Deadline has reported that Costa Rican filmmaker Hernán Jiménez will direct the romantic comedy Love Hard for Netflix starring Nina Dobrev, Jimmy O. Yang and Charles Melton. Written by Danny Mackey and Rebecca Ewing, the film will be produced by McG and Mary Viola from Wonderland.
Jiménez was born in San José, and studied at Pearson College UWC in British Columbia, Canada, earned a BFA in film from San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA in screenwriting and directing at Columbia University. He had a successful acting and stand-up comedy career, and in 2010 directed his debut feature film Eyes Closed /A ojos cerrados in Costa Rica, followed by The Return / El regreso in 2012, for which we won the Best International Feature Film Award at the New York International Latino Film Festival.
In 2016 he directed About Us / Entonces nosotros, which was Costa Rica’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at 89th Academy Awards. In 2018, he made his English language debut with Elsewhere, an American comedy-drama starring Aden Young, Parker Posey, Ken Jeong, Beau Bridges and Jacki Weaver.
Love Hard is being described as When Harry Met Sally meets Roxanne, and follows an LA girl, unlucky in love, falls for an East Coast guy on a dating app and decides to surprise him for Christmas, only to discover that she’s been catfished. But the object of her affection actually lives in the same town, and the guy who duped her offers to set them up IF she pretends to be his own girlfriend for the holidays.
