Married directors Scarlett Bermingham and Andrew Rhymer on making rom‑com All That She Wants about trying to get pregnant
Scarlett Bermingham and Andrew Rhymer tell IndieWire how their first feature as a directing duo, All That She Wants, interweaves rom‑com beats with a candid look at fertility and family, and how their own lives echoed the story.
Scarlett Bermingham and Andrew Rhymer, a married filmmaking duo, discussed their Toronto Film Festival premiere, All That She Wants, in an interview with IndieWire. The rom‑com follows Emma, a dancer in her 30s who wants a baby but not necessarily a relationship, and Luke, a younger grad student who complicates her plans. Bermingham and Rhymer said the film’s themes hit close to home: their own struggles to secure financing coincided with pregnancies in their family, and they delivered the director’s cut a week before their son's birth. The project is the pair’s first feature as co‑directors and aims to broaden how the rom‑com handles a woman’s desire to start a family.
Toronto premiere and the film’s premise
Annie Murphy and Cooper Raiff bring different tones to familiar roles
A directing partnership shaped by parenthood and long financing battles
Bermingham and Rhymer spent around four years assembling financing for the film, and they said major life events overlapped with its development. In an interview with IndieWire, they said Scarlett was pregnant when they first signed on, and a couple of years later they learned she was pregnant again; their son was six months old at the time of the conversation. The directors said they turned in the director’s cut a week before the baby was born. This was their first feature as co‑directors, and they described a collaborative process in which disagreements led them to find a stronger third option. They also acknowledged the practical challenges of combining parenting with filmmaking, from late‑night script fixes to always being in conversation about the work.