In Searchlight Pictures’ The Roses, love is a battlefield marred by passive aggression and verbal artillery. A contemporary reimagining of the Warren Adler novel The War of the Roses and Danny DeVito’s 1989 black comedy, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, The Roses flips the script on the classic divorce scenario. Director Jay Roach (Bombshell, Meet the Parents, Austin Powers) and screenwriter Tony McNamara (The Favourite, Poor Things) sought to reinterpret the story for a modern audience, delving deeper into the emotional complexities of modern marriage and turning the lens to focus on two people fiercely committed to figuring it out, despite their worst instincts.
Real-life friends and first-time screen partners Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch play the thorns in each other’s sides, Ivy and Theo Rose, moving from meet-cute to mutual resentment. When Ivy and Theo initially collide in a commercial kitchen, he’s an acclaimed architect and she’s a rising chef. A freak storm threatens Theo’s crowning professional achievement and brings lightning-in-a-bottle success to Ivy’s cheeky crab shack. What follows is a comedic pressure cooker of egos and insecurities as their relationship is pushed to the brink.
Rooted in Colman and Cumberbatch’s long-standing desire to collaborate, The Roses is poised to hit a nerve—and a funny bone—when it arrives in theaters on August 29 from Searchlight Pictures. In anticipation of the comedy’s release, Boxoffice Pro chats with director Jay Roach, screenwriter Tony McNamara, and actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman about the complexities of human connection and the joy of a shared laugh.
It’s great to have comedies on the big screen, even when they’re actually tragedies at heart. What was the seed for reimagining The Roses?
Tony McNamara: I’d read the book and, of course, loved the movie, but I didn’t want to do a remake. I did love the idea of writing a movie about contemporary marriage and, instead of people who were getting divorced trying to destroy each other, two people who desperately want to stay together but are very bad at it. That was the idea of how we would reimagine it: to flip the gender roles and look at it in a more contemporary way.
What was the development process like, getting this project off the ground?
Jay Roach: One of the enjoyable things about it for me was once we started casting everybody else, Tony started adjusting the characters for Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon and all the rest of these incredible players. We had fun workshopping it with the cast and continuing to evolve it, but it always stayed tight and true to Tony’s original concept of this reimagining. To me, it was always heartbreaking and hilarious at the same time. The range of that within this project is so much greater than anything I’d ever tried before, and so I really fell for the challenge right away.
Benedict and Olivia, how did you initially approach this project and these characters?
Olivia Colman: See, I’m always tempted to make something up, but …
Benedict Cumberbatch: Just do it. Please do it.
Olivia Colman: I went deep into the culinary world and slept in kitchens … I can’t do it. It was all in the script, and that’s it.
Benedict Cumberbatch: I did buy some copies of Architectural Digest.
Olivia Colman: Did you?
Benedict Cumberbatch: I did. I started imagining what kind of architect he was. She’s always downplaying the work she does. Often just bringing herself to set is the work. She’s so authentic and so immediate and has such accessible gifts. It’s just there. She gives a great reading the first time. You don’t really want to muck around with it much.
Olivia Colman: That’s exactly what you do.
Benedict Cumberbatch: I think I’m more trial and error. I’m happy to own that. I don’t think either way is better or worse. But I think some things are immediate.
Olivia Colman: The moment we did our first read-through it was like, “Oh, okay. We’re all there; we’re ready.”
Playing characters in their most horrible moments is deliciously therapeutic. Was that your experience?
Olivia Colman: It was. I think we’re lucky, as actors; when you have a day of shouting and stuff, you do get it all out of your system.
Benedict Cumberbatch: You learn what not to do. You just go home going, “I’m a bit wiser for not being that person.”
Producer Michelle Graham talked about the shifting allegiances of the crew during the shoot—identifying with Theo one day and Ivy the next.
Jay Roach: There’s a line where Benedict says, “How about a three-hour circular argument that leads nowhere?” It’s so sexy, funny, and weird. It’s totally true and insightful about how relationships work. People are rooting for each of them in turn. Neither wins, neither loses. They’re both fighting for their love and fighting for their humanity against ego and greed and all the other things that mess with relationships. It’s a pretty compelling thing with the two of them going at each other.
Tony McNamara: When I thought about reimagining it, I was thinking of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and even ‘70s movies like Harold and Maude and Annie Hall. The darker, adult comedies that they used to make a lot more of.
Jay Roach: Yeah, we shared a lot of these references. We crave more of that. I hope people start making more movies like this.
Jay, you’ve said that you need films to be personal in some way in order to engage with them as a director.
Jay Roach: I do find myself needing to have vicarious empathy, some kind of cathartic experience through the characters. I did identify with caring so much but then also losing track sometimes because you’re too busy, or you’re caught up in all the distractions of the modern world. You forget how fragile some of what you have relied upon is. There was a film in the ‘70s called Love Story, where the motto was, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” I think what this film teaches you is love means saying you’re sorry all the time because the only way for a relationship to really survive is to be aware of your fuckups and to be willing to admit to them once in a while. The other one is an attitude of gratitude. My mom used to always say that you’ve got to be grateful enough for what you have that it matters enough to keep fighting for it.
A lot of things can happen around a dinner table, or at a dinner party in this case. Tony and Jay, you both have expertise in that area on the screen.
Tony McNamara: I think we both love dinner parties [laughs]. I love writing them. As an ex-playwright, they’re where you can really ground a lot of stuff in one place and put people in it under emotional pressure. And there’s the social comedy aspect. They are a joy to write, and Jay’s done so many great ones. They are where, particularly in marriages, things often end up in crisis: at a dinner party, in front of other people. I find that weird, but I feel like it’s actually something that does happen quite often.
