Rebecca Miller on love triangles and sympathising with the other woman
BY Farhana Gani
1st Jan 2015 Film & TV
Rebecca Miller’s latest film, Maggie’s Plan, is a witty, modern screwball romantic comedy starring Greta Gerwig, Julianne Moore and Ethan Hawke. Here she tells us more about the complicated love triangle at the heart of the film.
Interview with Rebecca Miller—director of Maggie's Plan
Greta Gerwig is Maggie Hardin, an ethical thirty-something New Yorker who works at the New School. She’s at a crossroads in her life. With an unsuccessful track record with long-term relationships, she has decided to have a child on her own.
Guy (Travis Fimmel), an old college friend and maths genius, now a pickle entrepreneur, is happy to become the donor for her future child. Her hilariously snarky best friends Tony (Bill Hader) and Felicia (Maya Rudolph), a couple themselves, think she’s lost her marbles but support her anyway. Her plan is in motion and the donated sperm in her turkey baster when John Harding (Ethan Hawke) arrives on the scene calling for a new plan.
John's an anthropologist, also teaching at the New School, struggling novelist and departmental ‘panty wetter’. He’s also in an unsatisfactory marriage Georgette (Julianne Moore), a brilliant Danish fellow academic.
Maggie falls in love, possibly for the first time in her life. John leaves his wife and kids for her and they soon marry. John can now concentrate on his novel and they have a sweet daughter, Lily, together. Life is rosy. But the thorns are starting to grow! And so begins a curious and comical love triangle with three very likeable characters who deliver a funny exploration of the complexities of modern romance.
The film is adapted by the critically acclaimed and award-winning writer and director Rebecca Miller (The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, The Ballad of Jack and Rose) from a work-in-progress by writer Karen Rinaldi.
