Director David Schwimmer on the set of Run, Fat Boy, Run Courtesy of Picturehouse

David Schwimmer
To some, David Schwimmer will always be Ross, the sensitive paleontologist who lusts after Rachel, on the massively popular sitcom Friends. Yet theatergoers also know him for his extensive stage work, acting in and directing numerous productions with Lookingglass, a theater company he co-founded in Chicago. On the big screen he's acted in movies directed by Mike Figgis, Ivan Reitman and Bryan Singer, amongst others. And for television, he helmed a number of episodes of Friends, Joey and The Tracy Morgan Show. So it was only a matter of time before a feature film script would land on Schwimmers's desk and convince him to step behind the camera for his big film directorial debut.

This film was initially conceptualized as a New York story. Why did it become British?
I was attached to the script when I first read it three years ago, actually. It was before we finished filming the TV show [Friends]. And I knew right away this was what I wanted to direct as my first feature. It was set up with a company in Los Angeles and I was attached to direct and I kept pitching them actors: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Jack Black. They kept hemming and hawing. They had cold feet. And then luckily, this company called Material Entertainment in London optioned the script from them, and suddenly I was the director of a British comedy. It was actually kind of daunting. I wasn't sure if I was going to remove myself from the whole situation because I'd just spent 4 months doing a play in London and I wanted to get home for a bit. However, I started working with Simon on something else — a dark comedy called Big Nothing — and we were shooting on the Isle of Man when I got the news that this script was now going to be London-based. And I just was having such a good time with Simon, I said: "Dude, you want to take a look at this script? I'm now going to direct it in London. You'd be perfect to star in it and do the rewrite." And as soon as he was in — literally two months later — we were in pre-production. Everything happened very, very quickly.

What were the biggest challenges to changing the script?
Simon likes to say he just did a polish, which is a little self-deprecating. The original script was fabulous — it was really funny. But what Simon and I wanted to do was push some of the characters in the direction of being a little more complex and sophisticated. They were a little obvious, [for example] Hank Azaria's character: from page one in the original version, you knew he was a prick. In the romantic comedy genre, everyone knows there's going to be a happy ending, so the challenge is determining the most interesting way of telling it. And we felt that the more interesting way of doing it was to make it a very slow reveal that Hank was a prick. We wanted him to be a great option for Thandie, a successful American guy who on paper [seems] pretty great. And slowly but surely reveal that he's not very good with kids and he's kind of insecure. And it was also important to me that [Thandie's character] was a strong, independent woman and mother — she wasn't financially dependent on either one of these guys. She didn't have to choose one of these guys. She could just say: "You know what? Screw both of you! I'm going to go do my own thing. I'm doing fine."

Did some of the characters had to be made more "British" and have their dialogue changed?
The other script change to make me really happy was [rewriting the character of] Simon's landlord. He was originally going to be an old Italian-American because it was going to be shot on the Lower East Side or Brooklyn. But the South Asian community in London is huge, so it was a perfect opportunity to cast this wonderful Indian actor, Harish Patel. I directed him a couple of years ago in a pilot for NBC and he's a comic genius in my mind. So that was the other benefit of making the movie in London. My secret agenda was to make it a more reflective of the London that I knew, which was ethnically diverse. And you never see those kinds of English films come over to the States. Everyone's white and it's kind of a lie. It was one of my goals to better represent different cultures.