Brett Goldstein Might Want to Break Your Heart. Or at Least Give You a Proper Ugly Cry.
In the new movie “All of You,” streaming on Apple TV+ Friday, audiences are presented with a sticky conundrum: What if your soulmate and your best friend were different people?
Reactions may vary to the choices Simon (Goldstein) and Laura (Imogen Poots) make in the film, which is a sort of rom-com-dram, if you will. But one thing Goldstein has noticed is that many people who see it think it applies to them.
“I think everyone has this friendship,” Goldstein said. “There’s someone in their life who’s not their partner, that they have a connection with that feels more than friends, but what is it? What is love? And does it take away from the other? We just wanted to explore all of that over time.”
The idea came from a conversation I had with William Bridges, the Emmy-winning “Black Mirror” star whose episodes include “USS Callister.” He co-wrote the film with Goldstein and directed it. During the chat, Goldstein was alone. Bridges wasn’t. And Goldstein asked him if the woman he was seeing was “the one.” That got them thinking about the idea of a soulmate test, something that could just take all the guesswork, all the bad dates, all the wasted time, out of the equation.
“All of You” begins with a moment of truth when Simon escorts Laura, his best friend from college, to a test. He even pays for it, and soon enough she has plans with her husband.
While the film has a bit of a sci-fi element, it’s certainly less dystopian than “Black Mirror.” Some, like Laura, take the test. Some, like Simon, try to do it the old-fashioned way. But many are left wondering if they made the right choice. The film is told linearly, but skips months and sometimes years into the saga of Laura and Simon.
“I was really conflicted, but I also felt great compassion for each of the characters,” Poots said. “The whole person is a choice that they make or don’t make, and I think feelings and desire and love, they’re completely out of your control. And I don’t think you can fool a person into thinking they’re getting it. That’s when they’re obviously complicating it.”
Part of the equation had to do with the fact that Laura’s soulmate and husband were not easy to dismiss. Not only did they write him as kind, loving, and a good father, they also cast handsome Scottish actor Stephen Cray to play him.
“One thing we didn’t want to do, I think romantic comedies do a lot, is they make the other guy look boring or (expletive)-headed. So you go, ‘Oh, obviously not him,’” Goldstein said. “You have to stack the odds against everyone because it’s more realistic, and that’s a lot harder for the audience, I think, because I think you go, ‘I want this thing to happen, and I also don’t want this thing to happen.’”
“When Harry Met Sally” was a kind of unintentional touchstone, thinking about the idea of straight male-female friendship that only became clear to them after the film was made. An even less intentional reference was “Atonement.” Unbeknownst to the filmmakers, they set a key scene between Laura and Simon in the same cottage on the English Channel in East Essex that Joe Wright used for his classic tearjerker.
While movie fans might lament the lack of 1990s Nora Ephron-style romantic comedies on our screens, modern movies grapple with relationships in serious, satirical, and genre-bending ways, with films like “The Materialists, ” “Splitsville,” “All of You” and more. Bridges said the difference is perhaps that audiences today crave stories not about aspirational, unattainable romance, but about love — no matter how complicated and messy that may be.
“We’ve seen a movie where someone runs to the train station at the end and confesses their troubled love and the movie ends and the idea is that they live happily ever after. But I’m not entirely sure that’s the experience of love that a lot of people have,” Bridges said. “I think they’re looking for love stories, not romantic stories.”
