BOUNCE is a romantic drama about two strangers, a hot shot urban ad exec and a struggling single mom, who fall in love - only one of them knows it wasn't by chance.
With BOUNCE, writer/director Don Roos presents a dramatic love story for a generation savvy about the risks involved in romance. Buddy Amaral is a single man and Abby Janello is a single mom with a simple life. The only thing they have in common is that they are both trying to "bounce" back from hard times. More than simply meet, they collide into one another, or so it seems to Abby. As their relationship deepens and Abby feels she may have received that elusive second chance, she comes to realize their first meeting was not as innocent as she'd believe. Starring Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow, BOUNCE is a story not only about romance but about romantic reality - and taking chances.
Having previously directed the dark and biting comedy "The Opposite of Sex," Don Roos decided to switch all his gears with BOUNCE. "Everything's romantic comedies — but I wanted to do a love story that was different. It's very natural for contemporary writers to use spin and attitude and irony — and I love to write like that. But if you're going to do an honest love story, if you're going to hook people into a relationship between a man and woman, you have to leave that behind. You can't hide behind anything — you have to expose your heart and let the audience experience the visceral feelings."
Roos wrote BOUNCE in a flash of inspiration. What began as a story of on "chance connections" turned into a look at how a man and a woman make sense of love, loss and the unexpected. "When the idea came to me, it was entirely complete," he admits. "I have always been fascinated by the ways in which destiny, fate and choice all come together in love — and Buddy and Abby's story just seemed to take on all those complexities. I wound up with two very real characters who find themselves in a seemingly impossible situation."
From the beginning Roos knew he needed two actors who could capture the essence of falling in love — while remaining real, every day human beings. In Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow he found an unforced chemistry. Through their interaction, Roos felt he would be able to catalogue the funny, touching and revelatory moments that mark the development of Abby and Buddy's relationship.
Affleck saw the character of Buddy as a man who discovers the best part of himself through an out-of-control chain of events. "He starts off as an underdeveloped, immature kind of guy. He doesn't really know what he wants, even though he seems very successful on the outside," he says. "He goes through a process in order to grow up. He needs to make the hard decisions if he's going to be able to share his life with someone else."
Paltrow was attracted to the purity of the script's love story. "It is rare that you come across a movie where the central story is so much about the dynamic between two people," sums up Paltrow. "This was an extraordinarily well written and really resonant look at love — and we responded to that."
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