New Delhi, April 16: How do you know you have a perfect romantic comedy at hand? For Hollywood star Anne Hathaway, it’s when there is a “pleasurable conflict” between two characters, much like one of her favourites “It Happened One Night”.
In her upcoming film “The Idea of You”, the Oscar winner plays Solene Marchand, a 40-year-old single mother who begins an unexpected romance with 24-year-old Hayes Campbell, played by Nicholas Galitzine, the lead singer of August Moon, the hottest boy band on the planet.
“It Happened One Night”, a 1934 love story featuring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, starts with some friction between lead characters. It follows Ellie, a pampered socialite seeking liberation from her father, who falls in love with a roguish reporter, Peter.
This conflict, Hathaway said, was also present in “The Idea of You”, set to premiere on Prime Video globally on May 2. “One of my favourite rom-coms is one with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert called ‘It Happened One Night’ and so any time you can get believable tension and conflict between the two characters, that’s very juicy. Conflict is really important but it has to be a pleasurable conflict,” the actor told PTI in an international roundtable interview.
Popular in India for her performances in “The Princess Diaries” films, “The Devil Wears Prada”, “Interstellar”, “Love & Other Drugs” and “One Day”, Hathaway said unlike other movies in the rom-com genre, the conflict in “The Idea of You” is not between her and Galitzine’s characters but the couple and the world. In the movie, the age difference between Solene, an art gallery owner, and Hayes  leads to a paparazzi storm, forcing the couple to evaluate their priorities. According to the 41-year-old star, the fact that the characters get along well was interesting.
“What seemed very fresh to me was: this is a relationship that is clearly working for these two people. It’s just outside of the parameters of what society thinks a relationship should look like. The conflict isn’t actually between the couple, it’s between the couple and the world.
“It’s really interesting that we can’t be just happy for people when they are happy, we try to complicate it. I love that these two people decide to keep going deeper into their love and not care about what the world has to say about it until they must,” she added. (PTI)
