‘The Love Hypothesis’ Director On Ch 16 Scene, First Kiss & More

SPOILER ALERT: This piece spoils the entirety of The Love Hypothesis movie now streaming on Prime Video.

Editor’s Note: Trigger Warning – The following contains mention of sexual harassment. Help is available at the National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673.

The order of several pivotal scenes in Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis was switched up for the film adaptation of the best-selling romance novel, directed by Claire Scanlon and starring Tom Bateman and Lili Reinhart.

The film centers around a fake dating ploy that benefits both parties — Olive (Reinhart) convinces her best friend Ahn (Rachel Marsh) that Ahn should shoot her shot with their mutual crush Jeremy and Adam (Bateman) makes his higher ups aware that he’s in a serious relationship and in no way planning to leave Stanford University, which has funded much of his research but pulled the plug based on rumors that he might depart. What starts out as a simple business arrangement develops into real romance, which faces its obstacles when a certain Dr. Tom Benton (Arty Froushan) comes to town.

The very important Chapter 16 sex scene between Olive and Adam was moved up in the film, and Scanlon already felt the “pressure” to get that one right alone. Luckily an audience of 40% book readers and fans gave the green light.

“When we started, there was just a quick paragraph of the sex scene, and then I read the book, and [said to] Sarah Rothschild, who wrote a great adaptation, ‘I think we need to build out that sex scene.’ Then I went on TikTok and I saw everyone [saying] ‘chapter 16, chapter 16.” I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this has to be more,’ Scanlon told Deadline. “Translating the book, which is over a chapter, to the screen — you can’t do that long with a sex scene. That would be not right. But just making sure that you got it tonally is always going to be tricky because everyone’s got their own internal dialog and their own imagination of what it all looks like. We were ready for all the criticism, and then there wasn’t any.”

To back up, a chaotic kiss with Dr. Carlsen initiated by Olive sets the fake-dating scheme of The Love Hypothesis into motion. Olive panics and smooches the first man she sees — who happens to be the notorious Dr. Evil — to throw Ahn off the scent late one Saturday night in the lab. This snowballs into a whiplash of planned PDA and falling in love between the scientists.

“We shot the first kiss on the first week. I wanted to make sure we got that dynamic established. And when we got that scene, I was like, ‘We have a movie’ because you just get all of it, watching it, trying to recreate the book cover in the actual scene. Paying homage to the book cover, and just in general, trying to get the tone of that scene, all the elements that were going into it. Ahn’s coming up the stairs, [Olive]’s running this way. He’s like, “What?” Scanlon said. “Then he’s pissed because when you think about it from his point of view, he hasn’t been touched for years by anyone. Everyone’s so scared of him. That fact that someone smacked a kiss on him and then immediately rejects him, like that’s gotta suck, you know?”

Dr. Carlsen quips about filing a Title IX complaint because Olive technically doesn’t wait for him to give consent before she kisses him. Another key moment that brings Title IX truly into question was shuffled to occur after the Chapter 16 scene, compared to book order. Carlsen’s colleague and seemingly close friend Dr. Tom Benton, whose research aligns with Olive’s pancreatic cancer work, offers her a position on his lab bench at Harvard University to continue conducting her experiments, but rather than base it off of Olive’s merit alone, he lays down the ultimatum that Olive must sleep with him in order to use his lab and equipment.

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“Visually, it made more sense to have this lovely night, be on a high, and then the rug pulled out from beneath [Olive]. In so many ways, you have to truncate scenes and support the chronological order of things, and so it was something that we needed to manage and address. And then, because we changed that order, he couldn’t come at her and right after the conference, it had to be something different,” Scanlon said. “We liked the idea of him being able to say, “I had coffee. I had a coffee in my hand the whole time. I never didn’t have a coffee,” so he would have plausible deniability.”

What seems like an innocent move to bring coffee up to Adam’s hotel room at the Society for Biological Development Conference quickly turns sinister with the knowledge that Adam has already flown back to California. His implication that their working relationship be “equally beneficial” to that between Olive and Adam quickly sours his offer and her exciting opportunity, not to mention complicating matters between Olive and Adam as well as Adam and Tom by extension.

“She can’t get out. He’s blocking her from the door. There was a lot of talk about things that, technically, in a legal case, he’s probably done this so many times. He knows exactly how to do it, like so many people do,” Scanlon added. “[He] could have plausible deniability, but technically, we know how she looks, and we are experiencing what she’s experiencing, and you know darn well what he’s doing. We thought a lot about it.”

