Meg Ryan was injured. And not in a metaphorical sense. The actress who was once the queen of romantic comedies was in a lot of pain after spending the morning, one of many, unpacking and moving into a house that she had been renovating for a long time in Montecito, California. Persevering despite the painful twinges, putting order in the past (actually finding comfort in the present) are the stealthy subthemes of Ryan’s new film, What Happens Later (still unnamed in Spanish), a mischievous romantic comedy that she co-wrote, starred in, and directed. It is a film with two main characters in which she acts alongside David Duchovny and that distills the conventions of cinema and plays with a different emotional palette; Ryan grapples with her own cinematic brand. It is only her second foray behind the camera and the first time she has appeared on screen in seven years. She hasn’t missed being in the spotlight. “I feel like I’ve already made the journey, the Hollywood journey,” she said while sipping a restorative soup on a cloudy day. “In a way, I’ve already reached the moon. So I don’t have big ambitions to do it again.” Although she has always done dramatic work, romantic comedy was the genre that gave her mega-star status in the 1980s and 1990s: When Harry Met Sally… (written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner) were box office hits that defined the style of these types of films and are still popular today. Returning to the genre at this point in her career seems like a safe bet, but it is also a gesture of courage. She knows how to keep up the pace and divert attention. (At the beginning of the new film, Duchovny’s character, who is trying to charge his phone at an airport, unplugs a digital advertising billboard. A retro-looking “romantic comedy” advertisement flickers), but Ryan, 61, can also face intense scrutiny for her decisions, her humor, her appearance, her own way of being. That doesn’t seem to bother her either. “It took me all this time to have something to say,” she told me. And then she added, “My interest in this film has nothing to do with Hollywood’s perception of me. I’m not interested in controlling that aspect. I don’t think I can.” Instead, Ryan wanted a story that asked complex and strong questions: “Do you think about the love of your life? What would happen if at some point I saw him or her, after all this time? What would we say to each other? Would we forgive each other?”; but she wanted to encompass it all in what she has called the making of the romantic comedy. RYAN ARRIVED AT OUR LUNCH dressed in comfortable black clothes: calf-length sweatpants, sneakers, t-shirt… home clothes with a thick jacket on top, not paying much attention to detail. She took off her large oatmeal-colored hat and round sunglasses (Diane Keaton style) and looked for a quiet table, facing the row of lemon trees in the restaurant’s garden, where she, an enthusiastic renovator, spoke eagerly about design. “I love the idea of space and the space that contains you,” she pointed out. “I love the different ways you can direct light.” Her mischievous androgynous features (enviably wavy blonde hair, eyes of a brilliant lagoon blue) have softened with age and typical Hollywood wealth. Although a bit reserved, she is still charming and playful. She limped slightly due to a hip problem and, instead of trying to hide it, she incorporated it into her character in What Happens Later, brushing it off with a comment about her old age and not letting it stop her from dancing. In the film, which premieres on November 3, Bill and Willa are lovers who separated when they were in their twenties and reunite, now in their fifties, at a regional airport where they get stranded by snow. The jokes between them begin. No one or nothing else enters the scene, except time, personal history, and the disembodied voice of the airport announcer, whose messages become increasingly incisive. According to Duchovny, all of that gave it the touch of magical realism that came entirely from Ryan. (Thanks to a provisional agreement between SAG-AFTRA and the film’s producers, actors are allowed to give interviews during the strike). The whole production seemed mystical, especially because they filmed almost the entire film at night, at an out-of-service airport or at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. “She makes everything seem so easy, but that doesn’t mean it is,” Duchovny said in a telephone interview. “As much as we hated the physical work at night, there was an atmosphere that was good for creating. Real life faded away.” That was intentional. “We worked all the time as if the script were a dream,” said Kim Gillingham, Ryan’s friend and acting assistant and sleep therapist who advised the two actors on set every day. Another friend, novelist Sally Franson, also brainstormed ideas with Ryan early on. “She was thinking, where can romantic comedy go in 2023?” Franson said. “If you dazzle” the audience, “you lead them to a period of great immersion.” The project – based on Shooting Star, a play by Steven Dietz that was originally adapted with Kirk Lynn – came to Ryan during the pandemic break, when she became interested in the staging of two people “under scrutiny,” as she describes it, “who stop and you see what happens.” Her character is “new age”; Duchovny’s is more impassive. “I think David is very funny playing an anxious person,” Ryan said, “because everything bothered him so much.” They got to know each other while working on the material during six months of video calls. “I had never worked so much on a script,” Duchovny said. “It was great. She kept tweaking it.” The film is dedicated to Ephron, who died in 2012 and whose imprint is in the dialogue and rhythm. According to Ryan, the film is also influenced by her sense of destiny. However, with the notable exception of Ephron’s films and Nancy Meyers’ films with Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton, most romantic comedies focus on exuberant, foolish, and immature youth. This worried Duchovny, who is 63 years old. The characters in What Happens Later carry the weight and disappointments of middle age. “They can’t follow the steps of youth romantic comedies, they can’t seem stupid or dazzled,” he explains. “But they can’t be jaded or boring either. It was really about seeing how we make adults feel identified.” Even then, he wondered if there was an appetite for seeing mature people holding onto a connection. “There’s something in us that gets angry when we see older people with hopes, you know?” he said. And he added, “That’s the resistance we fight against in the film. But now we have shows like The Golden Bachelor that show us the way.” Ryan wrote the film after her long and intermittent relationship with rocker John Mellencamp; she ended their engagement in 2019. Did that have anything to do with her interest in lovers pursuing each other for years? Not specifically, she said. “But it’s the idea that some people go round and round” and never get it right. “And maybe they don’t need to.” “At my age and looking back, many of these stories are about looking forward and being happy forever,” she says. “And here we present totally different themes.” She is well aware, of course, that romantic comedies are the ones that sold us the “happily ever after” (“a crazy idea”) in the first place. And, having been the face of the genre, she is aware of the challenge of trying to change it with regrets or sadness. Quoting an expletive she used, it all seems mind-blowing to her. “In my opinion, I think it’s a great little film,” she proudly states. During our conversation, Ryan used more swear words than I expected and leaned towards unorthodox pleasures. When she found out…
