Imagine a world where premarital sex is only legal for one night out of the whole year (and, yes, condoms are mandatory). It might seem preposterous, but it is the premise of the movie One Night Only, a hilarious rom-com that takes us up, down, and all around New York City—crucially, all in just one night.
For a film that is set in the biggest city in the United States, the characters manage to cover a lot of ground (and at least three boroughs) in one wild night. Allie (Monica Barbaro), a single musician with unrealized dreams who makes her income recording pharmaceutical jingles, and Owen (Callum Turner), a charming but recently dumped pizza shop proprietor, cannot stop bumping into each other. As they encounter handsome stranger after handsome stranger in a quest to get each other laid, one thing becomes abundantly clear: looks can be deceiving.
Director Will Gluck, of Easy A and Anyone But You, was excited to take on this New York-centric film as a born-and-bred New Yorker. Part of his mission was to use as much of the city— particularly locations from his childhood—as possible, while making the characters’ movements and transit choices actually plausible. “I was very concerned with geography,” Gluck said, “I’m really a stickler that it has to make sense. I don’t want them going the wrong way to get to the right place.”
Gluck was able to call up a lot of his local friends to take part in the film: “We were lucky that pretty much everyone said yes.” From Mike Birbiglia as a farcical cop to a bouncer at a Greenpoint club played by Ziwe, New York comedians abound. “Most importantly, I like filming parts of New York that you don’t really see in movies,” he told Condé Nast Traveler. Gluck spoke to Traveler about all the neighborhoods and locales, both planned and those discovered along the way, that made their way into One Night Only.
