One Night Only Director Will Gluck on Perfect Leads and the Power of Chemistry
The director of 'Anyone But You' and 'Easy A' also talks about knowing Emma Stone would be a superstar.
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A lot has been said about the premise of One Night Only — a new romantic comedy that takes place in a puritanical dystopia where premarital sex is outlawed except for one night a year, when single people are allowed to have sex. How does the government monitor single people’s sex lives? What is the punishment for having sex outside of a relationship? These questions have been keeping potential viewers up at night in anticipation of One Night Only’s Aug. 7 release, but according to director Will Gluck, you won’t be so concerned once you’re sitting in the theater.
The premise might loom large in the trailer, but according to the director, it quickly fades into the background once stars Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro appear on screen. “No matter how many rules are put on us, those kind of rules go away — humans just want interaction,” he explains to Seen on the Screen podcast host Jacqueline Coley. “So, the rules of this world kind of fall off within two or three minutes of this movie, and it’s about these two people.”
Like all rom-coms, One Night Only lives or dies by the chemistry between the leads, something Gluck, who paired Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell in the 2023 smash hit Anyone But You, knows well. His secret to finding the perfect leads, he tells Coley, is to ask himself one question: “Do you want to watch them be together?” He continues, “No matter what, whether they’re fighting, whether they’re running, whether they’re in romance together, but you just want to watch them together.”
That said, the director admits he never knows if a pairing is going to work until after the roles have been cast. “You don’t really know — it could be disastrous, it could be not disastrous — until rehearsals and you spend a lot of time together, and you realize, ‘Ooh, this is what they have together.’ And then you just kind of reshape the script towards that,” he says.
Check out the full episode of Seen on the Screen to hear Gluck reflect on the surprising success of Anyone But You, reveal why it was “very obvious” that Emma Stone would become a superstar after Easy A, and why One Night Only is a movie you want to see with your friends.
One Night Only hits theaters on Aug. 7, and you can buy tickets now on Fandango.
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Seen on the Screen is a Universal Entertainment and Fandango podcast series hosted by Jacqueline Coley, Awards Editor at Rotten Tomatoes.
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