There was a time when it looked as though It’s Complicated writer-director Nancy Meyers would be working with Tina Fey on The Intern. That time was April 2012, and it has now passed, along with Fey and original studio Paramount. But Meyers hasn’t given up on the movie, has secured financing through Worldview Entertainment, and has Reese Witherspoon and Robert De Niro in talks to star.
Witherspoon would play the successful founder of a flourishing fashion website who is asked to recruit someone from her company’s Senior Intern Program. She’s assigned a 70-year-old widower who was himself an adept businessman before he retired.
The differing values initially cause friction between the pair but – you’ll never guess – eventually they find a way to work together. “It seemed more interesting than having to see yet another thing set at an ad agency,” Meyers said at the time the film was originally announced. “The character is much younger than me, but I was attracted to the pressures the character feels with her business, her husband and kids, and seeing all this from the point of view of a man who has been through it.”
Meyers introduced the project at the American Film Market on Thursday, and is looking to get started on it early next year. Witherspoon has worked on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice and refugee drama The Good Lie and is currently shooting Wild. De Niro will show up in the comedies Last Vegas and Grudge Match, and David O. Russell's American Hustle.