You hope it

will.

Yes, 100%.

You know, my directing career didn't really take off until I was well into my 40s.

And so I kind of, I suppose, bounced around for quite a while trying to kind of get my career going.

And I sort of knew in my heart if I ever get a chance to keep doing this, I'm just going to keep going.

And so I very much am that person that's like, what's the next thing? Let's just keep going.

Does that mean that you had Colleen Hoover's squillions of fans in mind when you were making the film? Because there's so many of them.

Can you tell me a little bit about what your experience with her writing or f- previous film adaptations had been when you took on Verity?

Um, well, you know, It Ends With Us had, had, had come out and was this, obviously this huge, big phenomenon.

And so, um, I watched the movie, and I enjoyed it, and I thought that it was very different in its own way, and sort of, um, so fascinating, fascinated both by the response to the movie, just as a sort of a consumer of pop culture and, and I'm being like, "Who is this person, and what is the appeal?" And, and then watching the movie myself and kind of, uh, finding it fascinating and different.

And so, um, when they, you know, brought the script to me, I was really interested just, just, just because it was Colleen Hoover and wanting to kind of, um, understand and get to know her work better.

And then when I read the book, um, which is so, again, it's just so...

There's something very, um, uh, unfiltered, I think, about her-

Yeah

... as a writer, and I really appreciate that, and I admire that.

Could you walk through your AI stack?

Yeah.

I use Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Codex.

My primary work stream is through Claude Cowork.

It's quite remarkable.

So there's the chatbot, which most people are familiar with, which is quite powerful.

Um, Cowork is a desktop app, for those who are not familiar with it, that plugs into my laptop, and so it's connected to the folders that I granted access to.

Here's Michael.

Right.

...

this came to us as a short story, um, by the, this writer, Chandler Baker, and it felt really funny.

It felt like exactly the kind of tone that I love, the sort of dysfunctional family all stuck in a house together.

Um, and then...

But with this new twist, which felt so obvious I couldn't believe it hadn't been done before, of that, like, that the true hero of the holidays is the, is th- is the mother, is the unsung-

Mm-hmm.

... to be good at it, to do it the right way, to, to, to, to not just mail it in or whatever, and to try to, to, to, to bring all of your best self into the work.