Producer Will Packer is always on the lookout for a joyful romantic comedy, and he found it in perhaps the most unlikely place: an original script from Ryan Engle, a delicious romantic comedy about one little lie, one large Italian villa, and two people getting lost in the sauce of love.  

Packer is responsible for some of the swooniest romantic dramas and swankiest romantic comedies in film history, including About Last Night, Think Like a Man, The Photograph, The Wedding Ringer, This Christmas and What Men Want. “I’ve always believed, and have built my entire career on the idea, that Black joy is powerful,” Will Packer says. “Black love is powerful. And when you see yourself on screen, fully realized, laughing, falling in love, living… that does something incredible to your spirit.”

Engle’s script was a transportive, escapist, sensual and very funny romantic comedy about a young woman, Anna, who has lost her way in life only to rediscover herself as she  stumbles into a transformative romance in Italy. The idea had come from Ryan Engle’s wife, Kristin, and the two of them had developed the story together as Ryan wrote the screenplay. When they finished, Ryan was nervous to even send it to his agents. “I do thrillers and action movies,” Ryan Engle says. “I told Kristin, ‘They’re going to think I’m crazy.’  A couple of weeks later, I got a text from my agent, and he was quoting the dialogue. He said, ‘We can’t wait to find a partner to do it.’”

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When Packer read the script, he immediately recognized the impact, and rare frisson, of a romantic story told by a husband-and-wife team.

“Ryan is a propulsive writer,” Packer says. “He writes action well, with characters you get engaged with, but I didn’t know him for romantic comedy. When I learned that he had worked on the story with Kristin, I thought, ‘This gives a balance to his masculine energy.’ I called him and said, ‘Ryan, we’ve done two movies together. Third time’s going to be the charm. Let’s do this, brother.’”

Packer’s producing partner, Johanna Byer, was just as ebullient. “Most of the projects we develop come from an idea, but this one was an incredible script submission,” Byer says. “Ryan and Kristin are the most loving, beautiful couple, and you can tell that this story was infused with their experiences in Italy, their family and journey. It was a poignant script. We sent it to our partners at Universal and they fell in love with it, just like we did.”

Making Packer and Byer’s decision even easier was the fact that the film already had an ideal director attached: Kat Coiro, who had directed the hit Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy Marry Me as well as episodes of some of the funniest comedy series of the past decade, including Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Mick, Alone Together, Shameless, Modern Family, Girls5Eva, Dead to Me and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  

“Romantic comedy is my favorite genre,” Coiro says. Some of her favorite films include genre classics written by Richard Curtis: Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually. “Richard Curtis is my all-time favorite filmmaker,” Coiro says. “The world needs more escapism and optimism—more striding for beauty. I also love the idea that you don’t have to limit yourself to categories. You can have it all.”

That the You, Me & Tuscany script made it into her hands was written in the stars. “Ryan Engle and I share an agent,” Coiro says. And she could see the impact of Ryan’s thriller-script sensibilities on this screenplay. “I’d never read a romcom that moved so quickly,” Coiro says. “As sweet and emotional as it is, it read like an action movie—moving from beat to beat to beat.”

The film, Coiro says, fuses two entertaining and emotional genres. “This movie is a romantic comedy, but it also has echoes of Under the Tuscan Sun and Eat Pray Love, about one woman’s journey into her soul,” Coiro continues. It’s also worth noting that stories like this being told about a young Black woman, in this case a young woman named Anna, are exceptionally rare. “It’s something Will Packer and I talked about a lot, bringing this young woman to this traditionally white, middle-aged, romcom setting,” Coiro says. “There’s also a reconnection to the earth. Anna comes from the concrete jungle of Manhattan, where she is floating and doesn’t know what to do, and lands in a place tied to tradition—tied to the earth.” There, reconnected to the senses of the physical world, Anna allows herself to open up to a new kind of love, and a new kind of life.   

Halle Bailey (The Little Mermaid, The Color Purple) stars as Anna, a young woman who has abandoned her dreams of becoming a chef and is now drifting through her twenties with a series of bad choices. When Anna loses her house-sitting job (and housing) in one fell swoop, a chance encounter with Matteo—a handsome Italian who happens to have a villa sitting empty in Tuscany—will inspire her to jet off for Italy, against the advice of her always-honest bestie, Claire (Home Before Dark’s Aziza Scott).   But Anna’s plan to crash at Matteo’s villa, without permission, just for one night, falls apart when Matteo’s mother, Gabriella (Italian film icon Isabella Ferrari) shows up at the house unexpectedly. In a panic, Anna allows Gabriella to believe that she is Matteo’s fiancée. That little lie becomes a big problem, though, when Matteo’s cousin, Michael (Regé-Jean Page; Bridgerton, Black Bag) shows up, and Anna discovers that the heat between them may ignite a fire that will transform her life.