How to be single
It’s a wet night in Manhattan — not the time or place you’d expect to see Rebel Wilson wriggling out of a taxi cab window, but that’s exactly what the Australian comic dynamo is doing. Completely upside down, she claws, kicks and crab walks her way onto the sidewalk, and then scrambles to her feet.
“We have to get her out of there!” she shouts, thrusting her hands back through the window to “rescue” Leslie Mann, with Dakota Johnson helping from inside the locked cab. But before anyone else can attempt the same window dive, the call of “Cut!” frees this celebrated trio of actors to drop out of character and burst out laughing. Soon, the laughter spreads like a virus through the crew and among onlookers watching from a distance.
It’s just another night on the set of the upcoming comedy How to Be Single — where a simple line of blocking can quickly evolve into an elaborate stunt. “It was a lot of fun,” Wilson quips as she and the camera crew head back to their marks. “Let’s just say we’re putting our bodies on the line for this movie.”
With her quick wit and trademark Aussie delivery, Wilson is lightning in a bottle, whether late at night on the streets of the city’s Meatpacking District or onscreen in films like Bridesmaids and the Pitch Perfect movies. But she’s not the only one. Also bringing their comedic chops are her scene-mates Johnson — plunging back into comedy after her dramatic breakout hit Fifty Shades of Grey — and the always hilarious Mann ( Knocked
Up, Vacation), along with Damon Wayans Jr. ( Let’s Be Cops), Anders Holm (TV’s Workaholics), Alison Brie ( The
LEGO ® Movie), Nicholas Braun ( The Watch), Jake Lacy (HBO’s Girls) and Jason Mantzoukas ( Neighbors).
Having populated How to Be Single with a ridiculous amount of comedic talent, filmmaker Christian Ditter — the German-born director of the recent indie hit
Love, Rosie — tells us half the challenge of this shoot is keeping a straight face. “There have been some shots where the image starts to shake and we realize that the camera operator was giggling. We’ve shot so much funny stuff, we could edit a sequel just of the deleted material we got from this one.” Hitting theaters beginning on Valentine’s Day,
How to Be Single follows a handful of interconnected characters navigating the ever-shifting set of codes, customs, rituals, apps and emojis of the contemporary single life in New York City.
Johnson stars as Alice, who sets the adventure in motion when she takes a break from her college boyfriend to get her first real taste of the single life and is hurled into a hilarious crash course in the “right way” to do it from Wilson’s alpha-single Robin, who lives the film’s tagline: If you’re not having fun being single, you’re not doing it right. We also meet Alice’s big sister Meg, played by Mann, an obstetrician who is too busy to find Mr. Right; and Alison Brie’s Lucy, a college professor who has it down to a science.
But tonight’s scene isn’t about finding Mr. Right or even Mr. Right Now — it’s about getting Meg to the hospital, stat. To elaborate more would be a spoiler, but what happens between them illuminates the rebellious spirit at the heart of the film. “This is not a movie where ‘girl meets boy and happiness follows,’” Ditter tells us. “I think lot of other things can lead to happiness — friendship, finding yourself, figuring out what you want to do with your life… It can also mean finding a guy, or a girl, but not always. Our film is about everything that goes on in life in-between.”
Given the filmmakers behind the scenes, that’s rich ground for comedy. Producing How to Be
Single are John Rickard (the Horrible Bosses films) and Dana Fox ( Couples Retreat), who also co-wrote the screenplay, along with Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein ( He’s Just Not That Into You), based on the book by Sex and the City series veteran Liz Tucillo. According to Fox, it’s less a romantic comedy than a funny, edgy celebration of the single life. And the cast is fully on board for that journey, with each actor bringing his or her A-game to both the story and the comedy, which Fox says is especially potent between the outrageously comic Wilson and the stealthily funny Johnson. “Rebel walks this incredibly tight rope; she knows how to be larger-than-life but is also really real, and Dakota manages to play off that so well, with this wonderfully dry sense of humor.”