If you lost the person you love most in the world, would it be acceptable to simply disappear without any trace? If so, would it be an act of self-preservation? Or reckless self-sabotage? These are some of the questions screenwriter Julia Cox’s new film Love of Your Life digs into.
Directed by Rachel Morrison (The Fire Inside), Love of Your Life stars Margaret Qualley as Maya, a young nurse who meets Charlie (Gabriel Basso) when she goes to buy a desk he’s selling on Craig’s List. Their meet-cute sets her on a romantic journey that will test both her resilience and courage as she examines the risks and rewards of fully opening her heart. We chatted with Cox to find out more about the inspiration behind this heartbreaking yet hopeful love story that ultimately centers on choosing to love yourself.
“The story is about the love of your own life as an entity, separate from you, as a kind of strange and mysterious ride that has a lot of ups and downs, joy and heartbreak and challenges and bliss,” says Cox. “And it’s about loving your life, loving that ride, even when it’s scary or difficult.”
The film, which also stars Aaron Pierre, Patrick Schwarzenegger and Catherine Keener, explores grief, loneliness and the terrifying vulnerability that comes with loving someone.
The Wandering Heart
After writing the 2023 Netflix biopic NYAD, Cox wrote Love of Your Life on spec in 2024. She says the central idea had been percolating for years, however.
“I started exploring this character, this idea of a woman who’d run away from her life after a really terrible tragedy,” says Cox. “Could you escape into anonymity if the worst thing happened to you? Would that work? Is it possible to eschew human connection? Is it worth it?”
Cox imagined Maya, a recent widow, wandering through Europe, attempting to outrun her grief by immersing herself in physical pleasures.
“Trying to be anonymous, trying to distract yourself with food and beautiful places and sex and these sort of very corporeal experiences of being alive when maybe emotionally she was someplace else entirely.”
One of Maya’s lines in the film clearly lays out of the consequences of her choice to disappear: “They say you can’t run away from your life, but you can. It just makes you a monster.”
Cox was interested in exploring that darker side of her protagonist without necessarily judging her choices. She wanted Maya to be complicated, imperfect and capable of making decisions that audiences might find difficult to understand. Qualley inhabits these choices full-heartedly, making for a truly beautiful performance.
Love in the Time of the Pandemic
Although Cox initially wrote Maya’s story without setting it during the pandemic, she realized that many of the themes she was exploring were deeply connected to the collective experience of COVID-19.
“I found myself writing about alienation, and grief, and loneliness, and whether human connection is worth the risk of great suffering,” she says.
But setting the story during the pandemic was not an easy decision. Cox understood that audiences were still processing the trauma of those years and that everyone’s experience had been different.
“It’s a complicated thing to tackle in art so soon after it just happened,” she says.
Rather than attempting to make a definitive statement about COVID, she focused on telling one woman’s story as truthfully as possible. The pandemic also reflected a broader anxiety Cox recognized in herself and her generation, something she calls “millennial dread” or the feeling that the world is increasingly fragile and that happiness can disappear in an instant.
“It’s really hard to enjoy and to surrender when you feel like there are threats all around,” she says.
Although Maya’s experiences are not autobiographical, Cox says the screenplay is deeply personal because it reflects her own fears, curiosities and preoccupations.
“Maybe on some level, I’m always writing about resilient people who go through terrifying ordeals, because I want to remind myself of how powerful people can be, how resilient people can be.”
It’s a theme that also runs through NYAD, which follows long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad’s determination to accomplish an almost impossible goal. For Cox, both stories ultimately celebrate the courage needed to keep going when times are tough.
“Even when life is hard, it’s worth staying in the fight, and it’s valiant to just continue to try.”
The Freedom (and Terror) of Writing on Spec
Instead of starting Love of Your Life with a detailed outline, Cox allowed herself to dive into the characters and story with the hope of discovering the structure along the way.
“The writing of the script was really organic and fun and messy,” she says. “I was writing it without a super clear roadmap, and I was sort of writing too much and letting it unfold, and then kind of deciding how to shape it after I’d written quite a bit.”
Writing on spec gave her the freedom to experiment. “I can get lost, and then find my way, and I can rethink and come up with a new idea without having to run it by a bunch of people who are waiting for a product that they’ve prepaid for.”
But that freedom also comes with anxiety. “You wonder, have I got anything here? Is this right? You’re making all of these decisions in a vacuum.”
For Cox, the greatest challenge was learning to trust herself enough to finish the screenplay without second-guessing every creative decision.
From Screenwriter to Writer/Director
Cox is now directing her first feature film, Woman in the Sun, starring Renée Zellweger, Sissy Spacek and Mia Threapleton (daughter of Kate Winslet).
When we spoke, Cox was just five days into production and still discovering what it meant to direct her own screenplay. “It’s really satisfying just to see how much of directing is communicating decisions that maybe have already been made in the writing of the script, even if they’re not explicitly on the page.”
Set on Nantucket, the upcoming film follows Claire (Zellweger), a middle-aged woman caught between caring for her ailing mother, Ro (Spacek), and navigating the return of her 21-year-old daughter, Annie (Threapleton).
Cox describes Claire as a member of the “Sandwich Generation,” a woman wondering whether she’ll ever escape the cycle of caretaking long enough to carve out a life of her own.
The story seems to fit in perfectly with Cox’s fascination of women who must navigate uncertainty, confront difficult choices and discover what kind of life they want to lead.
Love of Your Life is currently playing in theaters and will stream on Prime Video Oct. 14.