Diane Keaton didn’t think Jack Nicholson would do a movie with her

Little ditty about Jack and Diane, two American actors growin’ up in Hollywoodland. Jack, he’s gonna be a movie star. Diane didn’t think Jack would star in a movie with her.

Speaking with the Hollywood Gold podcast, Meyers reflected on 20 years of Something’s Gotta Give, her classic rom-com starring Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Meyers gets candid with host Daniela Taplin Lundberg, who produced her daughter’s latest film, Goodrich, and explains how, like John “Cougar” Mellencamp, she wrote with Jack and Diane in mind.

Fresh off a breakup, Meyers explains how she wrote her first 250-page draft of the screenplay for Something’s Gotta Give in a tear-filled fog. “[Diane’s] crying montage,” Meyers says, “that was sort of me writing the movie.” However, she did write with Nicholson and Keaton in mind, much to Keaton’s dismay.

“While I was writing, I met with each of them,” Meyers said, explaining how she knew Keaton from Baby Boom and the two Father Of The Bride movies. The two went out for lunch, and the writer/director revealed that she wanted her and Nicholson for the film. Though Meyers didn’t know Nicholson then, it was who she saw for the part. “‘He’s never going to be in a movie with me,’” Meyers recalled Keaton saying. “I said, ‘Well, he already has,’ because she made Reds with him, ‘So, I don’t think he’ll feel that way.’”

Diane Keaton is the queen of self-deprecation. It’s part of her charm, but sometimes, it can go a little far, as Meyers can attest. After spending the entirety of a screening of Father Of The Bride laughing hysterically, Keaton told Meyers, “‘Well, I thought it was funny, but who’s going to see it.’”

“‘You’re nuts. There’s no chance this will happen,’” Keaton told Meyers.

Keaton underestimated how much Nicholson wanted to star in a “tuxedo comedy.” A week after she sent Nicholson the script, he called her, and it was the “greatest call of my life, really.”

“He said great things [about the script], but the most charming thing he said was, ‘I always wanted to be in a tuxedo comedy.’ Nobody wears a tuxedo in the movie, but you get that he’s referencing a screwball of some sort or one of the more classic Hollywood love stories. It was a great phone call.”

As we know, Nicholson starred in the movie with Keaton, who was so good in the picture that he thought she was in love with him. In 2018, Meyers said that Nicholson took a scripted line for truth during rehearsals on Something’s Gotta Give.

“We’re rehearsing that scene in the street, where he’s running after her, and he calls me over after one rehearsal. He’s all rattled,” Meyers said. “I said, ‘What’s up?’ And he goes, ‘Diane just told me she loves me.’ I couldn’t tell if he was horrified or thrilled. So I was like, ‘Yes, I know, I wrote that line. It’s in the script, Jack.’ And he said, ‘Oh, okay.’ He thought she meant it. It’s really funny. That’s her.”