French Girl, starring Zach Braff, Evelyne Brochu, and Vanessa Hudgens, is a rom-com where love crosses borders. Zach Braff is Gordon Kinski, a love-struck English teacher planning a proposal to his girlfriend Sophie, played by Evelyne Brochu. Things go awry when, instead of being proposed to, Sophie is whisked away to Quebec with a dream job offer from her ex., a sophisticated celebrity chef named Ruby, brought to screen by Vanessa Hudgens. Gordon follows Sophie to Canada where he meets her family and doesn’t exactly impress them. Plus, it turns out Ruby’s intentions may not be as pure as she originally let on. French Girl is a hilarious love letter to cultural misunderstandings and being out of your element brought to the world by co-writers and co-directors Nicolas Wright and James A. Woods. The mash-up is breezy and funny, and expertly channels the classic rom-com vibe.
We sat down over Zoom with Nicolas Wright, one-half of the writing and directing duo behind French Girl, to chat about the movie. He shared how the famous cast came together—including Zach Braff, Evelyne Brochu, and William Fichtner. (There may have even been some nerding out over Fichtner’s amazing career.) Woods talked about how intimidating it was to direct the legendary Luc Picard. Wright shared what it was like filming at Château Frontenac while there were guests there and also how he and his writing and directing partner, James A. Woods, made the jump from writing to directing.
The Interview with French Girl writer and director Nicolas Wright
[Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.]
Ayla Ruby: I just finished watching the movie, and I really loved it. I love rom-coms.
Nicolas Wright: Oh, amazing.
Nicolas Wright: This was our throwback ’90s style rom-com that we’ve been dreaming of making for a long time, so I’m glad that you liked it, and yeah, hopefully they keep making more of these, because we need them right now more than ever.
Ayla Ruby: I hope so. And it was just so happily, tonally just it was… I don’t know, it was just joyful. So I’m excited.
Nicolas Wright: Yay. Yay.
Ayla Ruby: Okay, so I will get right into it, I guess.
Nicolas Wright: Yeah, please.
On how French Girl came to be
Ayla Ruby: So you mentioned ’90s rom-coms. Can you talk about how this project came to be? It sounds like you’ve been dreaming of it for a while. It’s not easy to make things anymore, let alone original stuff, or let alone rom-coms, so I’m really curious.
Nicolas Wright: Yeah. Well, look, it was a long process. My writing and directing partner, James A. Woods, he and I, we became friends about 20 years ago as actors. We got to know each other in Montreal, getting cast on various shows and series and we’d sort of realized we had a creative chemistry, and then we started writing.
Nicolas Wright: And through our friendship we discovered that we had similar backstories. Both of our fathers are English Canadians who married French Canadian women. And so we grew up in this bilingual context, and we thought, “Why has this not been exploited as a romantic comedy? This is hilarious.” This culture mashup and fish out of water vibe, and that’s something that’s irresistible to us, and it felt like it fit that ’90s rom-com mold that we… Look, we grew up on movies like Meet the Parents and all these classic just…
Nicolas Wright: So we set out to write it, and we did, but it took years. We conceived this movie about 13 years ago and then we just put it in a drawer. And then we got busy writing other stuff and getting embroiled in all kinds of different stuff.
Nicolas Wright: And then about five years ago we had the chance to sort of take it out and dust it off and really sort of give it a go, and we did. And it’s been a long journey, but yeah, as you said, it’s really hard to get these movies made now. I think just the landscape of the business has changed so much over the last 10, 15 years. It’s become much more of a global business, and that unfortunately hurts comedy, because comedy is a very culturally-specific thing, never mind a bilingual comedy where you’ve got two different cultural touchstones to deal with, or cultural tones to deal with rather.
Nicolas Wright: So it was immensely challenging, but we had great partners. Our producers, Valérie d’Auteuil and Anders Bard, were just fearless and intrepid, and they never ever faltered. And then in a partnership with Telefilm Canada and Paramount Global, we just were able to make it. And everybody believed, and we were so fortunate. So at the end of the day, it was a long haul, but we got it made. And yeah, that’s pretty much the long and the short of it.
On working with Luc Picard in French Girl
Ayla Ruby: I’m so glad you mentioned Meet the Parents, because the dad in this story, especially that one lamb scene in the butcher room made me think of Meet the Parents so much.
Nicolas Wright: Yeah. Yeah. Luc Picard is a phenomenal Quebec actor, Montreal, a French Canadian actor. And he’s also a director as well, very successful director. He makes a lot of films. And he was our Robert De Niro. We knew right away, he was the first guy we went to for this because we’re fans of his other work, and we immediately knew he had that sort of Robert De Niro kind of presence that would send chills down a man’s spine.
Nicolas Wright: It’s hard to direct him as well. He’s intimidating to direct where he’s a lovely man, but he can turn on those eyes and you’re like, “Are you okay? Did I say something wrong?” Yeah, he’s amazing. Yeah, he’s hilarious.
On making the transition from writing to directing a feature film
Ayla Ruby: So obviously you guys [James A. Woods] have a writing history. Where in the conversation did directing it come in too? Because that’s a big project. That’s a big jump.
