“One Night Only” Screenwriter Travis Braun on Capturing the Madness of Modern Dating

It was on his honeymoon that Travis Braun came up with the wild premise for One Night Only (in theaters now) whereby single people can only have sex 12 hours a year due to a government-enforced mandate. “Weirdly, I was just reflecting on the crazy winding road that led me to my wife,” recalls Braun. “But that felt like it would be a very long movie, so I needed to put it in a box, just because, from my own decade-plus of dating, it would be too much to tackle in one story. That’s where the 12-hours-over-one-night concept came from.”  

The high-concept hook fuels director Will Gluck’s (Easy A, Anyone but You) fast-moving rom-com, but Braun’s real interest was something far more familiar: the maddening, unpredictable search for love.

One Night Only was filmed in New York City and casts Oscar-nominee Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown) as jingle singer Allie opposite Callum Turner (Masters of the Air) as pizza maker Owen, who realize over the course of one manic night that they were meant for each other. Along the way, they’re distracted by a host of quirky New Yorkers portrayed by Maya Hawke, Molly Ringwald, LeVar Burton, Julia Fox and Flavor Flav among many others.

From his Burbank home office, where he’s overseeing the Disney+ 2027 animated series Cars: Lightning Racers, Braun explains how he used a ticking clock premise to explore the tribulations of modern dating.

Funny, sweet, and silly, One Night Only hits all the classic romcom beats, but some reviewers seemed to expect the movie to be more dystopian, like The Purge but with sex.

That may be why there’s been some confusion in terms of like, “Wait, I thought this was gonna be an apocalypse movie,” but that’s not my instinct. Even if I try to write cynically, I just can’t do it. I guess I’m a hopeless romantic.  Our intention was to set up the rules quickly and then allow this love story to take center stage. I saw it as two lonely people trying to navigate modern dating.

The movie opens with a statement: “Three years ago, premarital sex was outlawed in the United States except for one night a year.” Was that the first line you wrote?

That was not my first line. I actually wrote sixty pages of the script just because I was so excited by the concept that I had to get stuff down on paper. Then I threw it out because, you know, write the bad thing, throw it out, write a better thing, throw that out, write an even better thing. I wanted to challenge myself to make Allie and Owen fall in love with all the stuff going on in the background, all the arguments and fighting about the rules of the government and people standing up for their rights, and protests, and having orgies in the background— all of that informs this world, but we don’t focus on it because that’s never really what this movie is about.

In terms of pacing, the “Mandate” provides a sense of ticking clock urgency: The heroes feel like they have to make it happen by seven in the morning, when premarital sex again becomes illegal.

And also, it’s a fun marketing hook where people either go “Whoa, that sounds cool,” or “How the hell is that going to work?”

How did you get your screenplay in front of the director Will Gluck?

I have wonderful agents at UTA and managers at Echo Lake Entertainment. The success of Anyone but You made me realize rom-coms can actually work in a theater again, so Will Gluck was always top of my list in terms of filmmakers. My reps got the script to Jacqueline Monetta, Will’s producing partner, and I think she basically didn’t let him leave the office until he read it.

Once Will Gluck started casting One Night Only, you suddenly had Oscar-nominated actress Monica Barbaro and rising star Callum Turner as your leads. After picturing the characters in your head for so many months, how did you feel about these actors bringing Allie and Owen to life?

Dream come true. As a writer, you’re always trying to capture chemistry, describing how two characters look at each other with loving eyes, but you can only take that so far on the page. Until you’re actually filming the scene, you can’t really know if it’s going to work. Monica and Callum really do like each other, and I think their chemistry is a huge reason for people to see the movie. 

Speaking of written descriptions, the dress that Allie wears through most of the movie is really something. How did you describe it in the script?

“Cocktail dress.” I left the rest to the costume designer.

Spoiler

True to rom-com meet-cute tradition, Allie bumps into Owen on the sidewalks of New York. Sparks fly, but then he vomits, and from there, it’s one obstacle after another. But some might wonder why these two unusually good-looking single people don’t just hook up from the get-go?

There have been times in my own personal life where you bump into someone and go, “This might be something special.” Those moments can take your breath away, but they can also get ripped away from you just as quickly, and that’s what happens to Allie and Owen. The world is sort of screaming, “Hey, idiot, right in front of you. How do you not see that they’d be great for you?!” Hopefully, audiences will be rooting for Owen and Allie: “You guys are perfect for each other,” but they just don’t realize it.

The physical comedy can get pretty outrageous, like when Allie and Owen retrieve the last condom in New York City after it falls down a sewer grate. He’s holding her by her legs. She’s upside down. Her head’s in the sewer. It’s crazy.

There’s also that moment where they’re running off with the condom statue. It’s obviously character-first, love story-first, but there’s also a lot of shocking, funny visual sequences that Will is so good at creating.

The offbeat cameos also keep things popping. Canadian actor Charlie Gillespie, for example, plays sexy rock star Ezra who takes Allie home, strips down to his underpants and then starts acting like a nutcase.

As things get heightened at the end of the movie, you need distractions that feel like real contenders, and Ezra’s character seems to be everything Allie’s looking for.

One Night Only was shot in New York City while you stayed behind in Los Angeles to work on your TV projects. Were you able to contribute rewrites along the way?

Oh yeah. All the way into the edit, you’re rewriting constantly until they pull the thing away from your cold dead hands on the mix stage and you say, “It’s done.”

One fresh location specific to New York is the Little Red Lighthouse along the Hudson River that serves as a third-act rendezvous, kind of like the Empire State Building did in Sleepless in Seattle. How did you come up with that picturesque detail?

That was actually Will’s idea. He’s from New York and knows all about the lighthouse. I remember thinking, “How has this not been used before?” It feels so specific, but to my knowledge, it hasn’t really been seen before in a movie.

Another cool detail: Allie has a great voice but only sings in the recording studio because she suffers from stage fright.

In my script, Allie was always a singer, but the stage fright thing actually came from Monica. She felt strongly about telling that story, which works well because it gives Allie something to overcome. And with Owen, pizza is his creativity, which leads to this whole scene where they’re flirting over him making pizza.

One Night Only delivers a happy ending but only after nearly everything that could go wrong does go wrong.

That’s sort of the theme: modern dating is hard because there are endless options, endless choices, so many distractions, and so much bad behavior like catfishing, ghosting, and infidelity. Compressing all those things into twelve hours is kind of insane, but the story’s really just about how hard it can be to figure out who you have a real connection with.

One Night Only is in theaters now.

Featured image: (From left) Allie (Monica Barbaro) and Owen (Callum Turner) in ONE NIGHT ONLY, directed by Will Gluck.