From rising comedic auteur Kristoffer Borgli comes a sexy, contemporary romantic comedy about a pair of young Boston professionals who find their relationship and pending nuptials put to the ultimate test after a sudden revelation throws their happily ever after into spectacular turmoil.
A relationship comedy that dares to ask how much we really want to know about the people closest to us, The Drama sees writer-director-editor Borgli push the wedding movie into fresh new territory in an inventive, darkly funny, unexpectedly heartfelt look at love in the age of oversharing.
“In your closest relationships, you should be able to share everything, from how you actually feel to who you actually are,” says Borgli. “The Drama is about that idea getting stress-tested between two people who are head over heels in love, and who maybe never considered there could be more to the other person. It’s about the power of love — an emotional state you don’t get to control, and how complicated that becomes when your feelings are at odds with your rationale. When that balance slips, you find yourself inside a crucial dilemma.”
For his third narrative feature, Kristoffer Borgli did not set out to write a romantic comedy, or a wedding movie.
“The idea for the movie came from reflecting on the ups and downs of romantic relationships, and the quiet negotiations we all make between our emotions and our logic,” says Borgli. “I was interested in exploring how love can feel both undeniable and destabilising at the same time.”
Borgli began writing the movie as a journal of his thoughts
Born in Sarpsborg, Norway, the filmmaker became interested from a young age in how people act in different cultural environments. In his previous features Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario, Borgli conceived stories of a young woman obtaining social media clout after disfiguring herself and a family man who finds himself at the center of a controversy after random people start having strange dreams about him.
British expat Charlie Thompson (Robert Pattinson) is a museum curator who meets literary editor Emma Harwood (Zendaya) in a Cambridge café; after a whirlwind courtship, they settle into blissful domesticity and start planning their wedding. But one explosive confession during a drunken game of What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? sends the seemingly perfect couple spiralling into doubt and chaos as they try to make it to “I do.”
Borgli, who currently lives in Los Angeles, adds layer to Charlie by making him an expatriate, examining American society and culture through the perspective of an outsider. “I’m from Scandinavia, and while some of the topics and themes in The Drama are uniquely American, I wanted to bring a Scandinavian sensibility to an American setting,” says Borgli. “Shooting the movie in Boston made sense, because it feels intimate, historic, and human in scale, closer in spirit to a Scandinavian capital than a sprawling American metropolis.”
Borgli wanted to explore how two people in a relationship react when love is tested. “There’s no objective solution to Charlie and Emma’s dilemma, but we are not our own worst mistakes,” says Borgli. “There should be room for error in relationships, and some leeway and forgiveness with the people we choose to share a life with. We can disagree with our own past behaviours and actions, but you still have to be that same person over time.”
Once the major roles were cast in The Drama, Borgli made use of a two-week rehearsal period prior to production, involving lengthy discussions on character and motivation. He used the time as a collaborative process, using trial and error to rewrite and fine-tune the script.
“We discussed the roles endlessly in pre-production by sitting down at a table together and going through the script every day, some conversations spilling into group texts,” says Borgli. “I would jot down notes and go rewrite, or Rob and Zendaya would give me notes and I’d weave them in. The characters became more fleshed-out and three-dimensional as we discussed and debated their storyline together.
Borgli also hosted film screenings to help cast and crew understand the writer-director’s unique tone and psychological depth. He showed Paul Mazursky’s ‘70s domestic comedy Bob & Carol Ted & Alice — in which four close friends debate each other’s moral compasses. Other works Borgli screened included Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, the ultimate wedding movie in that it’s set during the world’s final dying days. “It’s a terrific wedding movie because it’s a fucked-up wedding movie,” says Borgli.
Borgli also showed key works by the Austrian auteur Michael Haneke including Benny’s Video and The Piano Teacher, a twisted love story between an older piano teacher, played by Isabelle Huppert, and her younger student, played by Benoît Magimel.
“Once Magimel’s character learns his instructor is a masochist who likes to be choked and gagged, it makes him ever more intrigued by her,” says Borgli. “The movie also contains a personal revelation that gets in the way of a private relationship, and while Huppert’s character is very put together in polite society, she has weird obsessions in her private life, not unlike Emma.”
Finally, Borgli asked Pattinson and Zendaya to watch Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna during their own free time — another meditative European drama featuring a shocking revelation. In The Drama, the film’s poster is visible on Charlie’s living room wall — a sly nod to the crisp British expat’s fragile psychological undercurrents.
“The film is really an invitation for the audience to engage in an [honest] conversation between the heart and the mind. There are no clear-cut moral conclusions, and each viewer is encouraged to grapple with the questions and decide where they stand.”
