No other place in the world screams romance louder than Italy so setting a romantic comedy in the country makes perfect sense. It’s exactly why director Kat Coiro and producer Will Packer picked the region as the setting for their new rom-com, You, Me & Tuscany. Starring Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page as the two main leads, the film finds Anna (Bailey) traveling the Italian countryside in search of herself, only to get caught up in an imaginary engagement in order to not get arrested for squatting in a house that she thought was unoccupied. As she does her best to keep up the act, she begins to fall for winemaker Michael (Page). Hijinks and hilarity ensue, of course. Shakefire sat down with Kat Coiro and Will Packer to discuss the film, from setting it in the heart of Italy to casting its two leads, and more.
Naturally the first thing about You, Me & Tuscany that stands out is its setting. Their goal with the film is to send audiences on a vacation in theaters and have them feel what everyone on set felt. “It was a dream,” says Kat Coiro. “There’s a reason that Italy and romance go hand in hand when you’re there, experiencing the sunsets and the food and the wine and the passion of the people. You get swept up in it. So it was very organic and natural, and we leaned a lot on our Italian cast and crew to help us make it feel really authentic and not just like we were using Italy as a backdrop, but that we were living in Italy.”
“It wasn’t a forced fit where that’s the place you can afford to shoot so it’s like, “alright, well now the movie is set in Jackson, Mississippi,” Will Packer adds. “No offense to my Mississippi folks, but it would have been a very different movie. So it’s really good that we were able to organically shoot it where the film is set and it fit. You do it writing as a journey of discovery for not only the lead character, but also for the audience, and that’s what we were trying to do. What made it so dope to me was that it really, really fit the thematics and the narrative.”
Anna tragically lost her mother before the events of the film and with her grief she also lost her passion for cooking. While sitting alone at a bar wondering what to do next with her life, she hits things off with Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor) and learns about his life and family in Italy, a place she’s always wanted to go. While their chance encounter is brief, it leaves a lasting impact on her and she decides to visit the country and hopefully reignite her passion. Due to her last minute travel decision, she doesn’t have anywhere to stay and with all the hotels in the city fully booked due to a local festival, Anna remembers the house Matteo told her about that is standing empty and decides she can just stay there for a few days and no one will notice. But Matteo’s family does stop by and one thing leads to another and Anna convinces them that they are engaged so they won’t have her arrested. That’s when she meets Michael, Matteo’s adoptive cousin who runs the family winery. The two clearly have chemistry together, but Michael believes she’s actually engaged to Matteo and Anna fears that he’d want nothing to do with her if he knew the truth.
Coiro made it a point to not want Anna and Michael to bond over their shared trauma of losing one’s parents. “They fall in love because they appreciate each other’s magnetism and personalities, and they each bring so much to the other person’s life. So they’re not falling in love because they both experience tragedy. That was really important. It’s one element in their story. I think a lot of times people in narratives become defined by grief, and that’s just not true. Everyone has experienced some kind of loss, some kind of grief, and your character is built by the way that you move through it and the way that you build resilience. And I love that both of those characters have built very different lives, but they do have an amazing resilience.”
The filmmakers wanted to make sure that the film didn’t get lost in their grief. It is a romantic comedy after all, and they wanted an equal balance of romance and comedy. “We had incredible chemistry between our leads,” Coiro explains, “which was great for the romance, and we really pushed the comedy throughout so that it could be a theatrical experience, too. There’s nothing like laughing in a theater full of people while swooning.” That chemistry between two leads is vital to any romantic comedy, so it was surprising to hear that there was no long list of actors to audition for the roles. It was a list of one and one, according to Coiro. “It was really like Halle has to do this. The reason for me was she’s young. She can get away with a lot because she’s so sweet. That was very important for Anna. Anna has to be able to really go out on a limb and make crazy, delusional, criminal choices, and we have to be with her. Halle’s kind of the only person in my mind who can do that.”
Balancing out Anna’s impulsiveness is Regé-Jean Page’s Michael. “Regé is not extremely unlike his character in terms of being a more serious person, very prepared, somebody that is not super spontaneous.” Packer tells us. “Not that he can’t be super charismatic, but he also is somebody that you feel like he walks to the room with a plan. Halle’s character Anna? Chaos, no plan. Seat of her pants, having fun, spontaneous. They need each other, those characters do, and they each kind of embodied those characters with elements of their personal lives to me that I think bode very well in a rom-com. You need that. You need people who have got things that bounce off of each other.”
