Gidday to the simple girls who like to feel the rain on their skin. Who just like to “watch hot people f—k and fight.” Who know that the most undefeated rom-com sub-genre is the Shakespeare adaptation. From Get Over It (adapted from A Midsummer Night’s Dream) to She’s the Man (Twelfth Night) to 10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew), the sixteenth-century playwright and poet has inspired much cinematic frivolity while bringing many perfect screen pairings together. 

Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell are the most recent performers to don the metaphorical frilly collars and tread the boards of bawdy, physically demanding romantic comedy. Anyone getting unnecessarily mad about the lightness of plot in Will Gluck’s sunny, silly Anyone But You—in which Ben (Powell) and Bea (Sweeney) have a perfect meet-cute, mess it up, then find themselves on a beach in Australia forced to behave nicely at a wedding—would do well to recall the title of the source play. The genre-perfect enemies-to-lovers storyline is straight from Much Ado About Nothing, complete with Aussie screen legend Bryan Brown playing a befuddled, over-acting step-dad. 

Anyone But You is not Gluck’s first literary rodeo. He helmed the Emma Stone vehicle Easy A, a hit adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; the delightful interpretation of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit and its sequel; and the 2014 remake of Annie, the musical of the 1924 comic strip Little Orphan Annie. With Anyone But You, Gluck returns to rom-com land, and to box-office success. Columbia Pictures’ horny film became the stealth hit of the holidays; more than half a million Letterboxd have logged the “semi-nude masterpiece”; men-friends rewatched it for Valentine’s Day; it is peak “three stars and a heart” cinema.

When I jump on a call with Gluck to talk about the Easter eggs in Anyone But You, and the challenges of filming in the famously clear downunder light, he starts by listing Ferris Bueller’s Day Off among his four favorite films. “I’ve seen it many, many times, and it formed a lot of my work,” Gluck says, of John Hughes’s 1986 comedy about a popular teen (played with a knowing wink by Matthew Broderick) who bunks off school with his best friend (Succession’s Alan Ruck) and girlfriend (Mia Sara of Legend). We take things from there. 

So many of your films have nods and winks to other movies—I’m thinking about the family movie night scene with Stanley Tucci in Easy A. I love that conversation that happens between your own works, and between your films and other pictures. What movies were you in conversation with in Anyone But You?
Well, this one was more Shakespeare. It’s funny because even my favorite of all the Letterboxd reviews say, “Oh, there’re so many cringe scenes.” I say, “Well, which ones are cringe?” “Oh, the goofy part when the dad and the brother over-act loudly.” And then I just have to say, “That is directly from William Shakespeare.” All the cringe scenes in this movie are taken directly from William Shakespeare. The tropes that all the romantic comedies have now, he started it back in sixteen-whatever. That’s where they began. So, yes, you’ve seen it millions of times, but this was honoring the goofiness of that.

I also truly believe that, for some reason, when we watch movies, we expect the characters to be the smartest people in the world, [as if] it’s the first time they’ve ever been through this, the first time a guy’s ever liked a girl in the world and never does anything goofy and silly. And yet in the real world, every interaction I have, you have, is “I just cannot believe you’ve done that. It’s so goofy, it’s so silly, I feel like such an idiot.” So I try to walk the line between what would really happen—and it was even more goofy in Shakespeare, it was even crazier in the original play. So my conversation is more with the play, I’d say.

Shakespeare is so silly. I’m thinking about A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When you’re in high school and the teacher is like, “Right, we’re doing Shakespeare,” and everybody moans because they feel like it’s something old. And then suddenly you’re doing the play within a play, “Myself the man i’ th’ moon do seem to be.” It’s so silly and fun.
Well, that’s why everyone likes Much Ado About Nothing and, as you said, the other one, A Midsummer [Night’s Dream], because it’s the two most fun plays. I read [Much Ado] many times during the editing, because we had to figure out stuff. But it’s just a romp. It’s a romp—although there’s a lot of crazy stuff in the original… Much Ado About Nothing, the original play, should be just “believe women.” Because if we believed women, the play would end within the third page. But no one believes a woman at all, so there’s a lot of problematic stuff in [Kenneth Branagh’s 1993] movie, too. 

