BEVERLY HILLS, Sept. 18, 1999 — In 1989, Rob Reiner introduced the question, “Can two friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning?” in his hit comedy, “When Harry Met Sally…” and relationship debates were never quite the same after that.
Ten years later, the director of such diverse hits as “The Princess Bride” and “A Few Good Men” revisits relationships in “The Story of Us,” opening Oct. 15, and asks: “Can a marriage survive 15 years of marriage?”
“To my knowledge there are not too many movies made about what it is to be in a long-term relationship, what it is to be married,” Reiner says. “There’s plenty of movies about meeting people and falling in love, romantic comedies about how the people meet and they live happily ever after. And then there are the ones about the devastation of divorce and what that causes, but very few movies about everything that happens in between.”
In the film, Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer play Ben and Katie Jordan, a Los Angeles couple with two children who find themselves at a crossroads when, after 15 years, they debate divorce. As they experience life apart, the couple are flooded with advice and philosophies from their married best friends, played by Rita Wilson and Reiner himself, as well as Paul Reiser, who plays Ben’s agent.
To Reiner, examining the core issues in the Jordans’ marriage in a two-hour timeframe meant taking out factors such as infidelity and financial hardship.
“We very carefully made sure that there was going to be no incident to get in the way of really examining what happens in a marriage,” Reiner says. “So the one little thing we had was not even a real affair — it was an emotional affair; he talks to another woman … We thought if we had sex [in the equation], then it becomes a movie about ‘he cheated on her’ and then that’s the reason why the marriage didn’t work. And…people in marriages know that that’s not the reason. The reason is everything that led up to the affair and all the stuff that was going on between.
“So we took the little device of the emotional affair to be the springboard for it, but it didn’t get in the way so much of purely examining what happens in the marriage.”
To make a well-rounded analysis, Reiner collaborated with Alan Zweibel, a former “Saturday Night Live” writer, and Jessie Nelson, who co-wrote “Stepmom.” While sharing experiences from their own marriages, they ended up inserting components into the screenplay. The three also share producers’ credit.
“You only know your own marriage, and you hope that what you know about your own will relate to a lot of other people, so here we had three marriages…So if we said something that would resonate with the other two, we would get a sense of ‘this must be beyond the three of us here.’ ”
Reiner‘s films have often resonated with his life. His breakthrough film, “Stand By Me,” remains his emotional favorites because it established his identity apart from his father, famed comic actor Carl Reiner. Since then he’s dabbled in horror (“Misery“), drama (“Ghosts of Mississippi“) and comedy (“This is Spinal Tap“). But “The Story of Us” caps a trilogy of sorts, films reflecting Reiner‘s own stance about relationships.
“At various stages of my life I will take a look at men and women and see what I think about them…Now, when I made ‘The Sure Thing,’ I was single and I was a lot younger and it was … about first love and it was about falling in love with a girl that you could actually like. And ‘When Harry Met Sally…’ was a product of years as a single person trying to make relationships work after having gotten divorce and seeing if you could reconnect…Now I’m married for 10 years, so now my look at men and women is going to be skewed by my experience.”
