In September of 2009, Hollywood director Edward Zwick set out to film “Love and Other Drugs,” a romantic drama loosely based on the life of Jamie Reidy, a drug representative for the major pharmaceutical company, Pfizer.

Zwick is well-known for movies such as “Blood Diamond,” “The Last Samurai” and “Glory.” However, this movie was entirely different from his dramatic films. It is his first venture into the genre of romantic comedy.

The film, set in 1997, follows the life of the young salesman as he and the entire pharmaceutical world go through a metamorphosis.

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as the story’s main character, Reidy. The film is laced with narration that suggests society’s dependence on over the counter and prescription drugs.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Campus, Edward Zwick explains his motives for the film and the many different decisions that went along with the making of “Love and Other Drugs.”

“To be honest, this film was very fun to make,” Zwick said. “The cast and the crew made it a very enjoyable experience throughout the whole process.”

“Love and Other Drugs,” although set in central Ohio, was filmed in Pittsburgh.

The city, which even masqueraded as Chicago in one scene, enticed Zwick to film there for its tax incentives and other perks.

“There are a lot of great advantages to shooting in Pittsburgh, the tax breaks being one of them ,” Zwick said. “Although coincidentally, Pittsburgh also happens to be the pharmaceutical drugs capital of the world.”

Even though the film focuses much of its attention on the world of pharmaceutical drugs,  “Love and Other Drugs” also tells the story of Reidy’s relationship with Anne Hathaway’s character Maggie Murdock, who suffers from the onset Parkinson’s disease.

The movie follows their relationship from start to finish, and surprisingly, uses sex as a story-telling tool to convey their budding romance.

“I was very explicit in the script that sex was going to be a major factor in the movie,” Zwick said. “We wanted sex to be a narrative in this film.”

While much of the film takes place in the beds of Reidy and Murdock, sex is only occasionally present.

Zwick claims that it was intimacy, not sex that he wanted the viewer to derive from those scenes.

“When a guy and girl get in bed for the first time, they spend a lot of time naked,” Zwick said. “We wanted there to be that honesty, the same way were we being honest about drugs and disease.”

The film takes a major turning point when Reidy, who has almost given up on trying to meet his quota of Prozac, gets assigned to sell a new drug, Viagra.

Called the “little blue pill,” Reidy’s life is taken for a spin when the demand for Viagra skyrockets the minute the pill is available to the market.

“Jamie’s book was really about his life when Viagra came to the marketplace,” Zwick said. “That was when it really became useful.

However, the romance, the mother, the brother – that was all created by us.”

If one were to ask Zwick what genre he would label this film, he would be hesitant to call it a romantic comedy.  

“Romantic comedy is one of those words that is in disrepair,” Zwick said.

“Typically, you take a lot of B-list actors, put them in unrealistic situations, and the result is neither romantic nor funny,” he said.

One aspect about this film that makes it a romantic comedy in the traditional sense is the fight that the viewer witnesses between Murdock’s early onset of Parkinson’s disease.

He said that in order to fully capture a genuine view of Parkinson’s he did extensive research on the disease and filmed a group of people who actually had it, allowing them to ad-lib.

“Parkinson’s was a very interesting disease to portray,” Zwick said.

“While Jake’s character is in a world of quick fixes, he is faced with this disease that had no cure and still to this day, is very hard to treat.”

Even though “Love and Other Drugs” may be tinged with seriousness and drama, Zwick approaches the heavy topics with a different approach, humor.

“It can’t be funny enough,” Zwick said. “Humor is a way to deal with everything in my opinion. The most serious situation should be looked at humorously.”

“Love and Other Drugs” hits theaters Nov. 24.