Jay Rohr
Eternity will soon be arriving in theaters. This romantic dramedy tells the captivating tale of a woman in the afterlife pressed to make an impossible decision. After passing away, she meets both men she married while alive. Her first husband having died early in their marriage, he has waited sixty-seven years for her to arrive, expecting them to spend forever together. Romantic as that may be, there is the matter of her second husband, who has the same expectation.
The film is the brainchild of writer Patrick Cunnane. He started his career as an inkslinger working for the Obama administration. There he served as the president’s Senior Writer and Deputy Director of Messaging. He eventually shifted into the entertainment industry writing for shows such as the television series Designated Survivor.
Producer Trevor White immediately saw the potential in Cunnane’s pitch. The script would end up on the Black List in 2022. Fortunately, no stranger to the industry, White has produced several motion pictures including Ingrid Goes West (2017), Wind River (2017), and No One Will Save You (2023). So it was only a matter of time before this interesting idea made its way to the big screen.
Below is the abridged text of our conversation with the two. Both were kind enough to give us some time to elaborate on Eternity. We sat down at the Four Seasons in Chicago for the following chat.
JAY ROHR: How did Eternity come together? Where did the idea come from?
PATRICK CUNNANE: It’s an idea that I’ve had in the back of my head for a long time before I got into the entertainment industry, to be honest. And I had written a script for Trevor and Tim’s company, and we really enjoyed working together and I pitched literally the one-liner, a woman was married twice in life, loved both of her husbands, and she gets to the afterlife and has to choose between them. There was a long silence on the phone, and I was like I might have just pitched the worst idea ever. But then Trevor chimes in and says, that’s a big idea.
TREVOR WHITE: I remember hearing it and was processing it, and I was like, how that is such a unique, cool concept to hang a big theatrical movie on.
PATRICK CUNNANE: And I was afraid to Google, like, I was like, this must exist, right? So, and then once we figured out it doesn’t exist, we just dove right in.
Since it’s such a grounded and humanized thing with some very heavy concepts within it, is that one of the reasons you keep it a little bit lighthearted? Was that an intentional choice right from the beginning?
PATRICK CUNNANE: Yeah, I think it would have been a mistake to take ourselves too seriously. I think the choice sort of speaks for itself, and we wanted these people to have fun and for it to be joyful. and mix in that real emotion as well.
TREVOR WHITE: What we had always been talking about was wanting to do something that lived in the Richard Curtis, Nora Ephron, Rob Reiner, Jim Brooks space, right? That early 90s, late 80s kind of great romance comedies. They all have pretty broad humor at times. And humor that never feels overly silly. We want audiences to laugh and enjoy it, but it’s also got real themes. It’s saying real things about love and about us as people. And we also simultaneously wanted people to go home and think about their own relationships, whether they be romantic or personal or family, whatever it is.
How hard was it to find the cast for this? Did it all just fall into place right away or was it an exploration?
TREVOR WHITE: You know, it was a little bit of both. I think David — our wonderful director — he had such a vision for this movie. David really came in and he had big ideas for how to kind of make our script that much better.
PATRICK CUNNANE: And an incredibly specific vision. We had been in this for a while, and it’s like, David knows. When he came on board, it was unbelievable. He took it to the next level.
TREVOR WHITE: Early on in the casting process, David had people he thought were really right for this. And it started with Lizzie (Elizabeth Olsen) as like his North star. He just couldn’t get her as Joan out of his mind. Tim and I fortunately worked with Lizzie a couple times prior and thought, that’s wonderful. She felt equally charmed by the script and what it could be. Then we wanted Miles. We didn’t know if Miles was available at first. And then it turns out he became available and we went right to him. And once we got Miles, it was like we were off to the races.
You said before you wanted to steer away from darker territory. But at the same time, there’s at least one area that kind of struck me as very interesting at one point. I don’t want to say anything that’s going to spoil the film for people. When you put stuff together like that, were there other things where you want to seed some elements of a little heavier nature in here, but like you said, you want to be careful about the balance.
PATRICK CUNNANE: I should be clear, I don’t think — we weren’t afraid to have heavy things, even moments of darkness. What we were hoping to avoid is not taking ourselves and the world overly seriously to the point that it could become something else and something not fun to watch. But I think, we wanted to also pay tribute to the fact that these are characters who we’ve created and they’ve, some of them, they’ve lived very different lives and your lives aren’t perfect. And we wanted to touch on that.
TREVOR WHITE: If we’re talking about lives and lifetimes, we should certainly have a place where we feel the sadder elements.
What is next for you, gentlemen? What’s on the horizon?
TREVOR WHITE: We have a movie together.
PATRICK CUNNANE: Yeah, we’ve got another one together that’ll hopefully be going soon. I don’t know what we’re allowed to say or not say.
TREVOR WHITE: Well, some of it’s out there. We have another movie that we’re actually doing with Miles Teller, hopefully early next year. It’s set in the world of the Winter Olympics.
PATRICK CUNNANE: Sports romantic comedy.
TREVOR WHITE: Pat writes romantic comedy very well. We really love the genre. I think that’s the other thing. For us, it’s never about like, oh, Hollywood right now wants this genre. I think we just genuinely are fans of these kinds of movies.
PATRICK CUNNANE: I wouldn’t say 5 years ago, the industry was clamoring for romantic comedies, certainly theatrically. Now it does feel like we’re on a bit of an upswing. But it’s like a cliché of write what you actually love and care about. We have a lot of projects together. That’s the one that’s sort of public, but it’s so fun to work with Tim and Trevor.
How did you guys end up getting together in the 1st place?
PATRICK CUNNANE: It’s a funny story. I used to work in politics before I got into the entertainment industry. I worked in the Obama White House. And Rob Reiner was scouting the movie. My boss at the time knew I sort of wanted to get into entertainment. He was like, why don’t you give Rob a tour? I almost didn’t do it, actually. I was supposed to be out that day, but thank God I did, because if not for that tour, I never would have met Trevor or Tim, who happened to be on the tour.
TREVOR WHITE: We were on the tour because we were doing the movie with Rob called LBJ. Woody Harrelson was there, and we had this tour.
PATRICK CUNNANE: My memory of it is that Tim and or Trevor came up to me and said, “Oh, I always thought, you know, political writers would be good screenwriters.” And I happened to have written a pilot if you want to read it. They remember it differently where it’s like, I went up to them. I can’t imagine myself doing that. But that’s the origin story.
TREVOR WHITE: Then Pat moves to LA when his time in the White House was over. We started working on our first script together shortly thereafter that.
Did you realize that you had created one of the darkest afterlives that actually exists?
TREVOR WHITE: I see it reading Letterbox comments how people are like, this is my hell. This is my version of hell. So you would really love talking to our director, David, because I think David shares a lot of that. He’s got kind of darkness. For the loveliest man on planet Earth, he has like this weird kind of love of the dark stuff too.
PATRICK CUNNANE: As much as we don’t want to take ourselves or the world so self-seriously, we want people to come out of the movie provoking questions and conversations. That’s the whole goal is always to make it a fun, meaningful movie, but that I do think it raises some questions that will be really interesting to talk about at Thanksgiving.
TREVOR WHITE: We talked when we were breaking this — it was like every single thing we could think of about the world, we wrote down. We asked the questions. But there becomes a reality of like real estate in a movie and what actually your movie is about. So 98% of the stuff that we were like talking about, we didn’t put into the movie because we just thought we’ll end up spending so much time needing to explain things that it’s just better leaving it to people’s imaginations.
