How David Freyne found the golden recipe with ‘Eternity’: The essentials for a perfect rom-com
It’s merits thinking what makes a rom-com great to understand why we seem to have lost it. While they’re the two prevailing questions asked by a choir of voices claiming that cinema has forgotten the art of the neat, sharp and endlessly charming romantic comedy, with Eternity, David Freyne is proving it’s still alive and well.
If current cinema has to be neatly summed up, it would probably be described with phrases like dark, slow, photographic, and ambiguous. We’re in an era of slow-burn movies that look gorgeous, yes, but leave you waiting and wanting, which finds people talking a lot about how it often seems like filmmakers have forgotten about the importance of plot, instead prioritising aesthetic and simply ideas.
But, when reflecting on all the best rom-coms, plot is always king and charm queen, making up the golden recipe that has Freyne delivering a film with so much charm it makes your cheeks hurt from smiling, and clearly, he’s realised that.
First, it came from the moodboard. In our interview, talking about this film in which Elizabeth Olsen’s Joan is facing the decision of which man to spend eternity with, her long-enduring current husband or the hot, young husband who died before they could spend a life together, I brought up Groundhog Day.
Eternity feels like a spiritual sibling to that, wherein both take a fantasy element but ground it with pure sincerity and delicious chemistry. I also mentioned the movies of John Hughes which highlighted the classic feelings of teenage coming of age and gave them an almost mythological quality purely through the infectiousness of the director’s writing. The writing here from Freyne and Pat Cunnane feels the same, weaving between complete silliness and genuine, gutwrenching heart in moments.
“Nora Ephron from that period was a huge influence,” Freyne told me, adding his own references to the inspiration pile, looking towards another master of the genre. But overwhelmingly, two filmmakers stood out as key players, daring to look back even further into the true golden age of the genre.
“The biggest influences were Billy Wilder films and Preston Sturges films,” he said, “Those kind of old Golden Era rom coms that had so much heart and humour and weren’t afraid to go for big emotions, which I think we don’t do as often now in cinema.” Harking back to the grandeur of the ‘40s and ‘50s, it’s clear that Eternity was shooting for those same lofty emotional stars, with Freyne adding, “Those old, old Hollywood kind of rom coms were the big, big, big touchstone for me when I was making it.”
But as it was back then, the true and vital ingredient for any rom-com lies in the casting. It lies in the Meg Ryans, the Molly Ringwalds, the Marilyn Monroes, the Henry Fondas, the Dean Martins, and, in the case of Freyne’s movie, it lies in the perfect trio of Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller and Callum Turner.
With Turner as the strapping young Luke who has stayed 67 years in the afterlife waiting room to reconnect with his with Joan, and Teller as Larry, the grumpy old spouse of Joan for those 67 years, the two play off each other so effortlessly in that classic comedy riffing of competition. In the middle, Olsen lends real heart to it, regularly bringing it all back home to the weight of the decision she has to make, and the film’s entire message of love, devotion and what spending a life with somebody truly means.
Freyne knew he’d hit the jackpot there. “They really were dream casting,” he said, “It’s kind of who I wanted for the roles, but they don’t audition, you offer them, and I felt so fortunate that they said yes.”
“I think for me, though, the anxiety was whether they would get on,” he explained, as that’s exactly it: it’s not enough to just have the names, but the rom-com always hinges on how the cast connect. It just happened that the cast connected on an emotional level, which Freyne explained, “We ended up having rehearsals in Lizzie’s house, and very quickly I could see them bonding and just having conversations about our lives and our loves, I could see how they were connecting with each other, and I could see that chemistry building.”
Also in the golden recipe for a perfect rom-com, there has to be boldness, and while Freyne brings that in his script with his directorial eye, building an afterlife full of the ridiculous and brilliant, so do his cast, as he admits, “They were so game to they had no embarrassment in going for the biggest loss. They had no ego in anything in the film. And they really just put their hearts and souls into it”.
“I was really proud of the script. I think it was really great. But they made it so much more funny and so much more moving than I thought it could be,” he said, which is surely something any great director would say about their great rom-com cast after they have made a masterpiece together, getting the formula for a big heart and big laughs exactly right.
