The Big Picture

Collider’s Isabella Soares talks with
Sweethearts
screenwriters Jordan Weiss and Dan Brier.
Sweethearts challenges the typical high school setting for coming-of-age films, focusing on college freshmen navigating breakups during Thanksgiving break.
The film is a fresh take on buddy comedies, set in university, and inspired by real-life experiences of best friends turned co-writers Weiss and Brier.

More often than not, coming-of-age films are set in high school, but Sweethearts shows that the college experience can be just a formative. Max’s latest original film follows best friends Ben (Nico Hiraga) and Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) as they try to maintain relationships with their high school sweethearts while in college, miles away from home. Soon they come to the conclusion that long-distance dating is preventing them from enjoying life on campus, such as attending frat parties and making new friendships. After an eventful night, Ben and Jamie agree on a break-up pact and hope to put it into action during their Thanksgiving break. As they head back to their hometown, determined to break up with their significant others, things don’t run as smoothly as they hoped.

Helmed by first-time director Jordan Weiss, known for creating the Margot Robbie-produced series Dollface, the film is a callback to classic buddy comedies like Superbad and Booksmart. Yet, instead of taking place in high school like the aforementioned examples, Sweethearts is set in university. More specifically, it follows the main characters on their first time coming back home after graduation. This fresh spin on the genre was intentional, according to Weiss and her co-writer Dan Brier. The real-life best friends worked on the film’s script together, pouring some of their own experiences into the page.

I had the chance to speak with Weiss and Brier about their latest collaboration ahead of the film’s streaming release. During our conversation, the duo shared more about the road trip that inspired them to write Sweethearts, crafting a buddy comedy that captures what it feels like to be a college freshman, finding the perfect ending for their characters, and what they learned from this experience that they applied to their next project, the book-to-screen adaptation of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy.

‘Sweethearts’ Is Based on the Co-Writers’ Friendship
“Dan and I have been best friends for most of our 20s.”

COLLIDER: Correct me if I’m wrong, but this film is somewhat inspired by your own friendship. Can you talk to me about working together on this script, as well as bringing a little bit of that feel-good energy from your relationship to it?

JORDAN WEISS: It was definitely the most fun I’ve ever had writing a movie.

DAN BRIER: Same.

WEISS: You better [LAUGHS]. That’s how you can tell we’re Ben and Jamie because I say something, and then I bully him into agreeing with me. No, Dan and I have been best friends for most of our 20s, and we went on a cross-country road trip together five or six years ago, and that’s really when we started having a lot of heart-to-hearts, and the idea for this movie came about. I think we just wanted to make a movie that felt like that trip did. It felt sweet, it felt crazy, it felt off the rails. Sometimes, we got into adventures we didn’t expect.

BRIER: It was confusing to other people.

WEISS: Everyone thought we were, like, running away together on a romantic getaway. Both of our moms were texting us like, “Are you in relationships? Why didn’t you tell us?”

BRIER: It felt like we had the privilege of having known each other a long time, but just getting to learn and understand more about a close friend of yours who you didn’t know in high school or college, and that really sort of started to fill in the blanks of this movie.

WEISS: You know when you’re having relationship problems, and you’re trying to tell someone, okay, so this is what he texted me, and you’re like, well, to understand this, I have to give you context. I have to go back, and you have to know what my ex did to me. You have to know my ex before that. Then we’re suddenly giving each other context on who was the first person that hurt you. We’re going to draw a line from that to why this person is now not texting you back at age 26. That was our experience on this psychological road trip. So yeah, that fueled a lot of what became the story for Sweethearts and us just really enjoying learning about each other and wanting to write a movie that sort of was an imagined version of our younger selves, had they been friends from childhood.

‘Sweethearts’ Marks Jordan Weiss’ Feature Directorial Debut
“It felt really good to tap into that side of myself and be silly with our actors and be creative with them.”
Image via Warner Bros.

I can definitely tell from the main characters’ relationship that you poured a lot of your own friendship into them. I wanted to hear from you, Jordan. This is your feature directorial debut. What about this process was different from what you’ve done before with short form in a TV show like Dollface, and what have you learned from leading a set?

WEISS: I got to work way more directly with our cast. I grew up a theater kid, I’ll admit it now, and while I truly have no interest in being in front of the camera, it felt really good to tap into that side of myself and be silly with our actors and be creative with them and really have a lot of heart-to-hearts about the scene work and encourage them to play around. I tried to create a culture on our set where improv was so welcome. I’m not the kind of writer or director that says, you better say this line exactly how I wrote it with every comma. I want these young actors to infuse parts of themselves into their performance in the same way that I infuse parts of myself into my script, because I think that that creates something that feels really grounded and relatable.

