Miss You, Love You was far from an easy shoot for Allison Janney and Andrew Rannells — but don’t feel too bad for them.
The pair understood that as the principle characters of writer-director Jim Rash’s intimidate film about grief, family, and times when the two collide, they were going to have their work cut out for them. Their characters — a widow, Diane, and her absentee son’s personal assistant, Jamie — are the only two on screen for the vast majority of the runtime, which is mostly limited to the kitchen and living room of a house in New Mexico.
When Janney and Rannells spoke with Gold Derby about the making of the movie, the actress said that the shape of the script let them know immediately that this was a different kind of movie.
“The first scene is 20 pages long!” Janney recalled. (A scene of average length usually runs anywhere from two to five pages.) With so much dense, emotionally complex material to get through, Janney and Rannells understood that they had to change up their approach.
The duo memorized the script from start to finish. “We both talked about it before we started and discovered that the easiest way to do this was going to be to memorize the entire script,” Rannells said. “Just to learn it like a play. And then Jim allowed us some time to rehearse for a couple days in the house that we were filming in. So we got to Albuquerque, and we got to sort of block some of the bigger scenes, and, and just run it, quite frankly.”
Janney and Rannells would continue practicing throughout the film’s tight 17-day shoot, running lines with each other anytime the camera stopped rolling between scenes.
“It was an extraordinarily challenge for both of us,” Janney said. “Even in plays, I would just go to rehearsal with my script and learn the lines along the way.”
“It was a very intense, satisfying, and very gratifying process,” Rannells said.
But luckily, both stars had some international luxury awaiting them around the corner. It wasn’t long after filming Miss You, Love You that Janney and Rannells were both approached to star in Paul Feig’s sequel Another Simple Favor, which would take them to Italy.
“We both got phone calls around the same time,” Rannells said. “And we’re like, ‘Are we gonna go to Rome together?’ I just got to walk around Rome with Allison and watch her shop, and it was the best.”
“It was such a great retreat after having worked so hard together to get to go walk around Rome and shop and eat,” Janney concurred.
