The Idea of You producer explains Nicholas Galitzine's boy band "boot camp"
"How do we capture the energy around One Direction without actually repeating it, or frankly, just being worse than it?"
Upcoming romcom The Idea of You has emerged as one of the most hotly anticipated films of 2024, after winning plenty of glowing reviews following its premiere at SXSW last month.
The film is based on a best-selling novel of the same name by Robinne Lee, and stars Anne Hathaway as Solène, a 40-year-old single mother who begins an unexpected romance with 24-year-old boy band member Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine).
Hayes's fictional band August Moon are fully brought to life in the film – complete with several music numbers – and according to producer Cathy Schulman, the process of creating an original boy band was the "trickiest part" of the adaptation.
"How do we capture the energy around One Direction without actually repeating it, or frankly, just being worse than it? That was the big fear," she told RadioTimes.com during an exclusive interview.
"We knew we had to be original enough that we wouldn't be directly compared.
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"And so, a lot of that pressure fell on, you know, Savan [Kotecha] to create songs that were more modern and more of the moment than One Direction's moment was, so that we didn't feel like it was a throwback, and that it could really be happening today."
Meanwhile, when it came to finding the right balance between Galitzine and his fellow band members – played by Jaiden Anthony, Raymond Cham Jr, Viktor White and Dakota Adan – Schulman revealed that an intense "boot camp" process was invaluable.
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"The preparation for the boy band was probably the most exciting part of the process," she said. "Because they naturally bonded as if they were being put together in a boy band. And that's how it's done, you know, [how] participants in one of these groups are actually cast.
"And Savan Kotecha, who helped us enormously to put the right group together, was used to the process, having done it with One Direction, of being in the room with a choreographer, a casting director, a music director and figuring out, you know, what's the right way to put together the right alchemy."
She continued: "And then, when the guys went to boot camp, they had to sort of find their rhythm, like quite literally had to find their rhythm, had to find their music, had to find their roles.
"And it's funny, there's a part of the movie where, you know, Hayes's character describes which role each of them plays.
"And that was written as we went. It was like, we wanted to understand what would come out naturally – well, he's the sexy guy, he's this, he's that, and I'm just the Brit – that came right out of the reality of the boot camp.”
The Idea of You comes to Prime Video on Thursday 2nd May.
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