That was a really fun experience. And I think the other biggest difference from being a showrunner and in the TV world was that I got to work more intimately with our cinematographer and our department heads. We had a really cool director of photography named Andrew Wehde, who does The Bear, and he did Eighth Grade with Bo Burnham, and I feel like I learned so much about lenses and composition and lighting. It was like going to film school to work with Drew. It was really cool. I mean, going to film school again. I did technically go the first time.

Related The 7 Best New Movies Coming to Max in November 2024 Kiernan Shipka’s latest rom-com, ‘Sweethearts’, is only one of the worthwhile titles arriving on the platform.

‘Superbad’ Was One of the Buddy Comedies That Inspired ‘Sweethearts’
Image via Columbia Pictures

That is so sweet. One thing that stuck out to me about the film is that it follows the framework of a buddy comedy. I was wondering if there were any of your favorite buddy comedies that you revisited while working on this project.

BRIER: Definitely! Superbad was very top of mind as a true, lifelong favorite of ours. It defined the feeling of finishing high school, and we wanted to bring that same, like, oh, everyone’s been here, this is such a universal thing, to that first time coming home.

WEISS: Booksmart is another great entry in that kind of buddy comedy canon, and then I think the kind of classic high school movies or movies about young people that sort of take place in one crazy night. Dazed and Confused, comes to mind, Can’t Hardly Wait, comes to mind. Trying to capture a crazy adventure that plays out mostly in one night, was essential to the formula that we were going for as well.

I like that you both mentioned two examples that take place in high school because that’s the time that coming-of-age stories tend to happen on-screen, but this is set in the college environment. Jamie and Ben are going through this period where they are trying to find out who they are without their significant others, as well as Palmer in his coming out journey. I would love to hear from you. Why did you decide to have this take place in college?

WEISS: I think we both felt that there’s this really cardinal experience that affected us both a lot that we hadn’t seen in a movie, which is coming home from college for the first time and revisiting your own house, your own family, your own hometown through fresh eyes, having seen a different part of the world. Even if you went to college two hours away, you come back with such a fresh perspective. The people you knew, the places you went, everything can feel so transformed. We really wanted to capture that experience, which feels so specific to being in college.

BRIER: Totally! I would say that personally, I feel like that first year of college is when I found out who I truly was as a person. There’s a reason that so many movies are set in high school. It’s the culmination of your whole childhood, but then getting to go meet all new people and do all of these new things is really when I figured out who I was.

WEISS: It’s the first time that you’re getting to make a lot of big decisions for yourself. If you’re lucky enough to be able to go somewhere out of state for school, you’re picking what is the new city I want to see myself in? How am I going to re-brand myself? Am I going to be a new person in college? Am I going to try on new identities? Looking back, I think that is what I would wish for any college freshman, is that this is the time in your life to explore and try new things. For us, the happy ending of a high school movie of two people ending up together does not necessarily feel as happy when I picture those kids in college and that really precious time that they have to explore and find themselves.

Absolutely! So this movie will go directly to streaming, but you already had a few experiences of showing it to a live audience. What was it like to put this work in front of everyone and to hear people react to it?

WEISS: Getting to screen the movie at the Savannah College of Art and Design in front of 800 college kids, when this is a movie about college kids, was truly one of the coolest nights.

BRIER: It was unbelievable. They were literally screaming, applauding the entire time. Literally, what more could you ask? It was such a vocal audience! Originally, we’d seen the movie a million times when you worked on it, so the cast, Dan, and I thought, ok, we’ll introduce the film, and maybe we’ll sneak out the back, and we’ll go grab dinner or something before the Q&A portion. We couldn’t leave; it was so fun to be in the theater and hear everyone going crazy.

‘Sweethearts’ Features a Different Kind of Happy Ending
“I think that the real breakup that these two co-dependent best friends need to go through is probably the one with each other.”

I love that so much. Now, one thing that I really enjoyed about the film is that I didn’t predict the ending correctly.

WEISS: Thank you!

I’ve got to give you that. Can you tell me about the conversations you had about where you wanted the characters to end up in this story?

WEISS: The ending was very intentional. We knew the ending before we knew the rest of the story.

BRIER: Definitely. It felt very central to this idea that it’s a story about them figuring out a lot about themselves, and the happy ending for us is that they’re going to go continue that journey and keep discovering and keep trying and learning, rather than being like, oh, it was you all along. We’ll go back to college, and maybe you’re gonna still go to Copenhagen. Who knows?

WEISS: I think that the real breakup that these two co-dependent best friends need to go through is probably the one with each other, and that doesn’t mean that they don’t need to be friends anymore. It means that they need to give themselves and each other permission to grow and develop as individuals in college, while still remaining obviously really connected and supportive of each other. By the way, maybe two decades in the future, in their 30s, maybe Ben and Jamie do end up together. It could be a happy ending at some point, but I think for these characters at this moment in time, we wanted to end the movie in what we felt was the happiest ending for those two people.

