Welcome to modern rom-com week at The Daily Beast’s Obsessed! In honor of two big romance releases this week—The Fall Guy and The Idea of You—we’re celebrating everything we love about the last 15 years of romantic comedies.
August Moon mania is upon us. The British boy band dropped their jaunty debut single, “Dance Before We Walk,” last month. At the same time, they launched an Instagram account that’s already racked up tens of thousands of followers, thanks to the guys’ swoon-worthy photoshoots and brotherly behind-the-scenes clips. YouTube commenters have christened them “boy band perfection,” while Twitter has crowned them “iconic.” A full-length album is on the way to appease their legions of fans, lovingly known as Moonheads.
The only catch? August Moon isn’t a real band.
The British quintet is actually the fictional pop group from The Idea of You, Amazon Studios’ steamy adaptation of the hit 2017 novel by Robinne Lee. The film—which premieres May 2 Prime Video—revolves around Solène (Anne Hathaway), a 40-year-old divorced mom who unexpectedly falls for 24-year-old Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine). But their love story is more Notting Hill than May December; Hayes is the dreamy lead singer of the world’s hottest boy band and his meet-cute with Solène happens backstage at Coachella, of all places.
Music, clearly, is a crucial element of The Idea of You, which is why director Michael Showalter and producer Cathy Schulman recruited an all-star team to build August Moon and craft the film’s accompanying soundtrack, which includes seven original songs. Among them was music supervisor Frankie Pine, who had just wrapped up filming Daisy Jones & the Six, another book-to-screen adaptation that involved bringing a fictional band to life (and quite successfully, too; Aurora, the album from that show’s Fleetwood Mac-esque rock troupe, shot to the top of the iTunes charts and earned a Grammy nomination). Riding high off that triumph, Pine jumped at the chance to help invent a world-famous boy band.
“I think boy bands get a bad connotation [of making] cheesy pop music, and we knew that we didn’t want them to be categorized as that,” Pine tells The Daily Beast about her creative approach to August Moon. “I never go into a project where I feel like the music should be bad, and this was the same situation. We didn’t want the music to come across as cheesy or not well-written. And with Savan on board, I mean, I don’t know how you don’t get just amazing songs.”
That’d be Savan Kotecha, the lead songwriter and producer for The Idea of You, whose hits include The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face” and a slew of Ariana Grande singles, like “Break Free” and “No Tears Left to Cry.” Not only does he boast a stacked pop music résumé, but he knows what it’s like writing from characters’ perspectives. Kotecha grew up writing songs inspired by Dawson’s Creek, and he previously helmed the soundtrack for Netflix’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. In sketching out August Moon’s sound, Kotecha knew he’d have to write and produce songs that would make a viewer buy into the group as a Coachella-headlining sensation.
“The challenge was going, ‘OK, so we’re gonna meet them at their peak, and you have to believe that they are this big pop band. And the songs have to live up to that,’” Kotecha tells The Daily Beast. “It’s something I learned working with Simon Cowell on X Factor when we would pick songs for people to sing. Certain songs are great songs to listen to, but they have to feel grand enough to pop off on screen.”
He approached that challenge by attempting to mirror the trajectory of a real boy band—one who, in this case, started out as a non-threatening guilty pleasure before eventually morphing into an edgier, radio-dominating force.
“The idea I had was to go, ‘OK, let’s break it down. What would their very first single sound like?’ The first thing would be something sweeter and vanilla and younger. So we had ‘I Got You,’” Kotecha explains, nodding to the virtuous acoustic guitar ballad that marks the first time we hear August Moon in the movie. “And then what would their second single feel like? We need an up-tempo dance [song]. ‘Taste’ came out of that,” he says of the gleaming BTS-esque earworm. “Then it was, ‘OK, their third single, now they have more control of the album.’ They wanna maybe be a little grittier, add more guitars, and that’s ‘Guard Down,’ [which] is actually about the pitfalls of fame. That’s how the progression went in my head. I wanted to make it feel as real as possible.”
Sound-wise, Kotecha says he and his team discussed no real-life references and were instead “starting from scratch.” So, yes, to answer the question on many listeners’ minds: The One Direction comparisons are overblown, in his opinion—though perhaps not entirely unfounded, considering he reunited for the soundtrack with songwriter Carl Falk, with whom he co-wrote 1D’s breakout hit “What Makes You Beautiful.”
“It’s so funny—I’ve been asked this so much, and until ‘Dance Before We Walk’ was out, it never entered [my mind],” Kotecha laughs about the parallels between 1D and August Moon, and Hayes Campbell and Harry Styles. “Maybe it’s stupid of me because I was so in it, and when you’re in it you kinda don’t understand what you’re doing sometimes. That was never the goal. Me and Carl never even spoke about it. I think it’s just that when we write male pop songs together, that’s what it sounds like. … People are drawing the comparisons, but I think when people see the movie, they’ll understand it’s not the same band.”
