Irene Emma Villamor’s penchant for romance movies began in the early 2000s, discovering the likes of P. J. Hogan’s 1997 romcom My Best Friend’s Wedding, which starred Julia Roberts, and Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 bifurcated romance Chungking Express as formative influences. 

At the time, she was already working as an intern for fellow filmmaker Joyce Bernal, while trying to complete her film degree at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Eventually, she became Bernal’s assistant director and writer, collaborating on projects such as 2012’s Of All the Things and 2016’s Everything About Her.

That exposure organically led to creating her own notion of romance and testing the revelations the genre can spawn. “I guess I was a hopeless romantic as well. Until I became more cynical, I suppose,” she told Rappler in a mix of English and Filipino.

But since 2014’s Relaks, It’s Just Pag-ibig, her first feature which she co-directed with Antoinette Jadaone, until her solo directorial debut in 2016’s Camp Sawi, and succeeding romance dramas including Sid and Aya: Not a Love Story and Meet Me in St. Gallen, both released in 2018, Villamor reckons that her take on romantic relationships has already evolved.

“I’d like to think so,” she said. “So my recent films tend to go in that direction. A friend said even my perspective about male characters has changed; they’re no longer asshole male leads. I also tend to be more experimental in terms of story structure [and] be more complex in excavating emotions.”

Case in point: In her Netflix two-hander Only We Know, one of 2025’s best Filipino films, Charo Santos-Concio and Dingdong Dantes play two characters, a retired professor and a widowed engineer, who are well over their 40s in a story that shrewdly argues for a kind of romance past a typical romantic persuasion, one that’s uncoupled from that rigid definition and a lot more sober and honest.

Much the same could be said of Villamor’s latest, time-shifting effort The Loved One, out in local theaters on February 11. Loosely inspired by A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, a seminal text by French philosopher Roland Barthes, the movie follows two former lovers recounting the aftermath of their 10-year relationship and its residues that somehow remain inexplicable.

Pressed on whether real romance takes labor, Villamor perceptively agrees. “Because we’ve already aged,” she told me. “We’ve seen things, [and] experience is a great teacher, so there’s a tendency to be more pragmatic about love. I believe relationships are hard work, constantly reaching for ways to keep at it.”

It helps that her actors have already gone through that pragmatic growth, weathering career swings and similar tumultuous relationships in their respective lives that are equally private and public. 

“The material tackles a 10-year relationship, and since it’s a dissection, it’s better for me if these two characters can already make sense of the = experience,” Villamor wrote in a Reddit thread for the film’s promo.

Anne Curtis and Jericho Rosales take on the central couple following their last onscreen project, 2011’s ABS-CBN television series Green Rose, and first pairing in the 2008 romantic period film Baler.

Villamor first worked on the material sometime in 2018 and had revisions until 2025. “I was asked to pitch a love story for a studio and for a certain loveteam,” she recalled. “By that time, I already did Sid and Aya and Meet Me in St. Gallen and Ulan. Those movies are about brief encounters that make a lasting impact on a person, so I wanted to do something that is really about the unraveling of a long relationship, exploring how it is when the initial spark is gone.” 

However, the project stalled after the initial loveteam attached to it did not pan out. The commissioning studio shopped the concept around to other actors, but the pandemic got in the way, making it difficult to land producers willing to fund the film.

“By 2023, I asked Cornerstone (who also manages me) if they wanted to invest in this project,” Villamor continued. “They read the script and loved it, so from there, we started pitching to actors. That was the biggest challenge, I guess. All those waiting and for that initial step to happen, to secure a producer who’d say yes.”

Rosales was first to come on board, and, eventually, Curtis, whom Villamor already worked with in Sid and Aya. In fact, it was the actress who reached out to the director, hoping to work on a “deeper film about relationships,” during which Villamor offered her the script for The Loved One.

After a few weeks, Villamor and the actors had dinner and talked about the film until four o’clock in the morning, as Curtis revealed in an episode of Ang Walang Kwentang Podcast hosted by Jadaone and fellow director JP Habac.

But filming would only begin a year later, as both stars still had separate projects to shoot. Curtis was shooting the Philippine adaptation of the South Korean TV series It’s Okay to Not Be Okay and Erik Matti’s BuyBust: The Undesirables, while Rosales was busy with the Dreamscape drama series Lavender Fields and Jerrold Tarog’s historical biopic Quezon.

“It turned out okay because we’re also fine-tuning the characters, and even our shoots were non-linear, so it kinda worked because the timelines of the film also jumped between years,” Curtis said in the podcast in Taglish.

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Villamor said “collaboration is the best part of the job.” “I always make it a point to get insights from my staff. And I listen and weigh in. That’s where magic happens. Especially with actors. They occupy the frame. It is their performance that makes the audience feel all sorts of things, so I rely on actors very much.” 

“Anne and Echo are very collaborative,” the director added. “They really delved into their characters. I appreciate that they’re asking questions because that also widens the perspective of the film. I can just sit back and enjoy them onscreen because they’re so good.”

Asked about the most significant shift in the local film practice, Villamor points to the existence of the Eddie Garcia Law. “Film workers are more aware now of their rights and there’s really a conscious effort to professionalize the industry,” she said. 

Film financiers, according to Villamor, are also still looking for love stories despite constant claims that “romance is dead.”

“Generally, they don’t require big budgets like an action or a period film would need,” she explained. “So, it’s like a safe bet for producers. And, somehow, this is also what streaming services are looking for locally. Horror films as well, I think, because they always find an audience.”

For years, Filipino female filmmakers like Villamor have been at the forefront of romance movies. Asked why that is the case, the director said: “Maybe because in the Philippines, there are a lot of women filmmakers doing romance. The sheer number makes up for it.”

“There are also male directors doing romance and they’re good films,” she added. “I don’t know if gender has anything to do with it since we all equally love and get hurt. Maybe women are simply more open to sharing their experiences, and they’re more vulnerable. But that’s also a stereotype, so I don’t know. Or maybe because the majority of the audience for romance is women, so there’s relatability.” – Rappler.com

Note: Some quotes in Filipino have been translated into English for brevity.