Nicolas Wright: Yeah, we’ve been directing stuff together for a while, like pilots that we would sort of finance ourselves and short films and little sketches and things like that. So we’ve been building up to this for a while. And then I think it was always a goal of ours. We knew eventually we wanted to direct. That was always in the cards for us as artists.
Nicolas Wright: And so when we set out to write this movie, because it’s such an intensely personal story, we knew that this would be the one to really push for hard, because not a lot of people out there could direct this, given its bilingual nature and the sort of cultural specificity between the American sensibility and the French Canadian sensibility, that’s a really sort of narrow target. There’s a few people that could do it, but we were certainly like, “Well, why not us? We want to do this anyway, so can we try on this one?”
Nicolas Wright: And thankfully, our producers from day one were absolutely supportive. And they knew that because it was our story, they thought, “Well, why would we chase someone else just to? Let’s believe in these guys.” And they did. And everyone did along the way from Telefilm to Anders Bard, our producer, Valérie d’Auteuil our other producer, Paramount Global, and Elevation and others. All of our partners every step of the way just said, “Yeah, Nick and James, they can do it. Let’s go. We’ll get behind them.”
Nicolas Wright: So we were really, really, really lucky, but it takes a lot of people to say yes and to believe that you can do it, and thankfully we were able to sway everybody. Because yeah, it was not an obvious thing.
Ayla Ruby: Yeah.
Nicolas Wright: But yeah, working with Roland Emmerich, I think that gave people a lot of confidence. We’ve had a lot of really, really good mentors working at a very, very high level in the business, and so we’d had the exposure and I think the best education you could get before going into making your own film.
On casting William Fichtner
Ayla Ruby: You have a past with him [Emmerich], but you also have some really cool actors and actresses on French Girl. You have Zach Braff, you have Vanessa Hudgens, you have amazing people. Can you talk about how they got onto the project, what that was like?
Nicolas Wright: Yeah. I mean, starting with Fichtner, we became fast friends on Independence Day: Resurgence. You do get to know people if you’re shooting for five months in Albuquerque. I love Albuquerque, it’s great. We were just like kindred spirits from the get-go. And we would be fanboys with him and just gush over his career to his face like, “Oh my God, it’s Van Zant [from Heat]. What the hell? This is crazy. What was it like to be in Armageddon? Stop showing off, Batman guy.”
Ayla Ruby: See, that’s what I would ask about.
Nicolas Wright: Oh, I know. And he’s got stories and he so loves sharing these stories. And so when we wrote this film, we immediately thought of Fichtner and we’re like, “God, can we please, please make it work?” We sent him the script and thank God his schedule was aligning with ours, and he’s like, “Boys, I’m going to do it, but I got one condition. I got to have a beard.” And we’re like, “Yes, of course. Let’s give you a beard. We can do it.” So we were lucky that he said yes.
On Zach Braff starring in French Girl
Nicolas Wright: And then with Zach, it was funny, Zach was at the top of our list but as a sort of a parenthetical Zach Braff type, because we never thought in our wildest dreams could we get somebody as sort of successful as Zach. But again, our fearless producers were able to just find the right person to get the right person the script to get it to Zach.
Nicolas Wright: And Zach read it, thankfully. And it’s hard to get people to read stuff. That’s the hardest thing in this business, is to get people to read stuff, which is crazy because that’s the sort of bedrock foundation, is a script, but anyway. Zach is a filmmaker and Zach is a smart man so he reads stuff and he’s got no problem with that.
Nicolas Wright: And he read it and he immediately fell in love with the script and we had a few meetings with him and he was just game on from day one, and it was fantastic, which we were blown away. We were blown away. What a dream. Also, because of his experience as a filmmaker, again, to have him on the set with us sort of as a sort of a spiritual brother was so huge, because the wisdom that he brings from filmmaking into his own work, his own character work is huge.
Nicolas Wright: Because a lot of, I mean, actors, most actors aren’t filmmakers, so they’re really dedicated and focused on their small part. And I say small part, I mean one person’s part in a whole movie is a very small part of the whole process, but Zach is able to sort of take a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing and make sure that whatever he’s doing is tracking through the whole story and that the whole film is being served by all these ideas that we’re sort of presenting him and that are in script. And if we’re dropping a thread here, he’ll remind us and say, “Don’t forget.” So that was invaluable for us, honestly.
On working with Vanessa Hudgens
Nicolas Wright: And Vanessa, again, dream come true to have her say yes to this project. What I love about her, I think she’s very underrated as a comedian, and I think her skill as a musician is what allows her to be so funny, because so much of comedy is rhythm and timing, and she’s got that in spades, it’s crazy. And to get her to sing in our movie was, again, a dream come true. What a-
Ayla Ruby: At a funeral.
Nicolas Wright: At a funeral, no doubt, with a shitty sort of fake Christian rock song, which it was such a surreal moment on set. It was amazing that she was just such a team player to do that. It was great. Yeah.
On getting Georges St-Pierre to cameo in French Girl
Ayla Ruby: Now, you also had, and I’m going to try not to mispronounce this, you had Georges St-Pierre as a-
Nicolas Wright: Yeah, you got it. Nailed it.
