Something’s gotta give if Nancy Meyers is ever going to make another movie. In a new interview with Vulture, the beloved filmmaker suggested her days as a director are over.
“I haven’t had a new movie in a while, and I’m probably not going to have any more movies,” Meyers, whose last feature was 2015’s The Intern with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, told Vulture. Asked to confirm if she was really “done,” Meyers answered in the affirmative.
“It feels that way,” she said, adding, “The length of a movie, I found over time, became exhausting. Because it’s not that I can’t work for two years. It’s the intensity of it for that amount of time—it never lets up.”
While Meyers allowed for the possibility that she could change her mind, she didn’t think it was a likely outcome.
“I miss that part of myself that gets to do that, but it’s so stressful. It didn’t used to be that way. Making movies used to be much more fun. It was always stressful. There was always a lot of money at stake. It was always a lot of personalities. It was always release dates, and get it done, and don’t go over budget, and try to stick to the schedule. There’s always those things, but it was just more fun,” she said. “Once superhero movies really became the only movie studios cared about, the experience of making a movie like mine changed.”
Meyers did admit she had received some “interesting offers,” but the coronavirus pandemic put a stop to her proceeding any further. “With COVID, I’m not going on a set. I don’t even go into my backyard if somebody’s here,” she said.
This isn’t the first time Meyers has discussed her retirement. Back in September, in conjunction with the release of a virtual Father of the Bride sequel that Netflix debuted on its YouTube channel, Meyers wrote an essay about the production for the New York Times and led with this anecdote: “I thought I was retired. After 40 years of making movies, I felt done. I was planning to travel more, start reading more. I wanted to buy a hammock. You know, all the regular stuff retired people want to do. Then Covid-19 came to America.”
In an earlier interview with Vanity Fair, Meyers also noted how her calendar was relatively light before the global health crisis began. “I wasn’t working prior to quarantine, I had given myself a lovely break from work but now I’m actually working on a little something, but I can’t talk about it quite yet,” she said in May, a reference to the Father of the Bride project. “Writing a screenplay would be a confusing endeavor right now. Would it have to take place prior to 2020? I think so. At least in my genre. They keep saying we’re only in the second inning of this pandemic, so this story, sadly, has a way to go.”
If she stays retired, Meyers’s final film will be The Intern. The comedy, which Warner Bros. released in September of 2015 was a success, grossing more than $194 million worldwide off a reported budget of $35 million.
“I felt between It’s Complicated in 2009 and The Intern in 2015, the business took a huge turn,” Meyers noted to Vulture. “The kind of movies I was making—I don’t know what they’re called. Some of them are romantic comedies; some of them are comedies. I don’t know, whatever the genre is—movies about people, let’s call them, that are funny—they weren’t anybody’s pride and joy anymore. I think one of the advantages of that on The Intern was they really paid no attention to me in terms of what I was making. They paid a lot of attention to the money but not necessarily to what I was doing.”
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