She was named one of Variety’s 10 Screenwriters to Watch in 2022 and Carrie Solomon is certainly turning heads in the industry. She wrote the script for Margot Robbie’s upcoming Ocean’s Eleven project and is also taking on the role of director for My Boyfriend’s Wedding, based on her screenplay that made the 2019 Black List.

Most recently, her film A Family Affair was released on Netflix. Directed by Richard LaGravenese (P.S. I Love You, Beautiful Creatures) and starring Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron and Joey King, the story centers around a young woman, Zara, who works as a personal assistant to Chris Cole, a somewhat-obnoxious, high-profile celebrity and notorious womanizer. When Chris meets Brooke, Zara’s widowed mother, sparks of all kinds begin to fly. Solomon delivers an unconventional romantic comedy, focused on an older woman dating a younger man, and she is excited to discuss the story she has woven out of a once-traditional genre.

What do you like about writing romantic comedy? How have you seen the genre change over time, and what traditional elements were important for you to retain?

I love romantic comedies. It’s such a dreamland that we all get to enter into when we watch a romantic comedy, and there’s an escapism to it. There’s an element of wish fulfillment. It captures the best part of falling or being in love, and I think no matter who’s watching it – whether you’re twenty-something, and know you have a lifetime with someone, or multiple people ahead of you, or you’re seventy five and you live your life with one partner – there is something for everyone. It’s that “serotonin rush” period of love.

Carrie Solomon

And I think there’s always humor to be found in love and the things people do for love. They bend over backwards. Even in the content we see online… there’s a trend on TikTok right now about the stupidest things people have ever done to impress a crush.

I think there’s so much humor and levity to be found in the journey to find love or your “person.” I think we’ve wanted (and needed) to tell different versions of the same stories we’ve seen, and now we’re finally getting different peoples’ love stories. We’re not just getting the same cis white love stories that we’ve seen this whole time, which makes me really excited.

I will say what we have here with this film is a cis white love story! But there are so many exciting comedies and romcoms about people of color who are trying to navigate the world in the exact same way – we just didn’t get to see that for the whole 1990s and early 2000s.

So, I think that’s a really fantastic and important evolution that I’m calling attention to away from this movie. But this movie does something in in its own right, which is it tells a love story that’s flipped upside down and is not exactly what you would expect. It’s honestly been really fun to hear some of the reactions to that because it’s out-of-the-box and a surprise.

I think we’re trying to find new ways to tell the same kinds of stories and hopefully this is one of them, in the sense that we never get to see women in their fifties date men in their thirties. It’s something that I think society can have an allergic reaction to, and that’s something we should look at because we’ve been watching older men date younger women for hundreds of years. So I think this is a slice of the larger pie of trying to take on something new through the romantic comedy.

What have the audience reactions been like so far?

Generally speaking, very positive. I feel like audiences that came into it excitedly and optimistically have gotten what they were looking for, which has made me really happy. I think it’s a surprising movie too… we advertised it very much as a comedy, and once you dive into it, you realize there’s a lot more to it. We have a lot of laughs up front, and there’s a lot of heart on the back end.

Tell me about your exploration of mother-daughter relationships in the story.

This is a complicated little web of a family we have here. We were really trying to tell three coming of age stories at once, and I think in any “hero’s journey,” there is often a wise elder voice in the room. I needed a voice of reason for Brooke, while Brooke was the voice of reason for Zara (Joey King).

Zara Ford (Joey King) Photo by Aaron Epstein/ Netflix

Kathy (Bates) plays Brooke’s mother-in-law, Leila. She’s not her actual mother, which was done to give Brooke (Nicole Kidman) a little bit more permission to pursue the relationship, as though it’s coming from her late husband. It allows for more of the messiness and adventure, whereas someone’s own mother might just cheer them on through everything. Brooke feeling like maybe she was mis-stepping, but then getting that permission from her late husband’s mom was much more meaningful in letting her know, “This is all OK, you’re not doing anything wrong”.

There are pieces of this that definitely are crazy… any mom dating her child’s boss is an insane dimension. But there have been stories about it before. We tried to tell it through a lens of this woman who is really looking to explore and find joy and fulfillment in her life. We wanted to make the way that things unfold OK, and the mother-daughter relationship between Brooke and Zara was a huge part of that.

I was twenty four when I wrote the first draft of this script. I certainly do not have the perspective or maybe the best insight into what it’s like to be fifty four. But I was processing my own parents’ divorce; they split up in my early twenties. I think so much of this movie was me trying to evaluate what I thought about my own mother and her journey through being single… the fact that she deserved happiness.

I think a universal theme to all of this is that we all reach a point where we realize that we’re going to have to be an adult among our adult parents. There’s a scene in the film where Brooke is sitting with Leila by the fire, and she tells her everything. This is a moment between peers rather than parent and child. We all come to a realization that our parents are fallible human beings.

When Richard LaGravenese became attached to the script direct, he added so much depth to the life lived in both Leila and Brooke. He and I had so many conversations that ended up really contributing to the script in terms of how to really deepen those women and give a true, older perspective that I just didn’t have from being the age I was at the time. To really write those women fully, and give them their due.