The ending makes sense, and like you said, sometimes you don’t have the answers right away, and you have to learn to not be co-dependent with your best friend.

Jordan, I wanted to ask you something related to what you said before. As a director, you gave the cast a little bit more leeway to improv. Were there any scenes in this film that you wanted them to play out in a specific way, and you were a little bit more critical of having the same lines and the same idea from what was in the script?

WEISS: That’s a great question!

BRIER: The lead-up to them kissing was pretty dialed in.

WEISS: Yeah, I think that the more emotional scenes were not places for improv, and that was dialed in. That scene also of them in the tree house we were doing all in one take. Sometimes you get multiple angles, and so then you can cut up the scene and cut around it and me and our cinematographer felt really strongly that we wanted the camera to slowly push in and have it all be in one take. You can really feel all the pauses and all the tension, so that scene had to be really, really to the script.

There are certain things that weren’t improvised, like a lot of the Danny Zuko oner. The scenes in college, where they’re kind of planning the breakup, they’re almost planning throughout the week. You see them in the dining hall, and you see them in the bathroom, and you see them in the library. We were pretty intentional about the framing of that to make it kind of look like one conversation that never stopped, even though it was happening over the course of a few days. That was a bit technical, especially even just getting them to be really and still remain in the exact same position in each frame. I’m trying to think if there was anything else that we really stuck to.

BRIER: Yeah, there’s little breadcrumbs that you’re planting throughout the story that end up paying off, and making sure that that stuff is preserved. But I don’t think there was anything that you were like, pause after that.

WEISS: I really encouraged our very cool, hip, Gen Z cast to flag if Dan and I sounded like millennials at all. “You encounter something that is quote-unquote cringe, please flag it for us, and do not say it. Help us help ourselves.”

This movie is set during Thanksgiving, so in that spirit, can you share something that you are grateful for about the person sitting next to you?

WEISS: What a cute question.

BRIER: I could talk for days! I’m so grateful for Jordan’s courage and her vision and she truly can wish things into reality. It’s a superpower, and that’s why I’m sitting here.

WEISS: I am so grateful for Dan, because he helps me be grounded and present. I can be quite an anxious person, and I have found so much peace through our friendship and so much trust. He knows all my secrets. He knows where all the bodies are buried, and I trust him with my life.

The ‘Romantic Comedy’ Adaptation Will Be True to the Book In This Way
“I sort of emailed him as Sally, and he emailed me as Noah, and then we put our emails into the script.”

Image via Random House

You’re working on another project together, and I know that, because you already worked on Sweethearts, you have an idea of how to work together and how to make a script go from page to screen. What’s something you learned from developing Sweethearts that you’re going to maybe apply to what you’re working on next?

BRIER: Great question.

WEISS: I think that the longer we write together, the more we know each other. One thing that was fun about Romantic Comedy, the book that we’ve adapted, is that with Sweethearts, we really wrote the whole movie sitting side by side. Speaking of long-distance relationships, there’s a really memorable set piece in the book [Romantic Comedy] where the two main characters are writing each other emails, and there’s a lot of tension between them writing those emails and not really being sure how the other person is going to respond. How Dan and I approached writing that section of the script is that we did actually email each other from our separate homes, and we thought it would help keep the tension alive for those characters if I sort of emailed him as Sally, and he emailed me as Noah, and then we put our emails into the script. That was a new sort of writing experiment that we hadn’t done. Sometimes, working on those passages separately actually helped keep a little tension alive.

BRIER: It’s a cool asset that we get to have as a guy and a girl who write together is really putting that humanity into a movie. I feel like it really works to feel the two characters embodying a man and a woman’s perspective.

WEISS: Being a perfectionist is one of the hardest things to, at least for me, get over. I think that I have become a better writer as I have allowed myself to not be so precious and to sort of just get out a version, because once it exists, then you can start making it better. We’ve gotten faster. I think we’ve gotten faster at it. Let’s just get out the bad words’ version, and then we can work together to punch this up. It’s way more efficient than being so precious about every line the second you write it. Having gone through Sweethearts, there are so many steps between writing a script and getting a movie made. So much is going to change, and you have to be malleable. That’s always the advice that I give to young writers, for sure.

Sweethearts arrives on streaming via Max on November 28.

Sweethearts Sweethearts is a comedy directed by Jordan Weiss, centering on two college freshmen who face the challenge of ending their high school relationships during a chaotic Thanksgiving Eve. The film explores themes of friendship and growing up as the characters navigate the pressure of breakups and newfound independence.Release Date November 28, 2024 Director Jordan Weiss Cast Kiernan Shipka , Nico Hiraga , Caleb Hearon , Tramell Tillman , Christine Taylor , Zach Zucker , Subho Basu , Aja Hinds , Charlie Hall , Jake Bongiovi , Sophie Zucker Writers Jordan Weiss , Dan Brier

Watch on Max