WORKS » 2006 - I Could Never Be Your Woman » Production Notes

Background

After Clueless became an international hit – spawning a flurry of copycats and launching the cash-rich, grey-matter-poor Valley Girl on an unsuspecting world – writer-director Amy Heckerling sat down and wrote I Could Never Be Your Woman. The story of Rosie, a single mom and T.V. producer who falls in love with a young actor on her show, was inspired by events close to home. Heckerling drew on her own experiences as the single mother of a very singular girl; dating on the wrong side of thirty in LA; and working in cut-throat American T.V. The finished script, a delightful romantic comedy with brains and a healthy sense of cynicism, then burned in Hollywood development hell for six years.

“Here’s the deal,” explains Heckerling, who is stoical about the film’s troubled start. “Young people still believe in the magic of products. As you grow older you realise that a different face-cream is not going to solve your life. That’s why anyone who is selling anything targets a young audience; they think that the kids will believe their garbage. The studio honchos got it into their heads that the movie would only appeal to older women, and older women are box-office ‘Whatever’ because they’re not brainless. That’s showbiz.”

And there the I Could Never Be Your Woman story would have begun and ended if one of Hollywood’s most impressive stars had not had her way. The studio honchos hadn’t counted on Michelle Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer read a copy of the script, fell in love with it and told her agents to find a producer as soon as the film’s rights came free. Heckerling does not pull her punches about her leading lady: “Michelle is the reason the movie got made. She just really, really believed in it and kept fighting to make it. I owe her everything.”

Producer Philippe Martinez takes up the story: “An agent at Creative Artists Agency called me one day and he said, ‘Philippe I know you’re looking for a big movie to produce and here is a wonderful movie that Michelle Pfeiffer wants to do’, so I read the script in two hours which is very rare for me and I loved it and called him and said, ‘Let’s meet the director’. It was one of the funniest things we’d read and incredibly powerful and pertinent. Ironically of course one of the reasons Michelle was such a champion of the project is that there really are so few great roles for older women.”