by Gill Pringle
When Julia Roberts and George Clooney agreed to co-star as warring exes in his new film, Parker’s dream rapidly became a reality.
“When the pandemic hit, the things that I’d been writing at the time suddenly seemed completely irrelevant,” recalls Parker who knows a thing or two about romance after penning The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films and directing Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.
“The world had completely changed. I thought about what I wanted to write and work on next, and I landed on writing something that would make people happy – something joyous and optimistic.
“Romantic comedies bring a large audience together to collectively laugh with each other, and after a few tough years, that seemed like a beautiful thing to bring to the big screen,” he says.
Coincidentally, he would meet with producer Sarah Harvey, who pitched a story inspired by the experiences of a divorced friend. “As she was talking, something clicked and I thought, ‘I know what this is, I know what direction it should go’,” recalls Parker, whose script centres on a long-divorced couple who, in the process of trying to prevent their daughter from an impulsive marriage, discover that the spark that ignited their own relationship decades earlier may not be completely extinguished after all. The sweet surprise of second chances, if you will.
Throughout the writing process, Parker only had Roberts and Clooney in mind.
After all, Roberts has starred in some of the most beloved romcoms of all time, including Pretty Woman, Notting Hill and My Best Friend’s Wedding.
He knew he needed the brightest star power if he were to reignite audience’s passion for big studio romantic comedies, which have become increasingly sparse on our cinema screens in the past decade.
Dating as far back as the 1930s, with the then-called ‘screwball comedy,’ the genre continued to evolve and flourish through the 2000s, only to slowly fizzle off the big screen.
Believing that the global collective experience over the last few years had left audiences eager for a romcom rebirth, Parker turned to Working Title, the studio responsible for the most iconic blockbuster romantic comedies of the 1990s and 2000s, including Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually.
“Romantic comedies went out of fashion for a while, and when Ol and Sarah pitched this to us, we thought, ‘Yeah, this is something we haven’t seen for a bit, and it’s worth revisiting because it feels like there’s a big audience for this sort of film’,” says Working Title Co-Chairman Tim Bevan.
“We felt that with our expertise, Ol’s knowledge, and hopefully getting two great actors and the material itself, we had a pretty good chance of delivering something really special,” he adds.
In the first draft of the script, in fact, the dueling divorcees were named Julius and Georgia, as a nod to the two Oscar winners.
When the screenplay was complete, Parker sent it to both Clooney and Roberts. “As a general rule of thumb, you should never mention another actor that you’re aiming for to costar when you send an actor a script in case you don’t get that other actor,” he says. “But in this case, I wrote to both of them. It was just very clear to me that it barely existed if it wasn’t them. I had no plan B,” he says.
It was a big gamble.
“We wouldn’t be sitting here today and we wouldn’t have made a film, if it wasn’t them. I’d still be writing letters, saying, ‘You don’t understand – this needs to be you’. I begged them to do it and they took mercy on me,” he says.
Clooney can’t help but interrupt, “in fairness, he had some compromising photographs. . .
“I remember after Ol sent it to Julia and I at the same time, I called Julia, and said, ‘Have you read this yet?’ And she says, ‘I’m reading it right now’. And I said, it only works if you do it and she said, same thing here. And then, luckily, it worked out.
“I think we were very lucky in that sense. But it’s fun to work with friends – and Julia,” he teases, trying to get a rise out of his co-star.
As filming began in Queensland’s glorious Whitsundays, Clooney and Roberts immediately proved why they were the only two people who could play this divorced duo. “The glorious thing about George and Julia, apart from them being geniuses at what they do, is that we’ve seen them onscreen and they’re also such good friends offscreen,” says Parker.
“Everyone loves them and knows that about them. So, as an audience, we understand them as a couple, and it brings that history and authenticity to these new characters. You can try to write the best script and set it in a beautiful place and hopefully point the camera in the right direction, but in the end, it’s going to stand or fall on the chemistry of the two leads, and, in the case of George and Julia, their chemistry is unmatched. It was the biggest gift to me – we were able to just turn on the camera and get out of the way,” says the director who was inspired by Howard Hawks’ classic 1940 screwball comedy, His Girl Friday.
The prospect of filming in this beautiful area of Australia – doubling as Bali – was also another huge draw for the cast, arriving in Queensland a month before the long quarantine was lifted.
“We quarantined and when they opened the borders on December 24, it got tricky after that. I think they weren’t necessarily ready for Omicron which started so it all got very chaotic then,” says Parker.
Clooney strongly disagrees, “I think it’s important to also remember that what we got to do in this, compared to what everyone else was going through, was nothing.
“And the citizens of Australia really put their head down and got through this. They took a big sacrifice and, had we done that in the United States, we would have had 900,000 more people alive today. So, what they did was incredibly brave and very hard on their economy. For us coming in, that was nothing; we just got to step in and we had some inconveniences but they went through a long, hard slog so we felt very honoured to be around and be with people who were dealing with things very seriously,” he says.
“Everything is huge there,” says Clooney.
“Everything’s trying to kill you,” laughs Roberts. “Ticket to Paradise? Ticket to the hospital.”
Parker did his best to protect his A-list cast – including Kaitlyn Dever and Billie Lourd – from harm.
“I was like, ‘don’t touch it. It will kill you’,” he says.
“A seashell? ‘No, that’s actually something that will kill you’,” says Roberts.
“And you have the world’s smallest jellyfish,” adds Clooney. “If you’re in the water, they’ll kill you.”
Putting all banter aside, the two A-listers just hope they can make audiences laugh. “George and I are both really motivated by making people laugh and it was our great joy whenever we would do something where we could hear all laughing across the set at the monitor and we thought ‘Okay, yeah, that’s great. We’re gonna move on now’,” recalls Roberts.
“To work in an environment like this was really joyful. And to be on an island with no place to run, we got to spend really sweet time together getting to know one another and just sharing that space in a really unique way, which was something that isn’t always afforded when you’re going home to your regular life every day after work,” she says.
Ticket to Paradise is in cinemas September 15, 2022
