Rom-com darling Meg Ryan returns to her throne with David Duchovny for Bleecker Street’s upcoming love story What Happens Later. Based on Steven Dietz’s play “Shooting Star,” the film follows two old flames who, after bumping into each other when their flights get snowed in, spend the night in an airport reliving the past.
In addition to her lead role, Ryan served as director and co-writer.
Ryan stars in the film as Willa with Duchovny leading alongside her as Bill. The ex-lovers engage in an awkward meet-cute (for a second time in their lives) before discovering that their two flights have been moved due to a snow storm.
“Indefinitely delayed, Willa, a magical thinker, and Bill, a catastrophic one, find themselves just as attracted to — and annoyed by — one another as they did decades earlier. But as they unpack the riddle of their mutual past and compare their lives to the dreams they once shared, they begin to wonder if their reunion is mere coincidence, or something more enchanted,” reads the film’s official synopsis.
Ryan is no stranger to the rom-com, having led a trio of Nora Ephron’s silver screen love stories with “When Harry Met Sally,” “You’ve Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” Now, “What Happens Later” marks her sophomore directorial endeavor but her first time directing and writing a rom-com.
“It has a relationship to movies from the ’40s, like ‘Bringing Up Baby,’ in terms of the banter and the rhythm of things and a lot of that era of filmmaking,” Ryan said of the film in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “Nora Ephron used to say about rom-coms that they were really a secretly incredible delivery system to comment on the times, and we do that in this movie.”
Along with Dietz and Ryan, the film was also written by Kirk Lynn. “What Happens Later” will get its theatrical debut on Oct. 13.