Brooke Harwood (Nicole Kidman) Photo by Tina Rowden/ Netflix

I understand this was his first project in a number of years; what was it like to work with and learn from him?

It was so exciting. He was a pillar in my home growing up and I think he is a brilliant man. I have so much faith in good screenwriters. I think he was starting a new chapter of his own life by coming into this, and we were both really excited to take on a creative partnership and lean on each other through this whole process. It became a wonderful working relationship and friendship. Honestly, I can’t believe he’s an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and I can forever turn to him and ask, “What do I do?”

He has an enormous amount of experience and perspective, and with this as my first movie being produced, I was just so glad to have someone who also understood what it is to be a writer. He had my back every step of the way and he looped me into conversations that writers are not often looped into. As far as first movies go, that was a dream come true.

Tell me about your experience pitching for the Ocean’s Eleven project.

First, I had to talk myself into the room… the door was not open!

I wrote a script (My Boyfriend’s Wedding) that started my whole career, because it got me on The Black List. Shortly after that, I was invited to a round table for a studio comedy where, in all fairness, I was completely in over my head. I had never been hired for a job as a writer. I had written, but no one had paid me to do it, and at that time, I didn’t know that I could actually call myself a writer. But I did fairly well in that round table. I think I was probably the least expensive person in the room, is the honest truth of it, and I think I had some good ideas. I was hired on that studio movie and it was about a ten-month project. I think my version of it was replaced and someone else is working on it.

But after ten months on a big studio comedy, I was a little bit more fearless than I think most screenwriters would be. Shortly after I was released from that project, I decided I needed to write something completely for myself. That was where my first draft of A Family Affair came from.

Oceans 8 had also come out in theatres. I was a huge fan of the series, and something in that one piqued my interest in terms of an idea for a spin off. I was in a meeting and kind of soft pitched it… I’m not even kidding, I pitched it as, “Someone should do this.” I was like, “Boy, that sounds like it’s right up someone else’s alley.” It wasn’t a moment of bravery, it was creative blue sky. 

But I got a call from Tom Ackerley, who runs LuckyChap with Margot. They wanted to work on it and bring it to Warner Bros. They championed me an enormous amount – having great producers is a huge amount of the development process when you’re new to the scene. Quite frankly, I’d been writing comedies, romance, and some action comedies, but I’d never touched anything like a heist or something in that tone before.

I was simply a fan; turning fandom into tone is really a niche thing to do. So my egregiousness was subtle, but more in the fact that they said, “Let’s do this” and I said, “Sure I can do it.” I had to have faith in myself that I could figure it out, and that really opened a new door in my career where I could think, “I’d like to do other things. I don’t just want to be a comedy writer.” It was an exciting time, but more than bravery, it was a lot of luck, right place, right time, and I think, a good idea.

What’s your writing process like and how do you write best? Has it evolved with each project?

It is a little bit different for every project. I once heard Eric Roth on a podcast calling himself an intuitive writer and I’ve since adopted that phrasing since I can identify with it. Often with comedy, I don’t outline… and I can feel my agents itching from far away. It’s not necessarily what I would recommend! But I was a kid who never wrote down my homework. I hold a lot of things in my head and I figure it out as I go. If I outline, I’m looking for the quickest way to get out of that process and what ends up happening is I don’t feel like I’m really working organically or creatively. I feel like I’m doing homework. So even if I have outlined something, I’ll often completely deviate from it once I’m in draft. Usually, I will come up with an idea and sit on it for a while without writing it down. Just letting myself ruminate, even if I need to write an opening act or something. I usually don’t go to script right away – I have to think about what it’s going to look like first.

And then I go and try to live my life. Go to the supermarket or CVS, see what happens in my day. I think, “Where’s a funny or interesting place to set this?” Somewhere that feels realistic and grounded… and it will come to me and I can build something from there. So in that way I’m pretty intuitive. I find the building blocks in the script itself, which is also something I don’t know that I would recommend to anybody. All my reps want is proof that I’m writing and I’ll say, “I don’t have it”.

But I do think that if it works for you, it works for you and that’s kind of the key to writing. Everybody finds their own stride. Now for Oceans, I massively outlined that and re-outlined it, We went back and forth on so many things. And still, when I got into the script, I had moments of, “Oh my God, they have to steal what from where… how am I going to do this?”

If you have a lot of complexities to the plot, it’s really helpful to outline; it’s just not my instinct. A huge part of my process is letting the mind wander. It’s gotten me into trouble a couple of times, but more often than not, I find a lot of creativity and ideas that never would have occurred to me through an outline.

Is there a genre you’d like to take on that you haven’t yet?

I’m really enjoying playing in the world of “action meets intrigue”. I really love crime. I think it’s fascinating. I’m such a Goody Two Shoes that I love movies where you’re rooting for the bad guy. I would really like to write a stylish, early Soderbergh-type sexy crime movie.

I think it would be hard for me to write anything that doesn’t have comedy in it. I don’t really take anything too seriously. But I’m leaning a little more towards that, and probably what will happen is the pendulum will swing back over and after that I’ll try to write a big action comedy.

I like to dip my toes in every pool, and I like to dance all over the map. For a long time, I thought that your voice had to be in one genre. It’s been a really great thing to learn how much one’s voice can carry through and that you can play in whatever playgrounds you want.