I sat down with Ruben over Zoom to discuss the ins and outs of Hearth Eyes. Here are the edited transcripts of our lively and wide-ranging conversation:

Sara Michelle Fetters: I'm going to get this elephant out of the room right away: Did you just decide to make Heart Eyes the most blatantly non-Seattle set-in-Seattle movie ever made?

Josh Ruben: My editor [Brett W. Bachman] is from Seattle. The whole time he was editing the film, I was like, "Poor Bret. Oh, my goodness!" [laughs] But he really worked his way through it all. ... But mostly he was like, "Whatever, man. It's the movie." [laughs]...

I'd like to think that there's a little bit of a suspension of disbelief for those who maybe haven't made it to this part of the world. But I tried. I tried, man, to make it look as much like as Seattle as we could. I truly tried.

Palm trees at the airport notwithstanding. [laughs]

SMF: With that out of the way, what was the genesis for this film? What were your initial thoughts?

JR: The original idea emerged from Philip Murphy, the first writer. I believe the story is that — hopefully I'm not butchering this — he was on a bad date, a bad first date, maybe even a blind date. He said it was so bad that ... he began to wonder what would happen if a masked maniac came in and started just hacking everybody to pieces. Would it bring him and his date closer together? Would it make the night more fun, enjoyable? How would they get away? That sort of thing.

From that emerged the first iteration of the script, which to my understanding was more of a straight slasher. Then the studio volleyed the script to Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy to put their spin on it. By the time it came to me, I was like, this is really fun and it's really funny, but as someone who's done the fun-funny-horror thing, I was itching to do something gorier and scarier. ... I am the one who probably took it more back to the middle of the dueling sensibilities.

SMF: The film does feel at times like that Paul Rudd—Amy Poehler rom-com parody, They Came Together, but then mixed with Scream. It's like you're riffing on all these romantic comedy and slasher tropes all at once. It's very funny, but also authentically romantic, and then when the horrible, intense, scary stuff happens, it becomes effectively serious. How do you balance those elements?

JR: I love that you're calling that out. I have a few different answers, but I think ultimately, if it were a different filmmaker, it would go further in one direction over the other. I happen to be a comedian who grew up loving Wes Craven as much as I did Pretty Woman...

So what happened is, by growing up during the great rom-com era of cinema that was like all things Nora Ephron and Garry Marshall and Rob Reiner, it was transportive... These romantic movies, they all very much affected me. But I'd also watch Freddie and could fancy him as a cartoon character. It was all so funny and so ridiculous. Once Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors came along, it wasn't scary to me. It was fun.

I kind of developed a barometer, I guess, so that's sort of in my blood as someone who's been able to make a living as a comedian who also has a darker kind of sensibility...

The barometer for something like Heart Eyes, then, is discovering what would take me out of it as a fan. What would be the line for me watching it? What would take me out of it is if the actors were playing it to be funny. It would take me out of it if the chemistry between the leads wasn't real. It would take me out of it if there was a "boing! boing!" sound when someone's head fell off. You know what I mean?

If you took it in way more of a parody direction, I think you start to lose the audience at a certain point. I'm just grateful that we had the shot to do it exactly as we wanted to. It's a friggin' miracle. [laughs]

SMF: Heart Eyes does not work without Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding. How did you know they were Ally and Jay?

JR: I didn't know. That's the short answer. The longer answer is, when you do a studio film, you're going to get your list of impossible people. They're going to say, it's got to be Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks, which you know is impossible. Once you start to get realistic about who's available, you look at these incredible actors, who not only exhibit such wonderful vulnerability but are fans of the genre and do it service.

You see that in Olivia's work in Cloak & Dagger, Totally Killer, and Cruel Summer. Then you have Mason. Literally everything Mason's doing and is about to do — there's stuff they haven't announced that he's doing that is going to be great — it just screams he should be perfect to play Jay...

It was a total gamble, but it is always a gamble, and it worked because we trusted one another, got along, and were determined to make something we would want to watch ourselves. We kind of Tetrised it all together. [laughs]

And let me be clear: Olivia and Mason are great people. No question.

SMF: With the ensemble, how do you keep them focused and grounded yet also maintain the film's humor without things suddenly becoming Airplane? Or maybe Scary Movie?