In the below interview, Scanlon further unpacks the denouement of the film, full circle moments, working in the romantic comedy space and whether an Ali Hazelwood cameo was discussed. She also teases upcoming project The Probability of Miracles, a TV show currently in production with Prime Video.

DEADLINE: Ahn is the one to tell Adam about Tom Benton, and they’re looking at each other in the mirrors. Can you talk about filming that scene?

SCANLON: We shot in that same space twice, the opening of the movie, which was very obfuscated, so you never see what Adam looks like because of [Olive’s] contact lenses. And then, obviously, what’s so interesting about shooting into the mirror? It’s a small space, but also, Ahn is feeling him out. Is [Adam] duplicitous? Is he on board? Does he know that Tom has this proclivity to sexually harass women that he works with? Is he complicit? So I think there’s this duality and reflection, “Are you a good person or not?”

You’re looking in the mirror and it’s kind of like, “Who are you? Who is this person in the mirror?” And then when she says, “Did you know?” And he’s like, “Know what? And she’s like, “He’s a piece of shit.” And he’s like, “Wait, what? And she’s like, “Okay, I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Rightfully so. Here’s what happened. “And he’s like, “You’re a good friend Ahn. And she’s like, “Yeah, duh.” And then he storms off to the tune of our version of Darth Vader’s theme.

DEADLINE: I was going to ask about that music sounding like Darth Vader.

SCANLON: And it’s when he comes in the coffee shop. In the rough cut, we actually just used John Williams, and it always elicited a laugh. And then our wonderful composer Laura Karpman, I was like, “Laura, you’ve got to pay your best John Williams homage at this moment,” and she had so much fun with it.

DEADLINE: Did you ever talk to Ali [Hazelwood] about a cameo? Was that ever thought of in the film?

SCANLON: Yes, and the answer was no. She came to set. I feel like she gave us her blessing, first with the script, but then she also came to set when we were shooting at Cal Tech. We did a day in LA. We shot mostly in Montreal.

We did a day in LA for exteriors with Lili, and it looks really good when she’s storming through the campus to go confront [Adam] after she finds out that Malcolm’s been fired from his team. Anytime you see a palm tree, odds are that, either, we were carrying two palm trees in Montreal, and we just would stick them in the background. Or when there’s a myriad of palm trees, that’s Caltech.

But she came that day, and she was so sweet. She is very quiet and unassuming. As [producer] Elizabeth [Cantillon] would say, she’s like a sprightly little elf putting pixie dust over everything in a wonderful way. You really see how she holds up other authors. She’s always advocating for others. She saw this and she said all these nice things about the film. She’s just really a wonderful advocate who uses her space in media to uphold others, and she’s done so with this film as well.

DEADLINE: The scene where they’re making the Rube Goldberg machine looked really fun and chaotic. Plus it’s not in the book.

SCANLON: We realized there were some scenes where she’s in his world, and we just wanted a scene where he’s in her world. So that’s where that came out about. First we were gonna do an ABC (Anything But Clothes) party. So you make balloons instead, or use a keg, or you make stuff out of like boxes, and it’s silly, but they’re fun.

But comfortability-wise, we were like, “That’s not gonna work.” It’s fun on the page, but we started talking to the costume designer, and they’re like, “Yeah, no, this is really hard for all those background actors to have anything but clothes on.” It would just have been a nightmare. And then the Rube Goldberg of it all, I remember Elizabeth being like, “We have to storyboard this.” And both the DP and I were like, “Oh no, no, no, no!” We know exactly how to approach this. It’s got to be chaos. It’s handheld. Nothing really is handheld in the film other than the sex scene and the Rube Goldberg machine. But just him being in her world and actually being able to hang and getting people to like him. He’s coming in and nobody likes him, and then being fun and helping and being game basically shows you, “Oh they really could get on. They might actually be each other’s people.”

DEADLINE: The epilogue two years later when the students are talking about rumors around Olive felt really full circle from when she walks into the Bass Building at the beginning of the film. Why did you want to bring it to an end that way?

SCANLON: Oh, for sure, it’s the two of them. There’s two girls coming in, and it was Ahn and Olive coming in the first go-around when they were nervous and starting. And Ahn’s like, “Let’s go up front. You can’t sit in the back. Can’t learn anything from the back.” And you’re watching two other girls, proxies for our two main stars. It is funny that Doctor Evil had a nickname and now it’s Doctor Smythe and her whole thing was trying to not make him Doctor Evil, but I think no matter what you do, the game of telephone is going to happen with scared young people starting school and they’re going to give you a nickname whether you like it or not, and it’s up to you to show, “Hey, yeah, I’m tough,” but like she said, someone got dehydrated from a party the night before. It wasn’t that she was a tough teacher, but it’s like a little bit of fear. Let’s let that ride. A little fear is good.