Rounding out the film is a colorful cast of secondary characters including Matteo’s loving relatives who are quick to embrace Anna as one of the family. There’s also the hilarious cab driver Lorenzo, played by the brilliant Marco Calvani, who steals every scene he’s in. “I love the Italian element,” Packer exclaims. “You don’t know what you’re gonna get, right? You’re shooting there, we had to cast there, so we are already committed. We’ve got our leads. We got the start date and all that. Then you have to fill out the supporting actors and you’re just hoping that they work, that you can get people that help bring this thing to life because we knew that needed to have a certain level of energy. We knew that they needed to be something that the audience was leaving the theater talking about. We were really fortunate to get those folks that we got. They were great all the way down; the Italian family, obviously, and then also then Marco Calvani. C’mon, Lorenzo the cab driver. He’s got a sandwich in his mouth right now. He is somewhere chewing on a sandwich getting the Italian tea about some other tourists that just came to town. I just really love that character.” Still, it’s Anna and Michael who are the heart of the film.
You, Me & Tuscany comes out during a challenging time in the industry. Streaming is still dominating over theatrical releases, and studios favor only the biggest of blockbusters to premiere on the silver screen and even that comes with shortened release windows. Audiences question whether it’s even worth it to go out to the theaters anymore. “We have trained them as an industry that you don’t have to. It’ll come to you. It’ll be on your phone in 30 seconds,” Packer says. “But unfortunately, that is not the premiere viewing experience.” It’s difficult for all movies, let alone a romantic comedy. The genre is often looked down upon, according to Coiro, and acted as if it’s dead but that’s far from the truth. “If you go back to the beginning of cinema, there’s always a great rom-com every generation,” she says. “It’s never died. So I think it’s like on all of us, too, journalists to kind of say, look! It’s this enduring genre that people love. People love to escape. When the right magic comes together, it’s a great genre.” That makes You, Me & Tuscany somewhat of an outlier. Not only is it an original theatrical romantic comedy, but it also features two black leads. That’s not something that just happens by accident, as Packer explains.
“I think that Hollywood for a long time has had major diversity issues. Diversity in terms of people of color, diversity in terms of gender. It has just not been as liberal of an industry as it is and professes to be. It has not been a bastion of equality and fairness when it comes to having a diversity of voices telling stories. So, the way that manifests is that you have a paucity of films that are told through a particular lens that are told highlighting a particular perspective and so, every time there is a film that has an opportunity to do that, folks like myself, who have made that a priority in my career, we celebrate. We celebrate the opportunity. It’s not something that’s just specifically this movie. We celebrated when Sinners came out and broke the bank, broke the awards. It did all the things. I couldn’t be happier for that whole entire team and certainly Ryan and Mike B., who I know.
With this, it’s interesting because we’re in a genre that has not been in the theatrical marketplace for a while. Hollywood is making less of those, and so by very definition proportionally, they’re making even less of those that are led by black characters. There’s an opportunity here. Audiences absolutely have a say in it. I try to remind people all the time. Hollywood, as much as we like to think that they’re out there doing things because it feels right; “Social Justice! This is what we should do. We want to go out and make a statement.” No. Not the case. Write it down. Will Packer said they’re making it because there’s an economic imperative. These media companies, it’s an industry and they’re trying to make money. So if this comes out and it works and it is successful financially, I promise you there will be other studios going, “Hey, where’s our rom-com? Where is our You, Me, & Tuscany? What’s Kat Coiro doing next? Talk to me about Regé? Halle Bailey; what else has she been?” That’s how the conversations work. It’s a reactive industry. It has been for a very long time.”
Time will tell whether or not You, Me & Tuscany will be successful. “Hollywood is so IP obsessed right now,” Packer says. “What that means is that when something works it immediately becomes IP that people are like, “what else can we do with it? Maybe a spit off, maybe a sequel, maybe a derivative?” But you have to break through first, so we will see. And then, as far as the creative appetite, I’d love to work with Kat again, and we had an amazing time with our cast. But again, the audience. The audience has the power. We’ll see. If it works though, I promise you there’s a reason that you’re seeing movies that have 6, 7, 8 behind their names, or the new version of this or the reboot of that. It’s always about if the powers that be, mainly the financiers, feel like there’s a connection with an audience who want to take the journey again with these characters.” Does that mean we’ll get a You, Me & Barcelona or a You, Me & Paris? Both Coiro and Packer would love to see more, of course, but audiences need to come to the theaters first. It’s an experience that can’t be replicated at home on the couch.
“I have such a desire to make theatrical experiences because it’s not just watching the story,” Coiro explains. “It’s sitting next to people. It’s laughing with people. We’ve had the opportunity to watch this with an audience and people are punching the person next to them and screaming at the screen. That becomes such a bigger experience than like falling asleep watching stuff, which I do all the time, but this is bigger than that. We shot it with the intention of taking people on a journey.”
You, Me & Tuscany is now playing in theaters nationwide.