JR: The tone? What did I tell people? I said that I wanted it to be Nora Ephron in earnest and Wes Craven in earnest. Both filmmakers have characters within their filmographies... that exist on heightened planes, that are whackadoo. Sometimes, if anything, those characters get caught being a little too villainous or a little too big, and sometimes that's warranted. Sometimes, maybe not...

I gave everybody their own sort of, not assignments, but their own kind of ideals. Honestly, with the exception of Mason and Olivia, everything was about "Let's just hang out. I just want to see you guys talk, and let's talk about our relationships." They knew what was on the page. But what wasn't on the page? We never had to talk about playing nervous or cute. It's already there. They can do it in their sleep.

It's up to me as the director to tie the room together with great composition, and I find music does a lot of the work for us. Jay Wadley, who I've been working with forever, who I've been dying to get on one of my gigs, asked, "What's the tone here?" I told him that I wanted him to make me cry. I want the score to be as earnest as anything Nora Ephron ever utilized, like when Tom Hanks is talking to his dead wife in Sleepless in Seattle. But then I wanted him ratchet things up to be as horrifying as a kaiju attack, which he did and we do. And it all just kind of worked.

SMF: I feel like it's become a lost art, the lost art of the song-score soundtrack. How much time did you spend on not only the song choices but where they would be placed, how they would be utilized, and then how that would get coupled to the score?

JR: It is something of a lost art, and I so appreciate you acknowledging that, I've seen numerous movies in recent years that have made a lot of money and done quite well, but the soundtracks aren't what they could be. I'm sort of surprised, because the filmmaker in me sees the untapped potential. If the filmmakers had just turned over a few more stones or spent a little bit more time, it all would have been perfect...

And again, it all comes down to who I am as a person and a barometer, but also the people I surround myself with. And it brings up my great heads of department, Rob Lowry and Mia Riggins, my music supervisor and music coordinator. Rob currently has Friendship from A24 about to come out, he has Companion out now, he has our film, and he has the next I Know What You Did Last Summer. He's like a secret weapon. He has such great taste, and Jay Wadley and Rob have worked together before, and so was helpful too.

You always get on the phone with your heads of department, and they go, "What do you see in your head? How red do you want the blood? How cheesy do you want the music?" I would be like, "No. Not cheesy. Never cheesy. I want to feel the way that I felt when Richard Gere was standing on the street looking up at Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman or when Albert Brooks chased Meryl Streep on the tramway in Defending Your Life. That was transportive, and there was nothing funny about it. Yeah, Albert was wearing a toga, and they were on a tram back to Earth or to Heaven, but you're still crying your eyes out."

The great success of Heart Eyes as a franchise, if we ever get to do it again, is to never shortchange the audience, We pay homage to what made that era of film that is so beautiful, and part of how we do that is through music.

SMF: What do you want viewers to take away from the film? And not to put you on the spot, but with things being the way that they are right now, socially, politically, etc., how important is it to have films like Heart Eyes that we can sort of communally wrap our arms around? That embrace and celebrate diversity, not just a single, narrow-minded — if all too vocal — aspect of it?

JR: It's not putting me on the spot at all. I am horrified by this world right now. I'm also heartened by what good there is left in it. As a 41-year-old Caucasian male filmmaker, one of many of them — there's too many of us — I have a responsibility to not only cast people who really look like this world and the people who are in it but also to spread what joy I can and to also take that very seriously. It's an extreme privilege to be doing what I'm doing.

And I'm going to bust my ass to get it out there and make it as much of an escape as it possibly can be. To cast people who may not often be cast in films like this, so that people who are escaping the horrors of the world and spending whatever it is, $50-plus to get out of the house, get to go see themselves survive an extraordinary situation or a horrible situation. To fall in love. To live their lives.

I can't do nihilistic horror. I love more whammy horror. I love whimsy horror. I love the fun stuff. I want people to walk away and go, "Holy crap! That is the kind of movie that I want to see! I can't wait to get the 4K and pop it on in the background and get the pizza and forget about the world for 90 minutes, for two hours. I want to go back because it flew by so quick. I want to bring five or ten people that I love dearly to the theater so that they can go on this ride, too, and I can't wait turn to them in the dark and look at their reactions when X or Y or Z happens."

We often hear people refer to Nightmare on Elm Street as a "comfort movie." Why is that? Horror can provide comfort because we get to see ourselves survive a horrible circumstance. Straight. Gay. Black. White. Whatever. We all triumph over the unimaginable.

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