Pittsburgh behind the scenes for 'Love & Other Drugs'
No, Hollywood is not packing up the movie industry and outsourcing it to Pittsburgh.
It's easy to see how one could get that idea, though. At the moment, there are three high-profile movies in theaters that were shot in Pittsburgh: the runaway-train action movie "Unstoppable" starring Denzel Washington; the prison-break thriller "The Next Three Days" starring Russell Crowe; and "Love & Other Drugs," which opens Wednesday.
Unlike the other two, "Love & Other Drugs" resists one-sentence categorization, although it is a romance starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway.
Gyllenhaal plays Jamie, a charming, aggressive pharmaceutical salesman for Pfizer in the mid-'90s, the heady early days of Viagra. Anne plays Maggie, a beautiful, free-spirited young woman who suffers from early-onset Parkinson's.
To put it in pharmaceutical terms, "Love & Other Drugs" is a cocktail of things that normally aren't supposed to be taken together -- weepy romance, raunchy sex comedy, social satire, heavy soul-searching drama.
"I think we decided very early on, that we were going to risk having more than one thing in the movie," says director and screenplay co-writer Edward Zwick. "In my experience, that's what life is like. The most serious things are often the most seriously funny. I maintain those juxtapositions end up giving you a more emotional response -- it makes you more unguarded to the ultimate, deeper strains of the film.
"That's what life is like. It's also what movies used to be like. What would you call 'Shampoo?' It's a sex comedy, a political satire, a social snapshot. It is what it is."
The movie, shot in Pittsburgh last fall, doesn't explicitly name-check the city -- Jamie's territory is referred to as "the Ohio Valley." But Pittsburgh is easily recognizable everywhere in the film, although it doesn't always play itself. Liberty Avenue, Downtown, fills in for Chicago at one point.
The movie is based loosely on Jamie Reidy's "Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman" -- very loosely, Zwick says.
"(The book) doesn't really tell anything about a relationship, or anything about an illness -- it was just a starting point for us."
Zwick is known for sweeping historical epics like "Glory" (1989), "The Last Samurai" (2003) and "Legends of the Fall" (1994). In comparison, "Love & Other Drugs" is a much smaller-scale, more intimate film.
"Some of the television stuff I've done -- 'My So-Called Life' and 'Thirtysomething' -- had been much more in this mode. It's been a long time since I've done that, and I missed it."
Despite having a significant body of work to his credit, Zwick says he isn't concerned with crafting his distinctive directing style.
"I have to say I'm a little suspicious of signature styles," Zwick says. "I'm never one who believes a director should put himself out in front of the film. I find that self-consciousness to be a little off-putting. I really think that the story and performances should be at the center. I'm happiest when I'm at my most invisible."
Hathaway is getting some notice for a very complex, nuanced performance that couldn't be more different from her early roles in family-friendly fare like "The Princess Diaries" (2001).
"It was a challenge, but I knew she was up to it," says Zwick says. "I'd seen her work, most recently Jonathan Demme's movie ("Rachel Getting Married") and "Shakespeare in the Park." And I knew she would do the homework, knew she would devote herself to do the work to get this right. She spent a lot of time with patients and neurologists, really trying to be truthful."
The fact that she and Gyllenhaal spent a good portion of the movie naked probably didn't make the shoot any easier. As one would expect from a movie about Viagra salesmen, there's a lot of sex.
"They're real scenes in the movie," Zwick says. "They're not exploitative. They're not gratuitous. It's about the relationship changing and growing."
Pittsburgh just seemed like a good fit for "Love and Other Drugs." he says.
"The state of Pennsylvania has been particularly good in terms of tax breaks and incentives," Zwick says. "And I think a lot of films have gone to Philly and Pittsburgh for those reasons. On the other hand, it has very varied architecture, interesting neighborhoods, pretty countryside. We just wanted a small-scale, Midwestern mid-Eastern city, and it fit the bill. Also with UPMC and the medical industry that's there -- there were an abundance of those facilities that were available.
"We had a great time. It was beautiful last fall. People were lovely to us. I was able to go to a couple of baseball games at the end of baseball season, and a football game at the beginning of football season. And we went up to Fallingwater and Ohiopyle. I had a nice little house that I rented in Shadyside. It was lovely."
