a dim however candy Ivy League soccer participant (Charlie Corridor), whereas Ben’s girlfriend Claire, a needy drama queen (Ava DeMary), smothers him with fixed textual content messages. At some point, Jamie and Ben resolve to dump their vital others over Thanksgiving break — particularly, on the night time earlier than the vacation. For a lot of 20-somethings returning house from school, that Wednesday is usually an excuse to occasion, run into acquainted faces and see what everybody’s been as much as.
For Jamie and Ben, it’s a name to motion. And as they summon the braveness to interrupt hearts, stress builds: They’re cute, they’re humorous, they clearly love one another. Might they presumably be greater than mates? That query supplied ample materials for director Rob Reiner and scribe Nora Ephron as they collaborated on “When Harry Met Sally” within the late Eighties.
Weiss met Brier, the Harry to her Sally, in a doomed “22-year-old writers group” that lasted about two weeks after which disbanded after two members connected, making issues bizarre. However she and Brier, who each moved “in the same network of [TV] comedy assistants and mutual friends,” stayed in contact and sparked a real rapport. “He’s like a brother,” she says. “We’re just very kindred spirits.” After they went on their highway journey, “all of our friends and both of our mothers were convinced that we were on a romantic getaway,” she says. “And no one believed us, that we were just a male and female best friend who wanted to do something fun over the summer.”
The collaborators spent their journey making one another snicker and speaking about their first breakups and what it felt wish to fall out of affection. Weiss had simply wrapped the primary season of “Dollface,” which premiered in 2019, and starred Kat Dennings as a lady who tries to rekindle feminine friendships following a breakup. She wished to clear her head “after that big, overwhelming experience” of juggling twin roles as a author and govt producer.
Weiss wasn’t seeking to direct “Sweethearts” initially. “As soon as the conversation shifted to that place, and I made a deck of what my vision for the movie would be, then I became completely obsessed with the idea of, ‘Oh, I have to do this.’”
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Instances)
When the pandemic hit and manufacturing stalled, she and Brier lastly had the time to sit down down and work on the script for “Sweethearts.” It was a protracted course of to get the greenlight from their studio, New Line Cinema, however as soon as they did within the spring of 2022, that they had the products: A promising rookie director (her); a intelligent story and dialogue; and two charismatic leads (Shipka and Horaga), plus a “video of their chemistry read, which is the most charming video you’ll ever see in your life,” Weiss says.
She quickly discovered herself on set in New Jersey, taking pictures a vacation movie in the summertime warmth with Brier as her co-executive producer, Andrew Wehde (“The Bear”) as her cinematographer and greater than 40 actors on the roster, not together with the extras partying in the home rager and bar scenes.
“It was a crazy couple months in my life,” she recollects. “I found out ‘Dollface’ got canceled, I got engaged [to her now-husband, Jake Densen] and I found out this movie got greenlit all within a two-week period. It was such a time of transition and change, both happy and sad, and I just totally threw myself into the movie. I’m very lucky that my mom is a wedding planner. I said, ‘You plan the wedding, I’ll do the movie.’”
Weiss grew up in Tampa, Fla., the place she was “a total theater kid.” She spent 10 summers at a performing arts camp, and for a time, wished to change into an actor when she grew up.
“I’ve always been a sort of painfully self-aware person,” she says. “I looked around at some point in high school, around 15 or 16, and was like, ‘All right, I’m not even booking the leads in my 100-person high school. This is maybe an indication that I shouldn’t take the show on the road.’”
Weiss shortly fashioned bonds with Shipka, who initiatives the cool-girl intelligence that made her well-known as Sally Draper in “Mad Men”; Horaga, an easygoing skateboarder who appeared within the movies “Booksmart” and “Moxie”; and comic Caleb Hearon, who delivers a breakout efficiency as Palmer, a homosexual man battling easy methods to come out.
Caleb Hearon, left, has a breakout position as a homosexual man struggling to come back out. He co-stars with Hiraga and Shipka.
(Cara Howe)
“I met Jordan for the first time when we were doing the director’s callback for Palmer, and going into it, I almost wouldn’t have held it against her if she had a little bit of a wall up,” Hearon says. “She’s a young director doing her first feature with two stars that everybody loves attached to the movie.”
Nevertheless, he says, “She’s the most down-to-earth, no ego, obsessed-with-the-actual-work person that you just immediately [think], ‘Not only do I want to make this film with this person, I want to do whatever they asked me to do for as long as I can.’”
Hearon witnessed Weiss’ expertise “handling s—” throughout a pivotal lake-house sequence that seemingly concerned one million shifting components, together with a personality’s unhinged plan to start out a bonfire that will get more and more uncontrolled.
Shipka recollects filming by the lake over a number of nights, with Weiss nailing all kinds of tough “comedy moments” behind the digital camera. And when the solar rose, she shifted gears to movie dramatic heart-to-heart talks between Jamie and Ben in a single or two takes.
“She’s so emotionally intelligent as a director, too, that she could snap from doing the biggest, coolest, most fun party scene to something so intimate and essential,” Shipka says, noting that Weiss “never made us feel on edge.”
Weiss, for her half, was humbled by the enormity of the labor concerned in making a film.
“There’s probably a hundred people around you — this huge footprint — and everyone is there to work on this thing that, at one point, was an idea on a road trip, a document in our computer,” she says. “I wanted everyone that worked on the movie to feel like it was their movie. If you were the sound engineer, I wanted you to say, ‘Oh, this is my movie ‘Sweethearts’ that I’m the sound engineer on.’ No matter how big or small your role on the set was, I wanted everyone to feel the same ownership of the project that I did.”
Shipka on Weiss as a director: “She’s so emotionally intelligent as a director, too, that she could snap from doing the biggest, coolest, most fun party scene to something so intimate and essential.”
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Instances)
She labored laborious to spice up morale. As soon as, in between setups throughout a protracted in a single day shoot, she seen on the digital camera monitor that the extras had been exhausted.
“Can I go and talk to the extras?” she requested her assistant director Alejandro Ramia.
“Go ahead,” he stated.
Weiss then stood on a desk and led a singalong of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” Quickly, the drained group bought a 3rd wind, and when she referred to as “action” for the following take, “it looked like a party and people were awake and they were laughing,” she recollects. “And it really adds to the texture of the movie.”
After wrapping the movie, Weiss started her subsequent high-profile job: writing the screenplay for “Freakier Friday,” the buzzy sequel starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, and directed by Nisha Ganatra, that’s set to be launched subsequent August. She and Brier have additionally been tapped to adapt Curtis Sittenfeld’s bestselling novel “Romantic Comedy” for New Line and Hey Sunshine. Within the latter, a snarky comedy author forges an sudden love reference to a good-looking musician she meets backstage at a “Saturday Night Live”-style sketch present.
Weiss and Brier’s fruitful skilled dynamic is one instance of a pair who solutions that age-old debate ignited by “When Harry Met Sally.” Ephron, who died in 2012, went on to co-write and direct “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail,” and her longevity in Hollywood enormously depended upon sustaining platonic partnerships with males like Reiner, Tom Hanks — who starred in each movies — and the prop man who didn’t wince at her request to wrap additional twinkle lights round a sailboat mast.
“I don’t think that Nora would say the answer to her question is ‘No, men and women can’t be friends,’” Weiss says. “I think she’s saying they can, and I think Harry and Sally are friends, and we see them be friends for 12 years and they happen to end up together. And I think in ‘Sweethearts,’ I’m saying, ‘Yes, man.’ We’re answering the question the same way.”