Pine agrees, adding that the differences between One Direction and August Moon have more to do with the two bands’ demeanors than their music.
“For August Moon, we wanted them musically to be as strong as One Direction. I think that was a big component,” she says. “But we also wanted them to be quite not as flashy as One Direction. We wanted them to feel a little bit more grounded, like with the clothing, and making them a little bit more approachable and down-to-earth.”
To that end, the pressure was on to pick the five heartthrobs who’d comprise August Moon. Pine says the “biggest criteria” was that they wanted dancers to play the four band members alongside Galitzine’s Hayes, so they cast professional dancers Viktor White, Dakota Adan, Raymond Cham, Jr., and Jaiden Anthony in the roles. None of them sing on the August Moon songs; Galitzine does lead vocals on all of the soundtrack album’s original tracks, while Kotecha himself sings the second verses of songs like “Taste” and “Guard Down.”
The main priority, though, was finding an actor with the right blend of charisma and musical talent to play a frontman who could convincingly seduce Anne Hathaway. And though Pine says Galitzine would be “the first to say that he’s not a dancer,” he certainly checked those other boxes.
“I got to see his chemistry read with Anne,” Pine recalls of Galitzine’s audition video. “I got goosebumps. I was like, ‘Oh my word, these two are going to be hot in this movie.’”
Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine on a plane in a still from ‘The Idea of You’
Alisha Wetherill
Kotecha had a similar reaction: “They were sending me auditions of other guys, and they were all good. But then the last one they sent was Nick and his chemistry read with Anne. And you just saw [it] right away,” he says. “It was that lightning-in-a-bottle thing. … But obviously my big thing was like, can he sing? What does he sound like?”
Luckily, they struck gold with the 29-year-old English actor, who had sung before on screen in Cinderella opposite Camila Cabello, and who occasionally treats his Instagram followers to clips of him singing and playing guitar. Once he was cast, Kotecha began writing songs that would complement the actor’s vocal style, and Galitzine rehearsed in Los Angeles with celeb vocal coach Eric Vetro before jetting off to Kotecha’s studio in Sweden for what the producer admits was “an intense few days of recording.”
“Poor Nick—he had no chance to be jet-lagged or anything. We just threw him right in,” Kotecha says. “I think it was like four days. That’s how impressive he is. Normally we would spend a lot more time per song, but he was such a pro.”
“And the movie doesn’t work unless he’s genuinely that good,” Kotecha adds. “I mean, A Star Is Born did it so great with ‘Shallow.’ It’s like, yeah, when you see that crowd, when [Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine] sings that song on stage, and [Lady Gaga’s Ally] joins him, you believe everything.”
If A Star Is Born had “Shallow,” then The Idea of You has “Dance Before We Walk,” which Pine calls the “centerpiece” of the movie because of its evolution from a simple piano melody that Hayes plays for Solène, to an acoustic ballad that she encourages him to keep sharpening, to a full-blown pop banger that soundtracks the band’s whirlwind European tour.
It also, Pine points out, crucially signals Hayes’ increasing hunger to go solo: “You get that moment of, ‘This guy is a real writer.’ He isn’t just a pretty-faced dancer in a boy band. There is a deeper side, which he really struggles to discover. Seeing that kind of growth in a song is really important.”
That sentiment runs through the rest of the songs that make up the Idea of You soundtrack, like “Go Rogue,” which is Hayes trying to establish himself as a “more left-of-center artist,” according to Kotecha. Ditto for “The Idea of You,” a sweeping ballad that appears in the film’s end credits. On those songs, the goal was to differentiate Hayes’ music from the poppier, bouncier August Moon sound and its more “run-of-the-mill” pop lyrics.
“‘Off the moon and I’m hitting the ground like a rocket’ is like, I’m off August Moon and I’m running, I’m going for it,” Kotecha says. “Sound-wise, it’s closer to August Moon sonics. But it was actually more live drums and more guitars. ‘The Idea of You,’ as well, was live strings and less synthetic. It has a lot more emotion, and it’s Hayes writing from his point of view.”
Though fans of these songs might be grappling with the hard truth that they can’t actually see August Moon or Hayes Campbell live in concert anytime soon, the fictional hitmakers seem to be filling the void in a world that’s overdue for a new boy band moment.
“I hope for now, August Moon fills the space,” Kotecha says. “They’re fun, and that’s what it should be. I think the mistake people make when they try and make these boy bands or when they try and make them cool is like, it’s not supposed to be cool. That’s the fun of it. There’s already enough cool things in the world. You sometimes just need something that’s fun and doesn’t take itself seriously.”
