Tired of the redundant romantic comedy genre? With his latest feature, Wet Hot American Summer director David Wain is here to rip it apart and put it back together in only the way he can. Co-written with Michael Showalter, They Came Together follows Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler as they take part in a “subversion/spoof/deconstruction” of the genre.
We’ve now got our first footage from the film, thanks to Buzzfeed, which finds Rudd and Poehler getting reacquainted in a book shop. Under another director, I’d wonder if this riff could be sustained for an entire film, but I look forward to seeing what Wain has in store. Also featuring Ed Helms, Cobie Smulders, Max Greenfield, Christopher Meloni, and many more cameos, check out the trailer, Deadline-covered poster, and director’s statement below for the film that made our list of most-anticipated Sundance 2014 titles.
After having already made world-changing cinematic statements on adolescence (Wet Hot American Summer), religion (The Ten), service (Role Models), and community (Wanderlust), I teamed up with Michael Showalter to take on a topic that (to our knowledge) has yet been seen in the movies: ROMANCE — particularly heterosexual romance between two white people.
Our next idea was to mix this romance story with humor – so you could almost call this a Romantic-Comedy, so to speak.
We first worked with Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd on Wet Hot American Summer. They played summer camp counselors in that movie, so it was obviously hard for us to imagine them playing a shopkeeper and a corporate executive, respectively. But thanks to a team of acting coaches and an award™ winning VFX team, we pulled off the illusion.
They Came Together premieres on Friday, January 24th at Sundance Film Festival 2014.