DEADLINE: Did you feel any similarities to Set It Up when you were filming The Love Hypothesis? Or maybe anything that informed you from shooting Set It Up? Rom coms are doing so well right now. I’m curious your thoughts there.

SCANLON: I would say my favorite films, my touchstone films that I always encourage people to watch when we’re working together on something like this — I did it on Set It Up — are His Girl Friday, It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, and those were called screwball comedies. I don’t quite know what change happened to call them romantic comedies because aren’t they the same essentially? I love those. Those are my favorite movies, and I like how witty the women are. They are equals, and this is the 30s and 40s, and I would say nothing’s changed. They still hold true. All those films still feel fun and fresh, and women are definitely the drivers of those films, and I love that. That’s probably why I was drawn to them in the first place. I think, for a while, the genre got a little lazy. I don’t think I’m unique in thinking this. Relying on the tropes rather than having fun with them, thwarting them. I think Set It Up definitely gave wink winks to them. Another touchstone would be When Harry Met Sally, three of the four people in that movie are just normal looking people, and they’re just in funny situations and they create funny situations and they miscommunicate and those are all things that happen in daily life. So I think the you can be in a silly situation, but it’s grounded.

This is at Stanford. It’s in labs. They really look like Stanford students. We had this wonderful consultant, Sonia Cruiz, who was so great and told us everything we were doing wrong and helped us set up the beakers and the test tubes and everything. So were some of the grad students that were in background. They were real grad students, so they knew too, at Concordia University in Montreal. They were totally having fun with it as well, feeling good that their field of study was being honored in a major motion picture. In general, I really try and strive to have lots of comedy in romantic comedies, not short shrift the comedy. That is my background too, and then also not take anyone for granted, have flawed characters but grounded and real, fully, three-dimensional.

I want to mention Malcolm in that regard. Malcolm could just appear like so many characters I’ve seen in these tropes of “gay black friend.” “Gay Black best friend” and check, we did that. We did all the things we’re supposed to do per 2026 PC rules. That’s not what he is at all. He is a three-dimensional flawed character who’s not pulling his own weight. He’s not doing a good job. He’s blaming his friend. He is not doing a great job moving through the world. He’s supportive of his friend to a point, but then he’s also slacking. He’s fully realized, and when he is an asshole, he’s an asshole through and through. He yells at her, and it’s not her fault. And he has done damage, and he has to do the repair. That is a great character to me. It’s not just like, “Hey, he’s got the witty comment because he’s funny and he’s gay and he’s Black.” He is just a real person.

And we need people just like him who fuck up, and then they have to apologize, or they’re not your friend anymore. There’s only one or two ways that was gonna go. I love the character of Malcolm for that reason. And I think Jaboukie [Young-White] was truly the only person to be able to bring him to life. He’s so good. And Jabouki was in Set It Up. He got a SAG card on Set It Up. His character got the key” “I know this key says do not duplicate, but you must duplicate, or my boss is going to kill me.” I was so happy for that full circle moment.

DEADLINE: What’s next for you?

SCANLON: The Probability of Miracles is something that’s shooting right now. That’s another book to to television adaptation. That one’s for Amazon.

It’s a really unusual show. It’s not the YA trope that you’re used to because it’s about a teen with cancer so it’s really different. I was like, “why do they want a comedy director?” But they did. I did get some surreal stuff to shoot. I’m very excited. I haven’t seen my editor’s cut yet. They’re still putting them together, so I’m excited for that. But I will tell you that television show was the first time I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with a female DP, Lindsay George, and she was phenomenal.

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She was out of this world, and I can’t wait to see how it all looks cut together because it was some beautiful cinematography, story aside, which is very impactful and powerful. And Ginny Goodwin is amazing in it. Ginnifer Goodwin, she plays the mum. It is gorgeous. I would watch it just for the visuals alone, and I think that it’s so high quality. Comedies can be very lazy, and TV can sometimes be lazy in terms of cinematography. I mean, not all of it. Obviously, like Widow’s Bay is incredible. I don’t mean to be reductive, but sometimes it is short-shrifted, especially in that space, and that is not the case with this at all. It is gorgeous.

I’m really excited, and it’s surreal. It’s definitely got a lot of magical surrealism because that’s what the story’s about.