Maura Corey, ACE talks to The Contending about creating romance for Joanne and Noah on Netflix’s romantic comedy Nobody Wants This.
Maura Corey, ACE says when editing a romantic comedy like Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, you have to get a little crazy in your cut.
“[The love interests] steal glances at each other or stare at each other,” says Corey. “If you actually did that in real life, it would seem crazy. Why is this person staring at me?” she laughs. “But with editing, you’re creating a feeling. You’re trying to say what it feels like in your head through visual language.”
When Noah Met Joanne: Cutting Nobody Wants This Party Scene
In the pilot of Nobody Wants This, Corey quickly establishes that Kristen Bell’s Joanne and Adam Brody’s Noah are into each other through cuts to stolen glances, starting with the party scene when Joanne enters in her chinchilla coat.
“It’s all about point of view. The basic idea was to show how Noah notices her. She walks in in the wide shot, we see him in the wide shot look at her, she has banter with her friend, and then you get closer up on him, so he’s noticing her.”
During that meet cute, Noah fumbles with the wine bottle (something Corey says was not scripted and that Brody and Bell just went with!), and it soon pivots to Joanne’s point of view.
“You smash cut into the party scene, and she’s having a conversation about three ways. It was intentional that I cut to him at certain points where he’s noticing how interesting she is, and then he leans in, and the way our director Greg Mottola framed this, you’re close in on Ashley (Sherry Cola) and Noah and you see Joanne through them. The way it’s framed is directly related to his point of view of her.”
Corey ping-pongs back and forth between Joanne and Noah’s points of view throughout the dinner scene, leading up to when she discovers the real rabbi of the party.
“We have this wide shot, everybody’s turned to Noah, but she’s turned to who she thinks is the rabbi. We worked on that to make sure it landed. Kristen knows how to do comedy so well! He says, ‘Hot?’ And she goes, ‘Kinda.’ I don’t think that was in the script. I think she just did that! There was a lot of leeway for them to react to situations, and it was organic.”
Falling in Love to the Soundtrack of Haim
Corey says the montage of the two thinking about each other set to Haim’s “Now I’m In It” (fun fact: Este Haim serves as the music supervisor on the series!) was a perfect marriage, “very LA, female-forward, and romantic.”
“When we put it up against picture, I thought, oh my god, this is so cute! Her smelling the jacket. The way we edited the music was to make sure the lyrics came at the right point. It ends with him lighting the match to the candle for his service. It was very purposeful on how we put it together.”
Of course, you can’t have a rom-com meet cute without a happy ending. And while we’ll see what Nobody Wants This Season 2 has in store for the couple, the first episode’s final scene truly captures that feeling of slowly falling in love with someone, when Joanne enters the synagogue in red, standing out within the congregation.
“It’s opening the door to a larger world for her. It was important to show how she was affected by his words and how they connected to what he’d gone through. We know that as an audience, but we see her learn it. I think that’s what makes the sparks fly even bigger because you’re seeing it through Joanne’s point of view and falling in love alongside her.”
Nobody Wants This is streaming on Netflix.
