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Scarlett Bermingham was on a plane when Andrew Rhymer, her husband and filmmaking partner, turned to her and urged her to read David West Read’s script for “All That She Wants.”
“God, damn it,” Bermingham remembered thinking after finishing the screenplay. “I wish I had written this. It seemed to speak to everything I was going through.”
The film follows Emma, a dancer in her 30s who is facing a personal and professional crisis. She’s tired of one demeaning gig after another and wants to have a baby, but maybe not a relationship. That is until the much younger Luke, a sweet-natured grad student, enters the picture. As Bermingham and Rhymer spent four years struggling to get the financing together for the movie, their lives mirrored Emma’s.
“Around the time we were first getting on board the movie, Scarlett was pregnant with our first kid,” Rhymer said. “A couple of years went by, and it was either a day before or a day after we got greenlit that we found out Scarlett was pregnant with our son, who’s now six months old. We turned in the director’s cut a week before he was born.”
When they sat down in the crowded lobby of a Toronto hotel in early September, Bermingham and Rhymer’s kids were playing upstairs with a sitter. In a few hours, the two directors will take the stage at the Toronto Film Festival to premiere “All That She Wants” along with the film’s stars Annie Murphy and Cooper Raiff. It’s a homecoming of sorts, as much of the movie was shot in the city. The hope is that Emma’s story will offer a fresh perspective on a genre that hasn’t always treated its female characters with a lot of nuance or subtlety.
“There’s been a bit of an overcorrection in rom-coms to make the female protagonist either a total mess or a super type A careerist who has it all together,” Bermingham said. “It so rarely includes someone wanting to potentially start a family, in part because that’s seen as not being super sexy. But I think this film validates the experience of wanting to become a mother, and still embeds it in the rom-com tradition.”
It also gave Murphy, whose breakout came playing a ditzy, down-on-her-luck heiress in “Schitt’s Creek,” a chance to show a different side of herself.
“There are these moments on set when I was just watching her, and I’m just so blown away,” Bermingham said. “Everyone knows how funny she is and how good she is at physical comedy, but this movie shows that she can go there emotionally, too. She’s so accessible and relatable.”
As for Raiff, best known for starring in and directing movies like “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” playing Luke also meant getting an opportunity to dial down the neurosis that has become his signature.
“Those early roles are kind of versions of himself, but he was making movies in his late teens and early 20s, so he was really playing into the uncertainty he was feeling,” Rhymer said. “And in this movie, he has a maturity that he hasn’t had before because he really is an old soul.”
Bermingham and Rhymer have been writing together for years, but this was their first feature as a directing duo. It sounds complicated to have two people leading a film set, let alone two filmmakers who are married to each other, but Bermingham and Rhymer insist that it made the job easier.
“Scarlett always jokes that she doesn’t know how anyone does this alone,” Rhymer said. “We end up getting to a better place on every decision. So if someone vetoes something, and Option A and Option B aren’t working, we find Option C together. Any friction or tension we experience only sharpens things. There’s a friend of ours who made the joke that not that long ago in the scope of human history, like when everyone worked on a farm, everything was a family business.”
It can be hard, however, to avoid bringing work home with them.
“There’s definitely times when it’s four in the morning and one of us is up with the baby and they turn to the other and say, ‘There’s this line in Act Two that isn’t working. Are you awake enough to talk about that?’” Rhymer said.
“But it also kind of cuts out the fat of having to be like ‘Let’s meet at 10:30 in the morning to like talk through stuff’ because we’re just always talking,” Bermingham added.
In addition to “All That She Wants,” Bermingham and Rhymer have numerous projects in different stages of development, including an adaptation of the children’s book “The Paper Bag Princess” for Universal and LuckyChap and “Big Time Abroad,” which was picked up by New Line and is billed as a cross between “Booksmart” and “Indiana Jones.” But if they run out of material, they might think about adapting their own “meet cute” story for the screen. Bermingham and Rhymer entered each other’s orbit as freshmen at New York University — she was an acting student, he was a film major. When Rhymer’s friend cast Bermingham in a student film, he volunteered to be part of the crew.
“I had such a crush on Scarlett,” Rhymer said. “I was probably holding a bounce card the whole time, but it was just a great way to hang out for the entire afternoon.”
At one point, when he was in the sound booth and Bermingham was recording dialogue, he leaned over to tell his friend how smitten he was with the leading lady. But he was briefly horrified because he thought he had pushed the button that allowed the booth to communicate with the actors in the studio, broadcasting his secret to the wider world.
“He was fine,” Bermingham said. “I didn’t hear a thing. It took more time for us to become friends and get together, and then, the rest is history.”
English (US) ·