It had to be you, it had to be you
I’ve wandered around, finally found somebody who
Could make me be true
Could make me be blue
And, even be glad just to be sad thinkin’ of you…
It’s one of my favourite cinematic moments: Harry, running to Sally, to tell her that he loves how she gets a cold when it’s 71 degrees out, or that it takes her an hour and a half to order a sandwich, or that she gets a little crinkle about her nose when she looks at him … and all the while, It Had to Be You, sung by Frank Sinatra, is playing in the background. The fact that It Had to Be You was almost the title for the film suggests how important the song was to Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner, writer and director respectively. It crops up earlier in the film, too, performed by Harry Connick Jr. Certainly, I cannot hear it without thinking of that movie.
Just as I can’t hear Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode without breaking into a Marty McFly air-guitar performance, It Had to Be You makes me mentally run through the streets of New York to declare my love to someone at a New Year’s Eve party. It’s a simple and old-fashioned song that echoes the themes of the movie – that however modern Sally is trying to be, in the end, she just wants a bit of old-fashioned romance. It’s also a quintessential New York song, used previously, and very poignantly, in Annie Hall via Diane Keaton’s performance of it, and summons up so much for the viewer. We know, or we so desperately want to know, what it’s like to have someone say to us … it had to be you.
Music is a powerful force in film. Film-makers are always navigating that fine balance of wanting the audience to feel something, but not wanting to tell them what that feeling is – and music is their holy grail. For me, a writer of romantic comedies, it’s something I think about all the time. When I write, I am always thinking about how I can use music. I write songs into the script; I have an ongoing playlist for every project I am working on; I write to music; I make up choreographed dance routines around my office to music. It’s fair to say, I spend a little bit too much time thinking about music.
When I wrote Man Up, I knew I wanted a When Harry Met Sally romcom run – the kind people take the mickey out of now. I was determined that there was a way it could still be done – that mad dash for love, that running to someone – in a way an audience hadn’t seen before. And the best possible way to pay homage to something great is to make it your own. Man Up is unashamedly a romantic comedy – a mistaken identity story about a woman who pretends to be someone’s blind date – and proudly displays all the tropes you have come to associate with the genre. But I tried to put a twist on each and every one of them.
So Simon Pegg’s character Jack had to run to Lake Bell’s Nancy. But what, I thought, if he ran to one of my favourite ever soft-rock songs, Here I Go Again, by Whitesnake, and was accompanied by some … ? Well, that’s a bit of spoiler, but let’s just say that he doesn’t run on his own – and it made me laugh out loud when I thought about it, which is always a good sign. So I put the song in the script, and it was only years later, when I sat in the edit with our director, Ben Palmer, and saw the amazing sequence which he and our editor, Paul Machliss, had cut to it, that I realised how it could never, ever have been any other song. It had to be Whitesnake.
- Man Up is released on 29 May.
