Screenwriter Matt Lopez On Creating A Relatable 'Father of the Bride' Remake
Whether you love them or hate them, remakes are an integral part of the film industry. Admittedly, not all of them are necessary. Some deliver nostalgia. Others are just clear cash grabs. The good thing is that for every film as unwatchable as Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla, there’s a certified spectacle like Peter Jackson’s King Kong. And the balance is slowly shifting. New voices are constantly coming forward to genuinely give audiences a chance to see old stories through a new lenses. One of the best examples of this is the latest iteration of Father of the Bride.
While some may think it is a remake of the 1991 film starring Steve Martin, that film is actually the remake. The very first Father of the Bride film was released in 1950. And that film was based on the book of the same name. Each version follows a father coming to terms with giving his “little girl” away - all while humorously dealing with all the hijinks that accompany planning a wedding.
The newest version sticks to the skeleton of the other stories too, but it also has quite a few twists. For one, the family at the center of the film is Cuban and a majority of the cast consists of Hispanic and Latinx actors. Secondly, a wedding isn’t the only arrangement at the heart of the film. All while trying to oversee their daughter’s nuptials, the parents (played by Andy García and Gloria Estefan) are in the process of filing for divorce. Because they don’t want their failure as a couple to overshadow their daughter’s big day, they go to extra lengths to keep their marital woes a secret while trying to make sure the wedding goes smoothly.
In Hispanic culture, there is nothing more important than family. So it’s easy to see why adapting this story through a Latinx lens works. Speaking in an exclusive interview with FilmSpeak’s Dempsey Pillot, screenwriter Matt Lopez broke down the decision to mix up the already successful formula so drastically. According to him, it came down to something a lot simpler than his culture. He told the site, “I had this idea of basically opening the movie with the discovery that the parents of the bride [are] on the brink of total collapse.” He added that he thought that plot point would specifically resonate with anyone who’s ever gotten married. “Those of us who have been married a while… It's hard to keep that love alive,” he shared.
Lopez especially wanted to do right by both parents of the bride because no previous adaptation really cared to talk about how a wedding might impact the mother as well as the father. “As great as the previous versions are, those movies were not very concerned with the mother of the bride,” he said. “By framing the story in that way, [the film] created this element of farce because Andy García and Gloria Estefan, the parents of the bride, have to kind of pretend and go through the motions like they're still getting along great, just so that they can get this girl down the aisle.”
Their situation puts them in a unique situation though. As Lopez puts it, “In a kind of heartwarming way, it allowed us to see if, through the process of putting their daughter's wedding together, [they could] get back in touch with why they fell in love in the first place.”
Father of the Bride (Courtesy of Warner Media).
In the interview, Lopez also discussed the importance of preserving cultural customs that literally get lost in translation between generations. He talked a little bit about his experiences as a Cuban-American too, saying, “If you are a first, second, third generation American, there's an immigrant experience not too far back in the rearview mirror of your family. The first generation comes over, and hold fast to [those traditions]. It's a bond that a family shares. And then through the generations, you start having kids, and they become more Americanized, and there's this assimilation that happens. And it's a beautiful assimilation in many ways, but there's also a cost to it, and there's tension to it.”
That’s not to say that the film is more dramatic than previous versions. Father of the Bride is a comedy at its core - and a really funny one too. If successful, Lopez hopes to get the chance to work on a sequel. After all, every other version got a sequel. In the interview he teased the idea for his dream sequel, and it’s a concept that’s almost too good not to do. He calls it “Father of the Brides.”