Anyone But You [is] arguably quite the sleeper hit. It was always going to be with that cast and with you directing. But when I went to see it at my local multiplex a couple of weeks after it opened, the attendant told me, “This has been the most consistently well-performing film that we’ve had in the theater for the past twelve months.” What do you put that down to?
Extremely low expectations. My whole career has been lowering the bar. And when your bar is so low that it’s on the ground, they don’t book six screens per theater. They book one or two per theater. So that actually helped us: because there’s only one or two screens per theater, they were always full. So that kind of got hype, and everyone got excited about it. I think if we had booked it in seven screens in the big cinemas and there had been a smattering, it wouldn’t have been that type of hype. All the boxes to check about what happened with that movie were all checked accidentally. But, yeah, number one was extremely low expectations.

And number two: extremely hot people.
Extremely hot people, and an extremely hot location with extremely low expectations equals a hit.

Speaking of locations, people don’t believe me when I say that the light is different in our part of the world. I feel like the first moment that Ben and Bea walk onto the beach when they get to Australia is the first time ever that I’ve been able to explain to people, “Look, there it is. That’s the difference.” I wanted to ask if it was a hard time filming in that light?
Well, I had filmed two other movies in Australia, which is why I knew it very well. And whenever you film movies in Sydney, you usually have to hide the fact that you’re in Australia because of the light. In fact, the other two movies I shot [Peter Rabbit and its sequel], it was supposed to be in England, so we spent all this time hiding that light. So this is the first film that I made that you actually had to show the light, and it’s just like how New York and LA is different light. Even when you go to London, it’s different lighting.

When you go to Australia, it is completely different. It’s just the vibrancy that feels like the entire area is lit. It’s not lit by a certain source. It’s just lit everywhere. The trick of [Anyone But You] was we shot the first fifteen minutes to make it look like Boston; the trick was to make it look shitty and dour. Once that was over, it was like, “Great, let’s open everything up.” There’s something about the light, when you land in Sydney, that just kind of changes who you are.

A lot of people did say they liked it, had a great time singing and were goofy. I would go to a theater to see another movie and then run in to see the end of this movie, to see everyone together laughing and singing that song at the end and walking out of the theater and talking about it and having a big smile on their faces—that’s what I have loved about movies since I was a kid. I love going to movies to have fun... that whole thing about low expectations and hot people, it’s a fun movie. People like having fun, and they don’t want to it they like having fun. But it’s such a cool feeling to see everyone jumping up and down and laughing and leaving the theater in a good mood. If I can do that at all, then I take a big win on that.

Then I’m going to own my own review, which was, “So beautifully stupid.””
Well, there’s even a line in the movie that I wrote: “It was fun. Stupid, but fun.” And then when Sydney says, “Well, that’s the good kind.”

You’re reviewing your own film inside your film. I love this meta stuff. I’ve seen the movie in a theater with a live audience reaction, and after the on-demand release, I watched it at home and I had as good a time in both circumstances. The thing about being able to re-watch and pause is the Easter eggs. You really get to dive into the things you didn’t notice the first time around. I enjoyed when Beau, the seemingly dim surfer, turned up as a cellist at the wedding. Talk us through some of your favorites.
I always do Easter eggs in all my movies because they’re fun, and you also have so much time on set when you’re just waiting to be set up. So there’s the Ojai t-shirt. At the airport, people have noticed that someone’s holding up a sign that says [Easy A character] “Olive Penderghast”, which I started in Friends with Benefits. There’re a lot of Shakespeare Easter eggs. Most people get a lot of them, they don’t get all of them, but there’s a lot.

What else? I always put my dad in the movie. Every single movie I’ve ever made, he always has a speaking role. I always put my kids in the movie, much to their chagrin. But you won’t even notice them if you don’t know who they are, which is the best.

Inquiring minds obviously want to know, will there be an Anyone But You 2?
Glen and I are definitely talking about doing things together in the future. We don’t know. We definitely plan to do something together. We don’t quite know what it is. We have some ideas. How about that for an answer?

The studio that’s ed you is celebrating its hundredth anniversary. Tell me about one of your favorite Columbia Pictures films from this century, and why you love it so much.
A hundredth? Oh, my God. The interesting thing about Columbia is that you know they have the most Best Oscar winners of any studio, which I didn’t realize. What I love about Columbia is that there’s such a wide array of movies, but they’re mostly about people. They didn’t take a dog-leg into the crazy superhero world.

The third one I would say—just for the film bros, we got to have one for them—I guess, Taxi Driver. I seeing Taxi Driver with my parents and my family. I realized, ‘oh, my God, that movie’s amazing’. That’s actually the first time I realized that an actor can just completely take over a movie.