Ayla Ruby: Cool. I tried. I looked it up.
Nicolas Wright: You nailed it. You nailed it.
Ayla Ruby: There’s this fight scene. How did he… Because that’s really cool. He’s a big deal.
Nicolas Wright: He’s a big deal and he’s a big man, so he’s got a lot of big commitments he has to fulfill, so the fact that he was able to take the time and come and do a cameo in our movie. We asked him, we’re friends with his manager, and again, his manager’s based out of Montreal, and so we’ve known him for years and we’ve hung out with him once or twice in various contexts.
Nicolas Wright: But we said, “You know what? It would be great.” I think we had this idea in pre-production where we said, “You know what would be great is if…” Because these restaurant openings with these big sort of fancy places often have celebrities come in, and we said, “What a coup it would be if we could get Georges St-Pierre to be there to close the loop on Junior’s story where he gets to meet his hero.”
Nicolas Wright: And on a whim, we just asked his manager, who was so supportive, and he’s like, “Oh my God, let me ask him. And if he has time I’m sure he’d love to do it.” And so we were able to make the deal, and he did it and he came and it was fantastic, and we had the best time with him. And he’s got such a delicious little scene with Antoine Olivier Pilon.
Nicolas Wright: And he’s a fricking good actor, man. He nailed it. He came in, we were like, “Can we do it like this?” And the guy is a pro, man. I mean, from Captain America: The Winter Soldier to French Girl, this guy, he’s taking Hollywood by storm. That is if he’s not too busy with all of his other MMA stuff, but my God, what a dude.
On casting Evelyne Brochu as Sophie
Ayla Ruby: And how about your Sophie? How did she come on board?
Nicolas Wright: Evelyne?
Ayla Ruby: Yes.
Nicolas Wright: Evelyne Brochu is, oh my God, as soon as we met her we’re like, “This is the girl.” She is a quintessential French girl.
Nicolas Wright: And we had a Zoom with her and we met her, and at the time she was pregnant with twins, but she sort of wanted to hide it. She didn’t want us to sort of get skewed by that, which we would never, but it was such a funny thing that she was kind of hiding that over Zoom.
Nicolas Wright: But her face is just, it radiates joy, energy, love. And so even on the Zoom we’re like, “I mean, of course it’s going to be you.” And she’s a movie star in her own right in this province. She’s so talented and so successful. We’re lucky that she said yes to our movie. And she just infuses this film with so much tenderness and love and joy, and we had a blast working with her. I’d work with her again in a heartbeat on anything, she’s just absolutely fantastic. Yeah, our whole French Canadian cast is just amazing.
On any favorite moments from filming the movie
Ayla Ruby: I know we’re getting close on time, but was there anything that was just a favorite moment for you from filming, from this whole process, or maybe a surreal moment?
Nicolas Wright: I mean, I think the most surreal moment is I think shooting at the Château Frontenac, which as a place I used to go as a kid on holiday and all those years later to have your movie sort of set up there and shooting in that magical place was, every day was a dream. And it was pretty funny because we were… I mean, yeah, that was just was incredible.
Ayla Ruby: That was a farm?
Nicolas Wright: No, the Château Frontenac is the hotel, the big hotel.
Ayla Ruby: Oh, gotcha. Sorry.
Nicolas Wright: Yeah. But yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was pretty amazing that they were so open and welcoming with us. And they gave us everything we asked for and more.
Nicolas Wright: But what was really funny was shooting nights, because you have to shoot nights there because you don’t want to interfere with the guests and get in the way of their business, which is totally fine and it makes sense. But we would end at 7:00 in the morning, and then we would sort of go upstairs to the dining room and have breakfast with all these sort of tourists. And we’d be at the end of a 14-hour day, exhausted and just rolling in with our whole crew and mixing and mingling with these 70-plus year old tourists who were having a lovely holiday and we’re all raucous and high from a whole day of shooting, just on adrenaline. So that was pretty funny and surreal. But yeah, that whole experience of shooting there was just magical. Yeah.
On final thoughts about French Girl
Ayla Ruby: Oh, awesome. And I guess my last question, is there anything you want people to know about this film that you haven’t talked about already?
Nicolas Wright: No, it’s funny, I say this a lot, but I hope obviously a lot of people see it, but I hope people pass it around. And I think our biggest dream is to just have people see this and laugh and have a good time.
Nicolas Wright: I think the world right now is a really sort of challenging, difficult place, and they don’t make a lot of these movies anymore, and so all we want to do is put a smile on people’s face. And so for me, that’s what I hope people take away, is that they have a good time and it sort of warms their heart a little bit, because I think we could all use a little bit of that right now.
Ayla Ruby: Aw, that’s such a great note to end on. Thank you so much for chatting.
Nicolas Wright: Thank you so much. And I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it.
French Girl is now in theaters. It will arrive on digital on March 19th.
Are you planning to see French Girl? Do you suddenly feel the need to visit Canada or rewatch Scrubs? Let us know on X @MoviesWeTexted.
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