Jay Roach: It’s also the greatest form of comedy torture in a certain way for the characters because they can’t leave. Whatever is happening, they have to stick it out. It would be so weird if you just got up and walked out of your own dinner party. This scene was one of my favorite scenes when I read the script. They’re really at it as intensively as they’ve been in the entire story, but they’ve invited friends over, and they have this big new house. They have to just stick it out no matter what. Some unbelievably horrible things get said, and it escalates and escalates. It was the scene I was looking forward to shooting the most, and it exceeded my expectations, partly because of everybody else we brought to the table. They have such a great cast around them.
Benedict Cumberbatch: We loved it. We had front-row seats for the brilliance of McKinnon and Samberg especially. I mean, Kate would not be able to get to the end of a first attempt at a new alt [as in alternate punchline] and just to know that she’s looking down the line of what she has to say and can’t face it. That’s a cue for everyone…
Olivia Colman: I wish that had gone on for longer.
Benedict Cumberbatch: If I was in a bad mood, that’s something I’d like to have a loop of, those alts.
Olivia Colman: Remember the one about the surrogate eating airport sushi?
Benedict Cumberbatch: I don’t know how Kate didn’t laugh. I mean, we were all laughing.
Olivia Colman: Well, thank God she held it together, because I could never have done it twice.
Do you like to give wildly different takes to find the truth of the moment?
Benedict Cumberbatch: I do like to give wildly different takes. I always feel that I’m very, very lucky, especially with material this good. I just don’t want to leave it until I know it’s all on the dance floor. If there’s enough space for me to do that, great. One of my biggest fears is when a director comes over and goes, “That was great.” And I go, “Oh no, no. Can we go again? I want to try something else.”
Olivia Colman: I admire that. I’ve never asked for another go. I’m always too embarrassed.
Benedict Cumberbatch: I do it too much. That might be the thing that drives people most mad about me, but I can live with that. I just love doing what we do as well. I love trying to turn the problem around and come at it differently. You know there’s only going to be one take. As a director, you’ve probably already got it, but I think it’s nice to let actors just go, “Oh, come on, we’re not doing theater here; as long as we’re not wasting everyone’s time and people can get home to their families, let’s do another one. It’s our last chance, and then it’s done forever.” Yeah, I like to vary it up a bit.
Also, I’m not always as comfortable as Olivia is with comedy. She’s equipped. Before she blew everyone away with Tyrannosaur, she was also an extremely gifted actress, primarily in comedy. She can do it all, as we know, and people who can do comedy mostly can do it all, but she’s at the zenith of both. I wanted to try it. I hadn’t done so much before, so I guess it was me taking the business of comedy quite seriously, which you have to do.
There’s nothing like the communal nature of the cinema, especially for comedy. There’s something really vicarious about watching characters that just let it rip.
Benedict Cumberbatch: I agree. I can’t wait to watch this with an audience, especially an American audience. Well, and with English audiences. I don’t know why I said especially. I think maybe because American audiences—this is a generalization—tend to be more voluble, more outward in their expression, appreciation, anxiety, or horror.
Olivia Colman: Yeah, because I don’t like horror films, for example, but watching a comedy with a communal sort of laughter is so lovely; equally I imagine watching a horror with a whole cinema of people going [cringes].
Benedict Cumberbatch: It’s much more fun. I can’t watch it alone. I was alone one night, and I thought, “Oh, what’s on telly? Oh, The Blair Witch Project. That’d be all right.” [It was] a little telly about the size of a computer screen. By the end, I was just like, “I’m not safe. There’s nowhere in this house I’m safe.” [laughs.] But when you’re doing it communally, you can laugh a little bit, you can feel that reaction is shared, therefore you’re not alone, and you walk out into reality with about a hundred plus other people.
Did each of you grow up going to the cinema? If so, is there a specific memory that stands out?
Olivia Colman: I have said this before, so forgive me, but I remember my granny took me to see Bambi, which was an absolute disaster. It was so sad right at the beginning that she had to take me home again. It was out years and years before I was born, but she thought, “Oh, she’ll like this. It’s about a little deer.”
Benedict Cumberbatch: The first film I ever saw, actually in the cinema, was Octopussy. I loved it. Gorgeous people, amazing adventure, chases in tuk-tuks; it was quite a thing at the time for me. I think it was when we went to see one of the Indiana Jones films with my friend Toby that my parents suddenly were like, “Where’s Toby?” He’d gotten up to go to the loo and wandered into the wrong cinema. We didn’t know that, so the film got shut down. “I’m sorry, but we’ve lost a child.” There were people with flashlights, and they went into the neighboring cinema, which was showing Supergirl, and there sat Toby, very happily watching.
Tony McNamara: I grew up in a small country town, and we didn’t have a movie theater, so I didn’t really go until I was about 15 or 16. I remember seeing Mad Max, and that had quite an impact on me. My first memories are Australian movies like Mad Max, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Breaker Morant. They were the movies my parents would take us to, I think in the spirit of patriotism, because they didn’t ever really go to the movies.
Jay Roach: I didn’t get to go to movies that much either, but my parents would take us to drive-ins. My dad was a draftsman in the defense industry, and I think he thought he was James Bond, because we just kept going to see James Bond movies, which paid off when I got to do Austin Powers. I came into my own watching films like The Graduate, Shampoo, and Eraserhead in college later on. I realized that films can help you cope with how screwed up you feel about everything. And how fun it would be to make a movie that could do that.
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