Nestled in the quiet Los Angeles suburb of Tarzana, on the campus of Portola Middle School, a graduation ceremony is under way. Here, bright-eyed young students struggle to contain their enthusiasm as their beaming parents look on from the sidelines.

But amid this chaos of so many families are some familiar faces—Hollywood stars Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Steve Carell and a host of others filming their new ensemble comedy, Crazy, Stupid, Love.

“This is the end of the movie,” explains director Glenn Ficarra, who shares filmmaking duties with longtime collaborator John Requa. “The ‘happy end,’ if you will, of our ‘happy-ending.’”

Based on an original screenplay from writer Dan Fogelman, Crazy, Stupid, Love. follows the trials and tribulations of Carell’s character, Cal Weaver, a man whose seemingly idyllic world is upended when his marriage falls apart. Leading the good life, complete with a rewarding career, a beautiful home, adoring children—and what he presumes to be a happy marriage to high-school sweetheart, Emily (Julianne Moore)—Cal’s world is undone when he learns that his wife has cheated on him and now wants a divorce.  

Thrust into the world of singledom, Cal, who hasn’t been single in decades, certainly has his work cut out for him. Spending his nights alone sulking at a local bar, he soon meets something of a savior in the form of Jacob Palmer (Gosling). Taking pity on the hapless Cal, Jacob decides to take the middle-aged marital refugee under his wing in an attempt to help him win back his self-confidence, starting with a decent haircut and new wardrobe, and begin living his life again. 

Onscreen with would-be wingman Jacob, Carell’s character is, not surprisingly, quickly put through his paces in that dating world and transformed by Jacob’s makeover, in which he loses the “cheap haircut, the ill-fitting clothes,” Carell describes.

“But, more important, Jacob tries to bolster Cal’s self-esteem, because that was something that was severely lacking in the marriage.”

Gosling, who is known for the acclaimed roles he’s delivered in complex dramas like Blue Valentine, Lars and the Real Girl and the romantic blockbuster The Notebook, had met Carell early in his career on the 1999 project The Unbelievables. “He was so funny I would just go to the set to watch him work,” Gosling recalls.  “I never had any scenes with him, but I’d always wanted to work with him.” 

Crazy, Stupid, Love. not only gave him the chance, but also represents the actor’s first comedy. “So, when I had the opportunity to do this, I just had to jump at it,” he says. “That, on top of the fact that I just loved the script. I laughed out loud while I was reading it.” Doing comedy opposite Carell, Gosling says, “was just easy. There’s not much you can throw at him that he won’t hit.  But he’s also very gracious. He finds out where your strengths are and then finds a way to play to them. I mean, Steve makes you funny.... He doesn’t have that in mind, but he finds out what you can do and then he gives you opportunities to highlight that, to feature it.”

“Ryan is just an amazing actor, one of the smartest I’ve ever worked with,” says Ficarra. “His character, Jacob, is just this guy who’s become the perfect ladies’ man. It’s like he’s honed it down over the years to such an art form that it’s become almost scientific, like a calculation. That’s where we needed him in the story. And he plays it perfectly.”

“Ryan also brings an intelligence and a back story to it,” adds Requa. “He sets this character apart from being just some typical womanizer. He makes it much more complex than that.”  

Gosling describes Jacob as “sort of this guy who haunts this bar, and then he notices that Carell’s character is being even creepier than he is, so he figures he can teach him to be a Lothario. But the truth is that Jacob’s at the end of his heyday.  He’s lost his luster and he’s kind of trying to pass on the baton.”

Jacob’s days as a player may be numbered thanks to the charms of Hannah, played by Stone, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in Easy A and is next slated to play Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spiderman. Hannah, she says, is the first woman to rebuff Jacob’s charms. “She’s a law student trying to take her bar exam,” Stone describes. “She’s in a content relationship with this guy, played by Josh Groban, who is also a lawyer and just kind of a nice guy. And then, in one night, she turns on a dime and shakes her whole life up, which I really loved because I think that a lot of things in life happen drastically and quickly. Sometimes you just have a big revelation.”

With the filmmakers’ encouragement, Stone and Gosling relished the opportunity to improvise over the course of their characters’ date. “Glenn and John were really open and incredible,” Stone supplies. “They let us explore and find things in each other on camera and off. It was a really incredible work environment just because the lines were kind of blurred. It was just so much fun between takes and we were able to hopefully keep that alive in the movie.”

Somehow between them, they decided to recreate a move from Dirty Dancing, in which Gosling hoisted Stone in the air, which took a day to perfect. “I don’t remember how that started, but it just seemed like a good idea at the time,” Gosling recalls. “I thought it would be funny if some guy’s move was someone else’s move, and that it would say a lot about him.”

The atmosphere of improvisation and fun on set, Requa explains, was “always within the context of the scene or as something to play with after we’ve completed a scene. It’s not like we roll the camera and it all just comes out of their heads; it all branches off [screenwriter] Fogelman’s dialogue.” 

“Oftentimes when people ask me what the movie’s about, it’s hard to figure out the exact one-liner to describe it,” says Fogelman, who sees the film as a throwback to the multilayered comedies that have become increasingly rare in today’s Hollywood. “I’m a huge fan of James Brooks’s movies, but it’s getting harder and harder to do those kinds of character-driven comedies that are romantic in nature, but not necessarily romantic comedies.”

***Now in Philippine theaters, Crazy, Stupid, Love. is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.