How The Half of It's director made a 'humanistic' teen queer romance

We’re officially a third of the way into 2020, and with the whole of May lying ahead, it’s the perfect time to stream The Half of It.

Alice Wu’s high-school romantic dramedy, a teenage takeoff on Cyrano de Bergerac, hit Netflix on Friday — soon after having won top honors for a narrative feature at April’s (virtual) Tribeca Film Festival. In a twist on Edmond Rostand’s classic love triangle, the Cyrano character is Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis), a shy intellectual who agrees to write love letters (and texts) on behalf of jock Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer). But while the romantic addresses to popular girl Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire) are signed with Paul’s name, they secretly, truly come from Ellie’s heart.

Despite all that unrequited devotion filling the frame, the most piercing love story here (along with the one between Ellie and her father) is that of Ellie and Paul, a mismatched pair who become close friends over the course of the movie. “This is about the two least likely people somehow crossing paths and affecting each other,” Wu tells EW. “Their collision [is] sort of the heart of the story.”

In playing the nerd and the jock, Lewis and Diemer bonded just as much as their on-screen counterparts. “Daniel is like my brother now,” Lewis tells EW. Recalling one particularly nerve-racking scene to shoot — a talent show performance, naturally — in which Paul encourages his Ellie to overcome her shyness, “it was kind of like having my little guardian angel in the corner,” she recalls. “His belief in me as Daniel definitely translated onscreen where Ellie finds the courage to perform because of Paul’s belief in [her].”

A high school (and all of its attendant features, like the ever-terrifying talent show) presented the perfect microcosm for Wu to explore her theme of mismatched love stories — platonic, romantic, and familial — since, while there will always be clearly defined cliques, “it’s all trapped in one geographical location where they can intersect; they just usually socially don’t,” she says. “So it allows me to play with different cultures, different economic classes, and have three people who would [otherwise never] cross paths do.”

The differences between Ellie, Aster, and Paul stand out all the more clearly against the backdrop of the fictional, conservative small town of Squahamish, Wash. “I kept saying, ‘listen, the setting is actually a major character in this movie,’ all through pre-production,” Wu says with a laugh. “I did an insane amount of location scouting.” Her hyper-specific vision of Ellie's environment, informed by her own experience living in the state in her 20s, included an emphasis on the town’s church as a significant unifying feature and a mostly white population.

“For whatever reason, in any tiny town, there’s always one immigrant family, or there’s always one POC family, and I kind of wanted to tell that story,” Wu says. “Immediately, we get a sense of the loneliness of Ellie and her father.” Indeed, as Squahamish’s only Chinese-American non-believing lesbian, Ellie’s isolation is heightened by everything about her — though none of that defines her, just like being the high school nerd doesn’t, either.

“She’s very intelligent and very withdrawn and keeps to herself — and she’s incredibly rich, internally,” says Lewis, a self-described “very loud and expressive person” who found it a “transformative experience” to step into Ellie’s much more understated shoes. “It’s not just about love, it’s about Ellie finding herself, it’s about Ellie being the outsider. There are just so many different real-life qualities added to this rom-com.”

The nuanced attention to race, faith, class, and sexuality feels unique for a teen romance, but in terms of what these characters want, those elements are as dividing — and about as irrelevant — as tables in the high school cafeteria. “I am a humanist, and I try to make humanistic comedies. I think we are all far more similar than we are different,” says Wu, whose last film, her directorial debut Saving Face, was released over a decade ago. “The very specific details of their lives might be different, but actually, all of the characters want exactly the same thing: they all want to love, they all want to connect, they all want to be seen for who they are.”

For teenagers trying to figure out who they are themselves, that desire is all the more profound — and all the more confounding. Over the course of the film, a handful of the characters posit conflicting definitions of love — that love is effort, it’s obsession, it’s conviction — but all ultimately must conclude that they have no idea what it means.

“I personally think that, as a species, one of the most delightful things about us is how terrible we are at figuring out how to connect with other people and how to find love,” Wu says. “I love that we reach for people even though there’s a decent chance we’re going to get our heartbroken. But it’s not about finding the perfect love — it’s about the fact that we’re constantly reaching.”

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