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Edward Zwick likes to go to battle. Whether it is directing Glory, The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond or Defiance, Zwick seems to have positioned himself as a director who uses a giant scope. So in 2009, when he set out to direct and co-write his next project, Love & Other Drugs, a romantic comedy whose main character is in the profession of pharmaceuticals, it was surprising to say the least. “The funny thing is that during that period of time [shooting big-budget movies], I also had been doing television shows,” recalled Edward Zwick during a roundtable interview in Boston. “Doing My So-Called Life and thirtysomething was an opportunity of doing very small, human behavior. And the last number of years I really stopped doing television to do movies and I missed it. To be away from it was something I had longed for. So this movie seemed to be an opportunity to express that part of myself.”

Love & Other Drugs tells the scaled-down story of a career-minded drug rep, Jamie (Jake Gyllenhaal), hoping to be put on the fast track by selling the new company drug, Viagra. Things get complicated when his no-strings-attached relationship with a girl diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Maggie (Anne Hathaway), turns into a romance. Loosely based on Jamie Reidy’s memoir, Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, Zwick talks about what makes a good love story, being a Hollywood matchmaker, returning to TV, and if his movie has enough nudity to enter the Guinness Book of World Records.

Like the game Jamie and Maggie play in the movie, tell me four good things about yourself.

Well, for one, when I became a father, I became a better director. Let’s see. My editor from film school has cut all my work for 30 years so I’m loyal. I’ve worked with the same actors a number of times (pauses) …. God, I have never had anything in my movies turn around on me like this (laughs). I actually have increasingly grown to love the process of making movies, which wasn’t always true. And finally, I think that actually the performances and stories of movies are more important than the director putting himself out in front of it.

What elements are important to make a good love story?

So often in romantic comedies, the obstacles are contrived and external. I think the most interesting obstacles are internal. One of the points of this movie is when you evoke work and Parkinson’s as the ostensible obstacles, once revealed, that the things that are more inhibiting are those issues of intimacy and of character that have to be worked through. They are higher than the Montague family walls and stronger than the Capulet rivalry. All of us carry around some baggage, some damage, that we have to get through in order to connect with another person. And that’s very much the heart of the movie.

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