Writer/director Adam Brooks doesn’t rush into projects. In fact, it’s been eight years since he last directed a film, although he has kept busy in the interim writing screenplays. The Universal Pictures romantic comedy/whodunit Definitely, Maybe marks Brooks’ first foray into commercial, larger budget projects as a director. And working on Definitely, Maybe was such a positive experience, it’s likely he’ll return to the land of big studio productions in the future - and it won't take him another eight years to do so.

“I think it’s a world that I want to stay in,” said Brooks. “My last film didn’t do very well and it was very hard for me when it didn’t do very well, so I think I just went back to writing for a little while. But this was the most enjoyable, fulfilling directing experience I’ve had so far, so I look forward to getting back to it very soon.”

Brooks wrote the screenplays for Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Wimbledon, and Practical Magic, so he’s definitely (no maybe about it) not a stranger to the romantic comedy genre. But with Definitely, Maybe Brooks was determined to spin the genre on its head by approaching the love story from a totally different angle. “I really see it as that I wanted to reinvent the romantic comedy storytelling a little bit in this movie and do something fresh and different and unexpected,” explained Brooks. “And also, for me personally, it’s the story of coming of age in New York City.”

“At the beginning it was really that I wanted to tell the story of that time of your life – sort of post-college to pre-settling down and having a family, when you have enormous ambition and idealism and aren’t sure of what’s going to happen you,” said Brooks on how the screenplay took shape.

“That idea of a guy coming to New York to pursue his dreams, his career dreams, his romantic dreams, and then what happens to them and that somehow the world of politics and the analogy of the Clinton presidency kind of fit all that. The last [aspect] I came up with was this idea of telling the story to his daughter. But I always knew that a certain amount of it was about disappointed expectations and disillusionment and taking a long time to find true love. The framework of that story seemed to also work really well. And it became very much about a guy, by telling the story about a man who comes to terms with who he is and how we go forward, and a young girl who comes to terms with what’s going on with her family, how she’s going to go forward.”

Brooks has two teenagers and certain scenes from the film were lifted from real-life experiences. Definitely, Maybe follows Ryan Reynolds as a divorcing dad whose young daughter (played by Abigail Breslin) wants to know all about his love life after learning about the birds and the bees in school. “I think it’s amazing how kids want to know what parents don’t want to tell,” said Brooks, laughing. “I think that’s always true. I think about my parents - I knew lots about them and lots of stuff I don’t know. They go, ‘Oh, I’ll tell you that story one day,’ and then they don’t. And the other thing, I think kids now – I don’t know if New York kids are different from other kids – but they have a lot of information. I remember the day my daughter came home with her sex ed book. We didn’t know that was about to happen at school. They have a lot of information but they don’t understand anything, necessarily. They know what sex is but they don’t think you actually do it. I think that that gulf between their factual information, which they seem know younger and younger, and not really understanding the context of it, was something that I saw with my kids that I thought was interesting to use in the movie.”

Definitely, Maybe unfolds over the course of a decade and Brooks found an interesting way to show how his characters change over the course of the years. In addition to using makeup to slightly age his characters and, of course, updating the backgrounds as the years go by, Brooks focused on a bit of technology most of us can’t live without now. “One of the reasons why I liked the Clinton years in the ‘90s was it seemed to be the moment when New York started to change a lot, and one of the things that was happening was the digital age was exploding,” explained Brooks. “So I just thought about what those props were, and it was the city cleaning itself up. And one of the things that was happening was just cell phones. It was an obvious kind of prop to use, and I thought it would be a fun one for the audience.”

Reynolds’ character has high hopes when he moves to New York to work on Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, and Brooks believed using politics as the setting would work within the story on multiple levels. “I didn’t want to get too heavy with it,” said Brooks about the political overtones and Clinton’s campaign, “Yet the part that wasn’t heavy was the part that I thought mirrored the romantic comedy aspect of the movie, which was Clinton’s own sort of tribulations romantically. I wanted the movie to have a backdrop that was bigger than just the love story. You’d see the world that the people lived in and what their ambitions were. And it was fun to write all that campaign stuff because one, like a lot of people I’m obsessed with political stuff. But two, that the campaign world is a lot like the film world. It’s a lot like being on a shoot. You’re spending an enormous amount of time with this small group of people, very intensely. It was easy for me to write that.”