Savan Kotecha and Carl Falk might not be widely known, but their songs definitely are.
Between them, the producer-songwriters have birthed bangers like Nicki Minaj’s “Starships”, Ariana Grande’s “One Last Time” and Usher’s “DJ Got Us Falling In Love”, but together, they might be best known for crafting most of One Direction’s first and second albums – including their debut single “What Makes You Beautiful”. It's a fact that wasn’t lost on 1D fans who clocked their songwriting credits for the fake boyband at the centre of The Idea of You.
The lore behind The Idea of You, the film now starring Nicholas Galitzine and Anne Hathaway, runs deep for Directioners. Adapted from Robinne Lee's 2017 novel, it follows a 40-year-old woman who ends up dating the lead singer of the world's biggest boyband after running into him backstage at Coachella. If it sounds a bit like self-insert fanfic about Harry Styles, well, it is. Lee has been open about calling on Styles as inspiration for the story's lead heartthrob, Hayes Campbell, and One Direction for his five-member group, August Moon.
When it came to bringing The Idea of You to the screen, music was a priority – because you can't show a band headlining the biggest festival in the world to a bevvy of screaming fangirls if the songs don't slap. So Kotecha, who also previously worked on the songs for Netflix's Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, and Falk were brought in to recreate boyband magic.
“[The producers] were asking me questions about the experience – since I've been quite close to it a number of times – of what maybe these guys in the band are going through and what the Hayes Campbell character could be going through,” says Kotecha. “I told [Michael Showalter, the director] some stories and just gave some advice of what I think the character would be thinking because they were really wanting to humanise it.”
Here, Savan Kotecha and Carl Falk chat with GQ about whether they were trying to strike gold again with August Moon, making fake music that doesn’t sound fake and whether there’s a formula to the perfect boyband song.
GQ: The original novel, The Idea of You, is pretty famously inspired by Harry Styles, and in this film, the band, August Moon, are almost a One Direction proxy. Was that something you were aware of coming into the movie?
Kotecha: That's the weird thing. Now, when people talk about it, it seems obvious that it would be, but at the time, it was very specifically like, 'We don't want it to be a Harry Styles fanfic movie.' It was written before Harry's famous relationship, which people thought that it might resemble. [The book] was written in 2017. Now, looking back it's like, yeah, of course, people are going to think that, but One Direction didn't really come into my head. It's kind of funny to us now because, I guess when we get together and write these pop songs, that's what they sound like.
Falk: We write songs that we think are good and we didn't think about that parallel when we wrote those songs.
When the first song from the film, “Dance Before We Walk”, was released, people immediately clocked that you were the writers and started connecting that lore because of your history with One Direction. How was that to watch?
Kotecha: The original version, when we wrote it, was supposed to be Haye's first single outside of August Moon. It's about Hayes Campbell leaving the band or his first foray out of writing outside of the band, and you listen to the lyrics and it all makes sense. But I saw that online – because there's a line in the second verse [that goes] “I think I need a new direction" – that people were like, ‘Oh my God, like One Direction’ but no, it's about Hayes' character leaving the band.
Is the process for writing for a fake boyband different than writing for a real one?
Falk: It's always a challenge when you have to create something from scratch and invent the style of each song so it goes with the narrative of the story. If you compare it to writing for an artist, the artist may have doubts like ‘Can I say this? Can I sound like this?’ and you have to take that into consideration. In this case, we didn't have an artist, really.
Kotecha: I approached it like, ‘This is a real person and this is a real pop band’. The script gives you what you need to know who that character is, we were writing songs for this artist. It was like the old days when we used to write without the artists in the room. [We were] treating it like it was method writing and as for a real artist.
Sometimes fake bands in movies can sound fake, somehow. Is there a specific way of making fake music that sounds real?
Kotecha: As songwriters, we had to have discipline, because when you come up with a song, you're like, ‘Oh, shit, this could be a real hit for X, Y, or Z, should we save it for X, Y, or Z?’ but you have to be, like, no, we're going to try and do this and make it as good as we can. Because that's what happens a lot with these things. I think that's why historically we get fake bands sounding like fake bands. But I want people to believe it's a real band and I want this band to have real fans and for people to really enjoy the music, whether it's from a movie or not.
We hear a few of August Moon's songs at various points in the film, from their first single to their newest release, and the sound gets more mature as it goes on. How did you tackle crafting that sound evolution?
Kotecha: I wanted there to be the first August Moon single that was like a teeny-bopper love song, and that's what “I Got You” is on the radio. Then, what would their second album's single sound like? That's “Tastes”, in my head, my mind. And then with the third album, they want to be a little bit edgier, and have more guitars and live drums, so that was “Guard Down” and “Closer”. “Closer” is supposed to be like an album track, a deep cut. I tried to do that lyrically as well. Like “Guard Down” those lyrics are all about dealing with the pitfalls of fame.
What was the process of recording with Nicholas Galitzine like?
Falk: It was a really good process to write the songs and then have Nick over here for a couple of weeks. We had never met and he had no clue what to expect from the recording process as well. So it was like an unwritten book, like 'You're the artist, but you're not'. He also had to make the songs sound like they were his, so we really experimented with different tones and different voices and after a while, he really found his way of singing. I hope that the music resonates with with with the audience. It's just not our songwriting, but also Nick's vocals that make it [feel] like it could be a real band, like it could be a real artist.
Is there a formula for the perfect boyband song?
Kotecha: Historically, the music business has always fed teenage girls of every generation. I think during those very difficult years, it gives you common ground with your peers, and sometimes you just need that human connection. One thing that I always think about with these groups is that, where people can go wrong with them, is when they try and make it too cool. When New Kids on the Block came out it, sounded like nothing on the radio. When Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC came out, it sounded like nothing on the radio. Purposely, when One Direction came out, everyone was doing that Chris Brown-Rihanna dance-pop thing and people thought it was crazy to go very poppy with guitars. But it shouldn't be hip, because you've already got artists doing the hip thing and you need fans of these guys to feel like it's their own. If the older brother likes it, it's no longer theirs.