DETROIT — Jason Orley didn't have to study the romantic comedy playbook before making "I Want You Back." He already knew it by heart.
The filmmaker, who hails from the tiny Oakland County village of Franklin, has always had a fondness for romcoms such as "When Harry Met Sally" and "Sleepless in Seattle." Even when his friends were praising the works of Martin Scorsese and other gritty '70s filmmakers, Orley was gushing over Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner.
"Those are the movies I grew up on," says Orley, over a Zoom call last month. "My personal top 10 list has always had like three rom-coms on it. It always had 'Annie Hall,' 'When Harry Met Sally' and 'Notting Hill.'"
Now the filmmaker, 32, has made a romantic comedy of his own.
"I Want You Back" stars Charlie Day and Jenny Slate as a pair of recent dumpees who hatch an over-the-top plan to win back their exes. Those plans involve Day's character befriending a personal trainer (Scott Eastwood, son of Clint) and Slate's joining a middle school production of "Little Shop of Horrors," and in classic rom-com fashion, love blossoms when and where it's least expected. The film is receiving high marks from critics and audiences, and is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
It's Orley's second film after 2020's "Big Time Adolescence," which he also wrote, and stars "SNL" enigma Pete Davidson. That script had been kicking around since 2014, when it made Hollywood's Black List, an annual survey of Tinseltown's most admired unproduced screenplays.
Orley's journey toward Hollywood started much earlier. Growing up near 14 Mile and Telegraph roads, "I was going to the Maple all the time and watching a ton of movies," he says.
At home, his father introduced him to classics such as "The Godfather" and "Annie Hall," and he was already prone to telling stories and making mini movies with the action figures he collected. Film was more than a hobby, it was an obsession, and by his freshman year in high school he knew he wanted to attend film school.
As a student at Andover High School in Bloomfield Hills, his digital filmmaking instructor, Donna Learmont, was teaching students how to use programs such as Final Cut Pro. The hands-on experience lead to him making music videos for his brother's band, James West, and those clips helped get him into NYU.
At film school, Orley — whose grandfather, David Hermelin, was a philanthropist and the U.S. ambassador to Norway during the Clinton administration — was a classmate of Hallie Meyers-Shyer, daughter of filmmaker Nancy Meyers. Orley became Meyers' assistant during the making of 2009's "It's Complicated," and he later acted opposite Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro in Meyers' 2015 film "The Intern." "She's the rom-com queen, and that was like my film school education," he says.
There were other gigs, too, including an assistant role to "Modern Family" producer and director Jason Winer.
But as the cliche goes, what Orley really wanted to do was direct.
It took years for "Big Time Adolescence" to come together, a process Orley still refers to as "a miracle." After filming in 2018 in and around Syracuse, New York, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019. It was released on Hulu in March 2020, just as the pandemic hit the United States.
"I Want You Back," from a script by Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger, was already coming together before the pandemic, and Orley met with Charlie Day ("It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) to discuss the film in late 2019.
Day was looking to showcase some different skills, to play something that was more grounded than his usual wiry, agitated comic characters, and again Orley's romantic comedy knowledge came in handy. "We talked about Billy Crystal and Tom Hanks and all these great rom-com leading men who were untraditional, the way that Charlie is," he says.
Jenny Slate ("SNL") helped round things out and took some of the comic lifting off of Day's shoulders, and after COVID delays, filming took place in March and April of last year. Its release on Amazon's Prime Video service is timed to coincide with Valentine's Day, and a large group of his family and friends came out to watch a private screening of the film last month at the Maple Theater, the same theater that taught Orley to love movies.
Now that he has two movies in the can, Orley's plan is he has no plan.
"I was so excited to make the first movie, and that was amazing. And then someone liked it and sent me a script for another movie, and again I was like, 'this is really cool!'" he says. "I have some ideas that I'm writing. But every time I get someplace, I'm just trying not to mess it up."
Orley has seen enough romantic comedies to know that things usually work out in the end. They'll probably work out pretty well for him, too.
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'I WANT YOU BACK'
MPAA rating: R (for language, sexual material, some drug use and partial nudity)
Running time: 1:51
Where to watch: Now streaming on Amazon Prime Video
