Leah McKendrick’s romantic comedy, Voicemails for Isabelle, follows a formula as most romantic comedies do, but many key ingredients had to come together over eight years to reach the final recipe/product on Netflix today.

The film stars Zoey Deutch as Jill, who aspires to be a big-time baker in San Francisco while she works as a prep cook for maniacal Flâner boss Chef Bastien (Nick Offerman). She spins all the challenges at work and adventures she has in the dating world into stories for her sister Isabelle (Ciara Bravo), who has had cystic fibrosis since they were little, calling her at all hours to relay her latest news.

But when Isabelle dies, her phone number gets reassigned to the work cell of one Wes (Nick Robinson), a real estate agent from Jill’s hometown of Austin, TX who begins to silently cheer Jill on in her endeavors, eventually visiting her under the guise of a work trip without telling her about the technological glitch.

McKendrick’s original script made the 2019 Black List of screenplays, a survey of unproduced projects which are voted most popular by Hollywood executives. It received six votes.

“To me, the Black List was something that happened to the big writers, like the fancy writers, the real writers, and I’ve always kind of viewed myself as an actor that writes, a singer that writes, and so I think I had a lot of imposter syndrome surrounding that,” McKendrick recalled. “But I also knew that I had written straight from my heart, and I knew I had written the film I wanted to see. It was so pure and so authentically me and my sister. Maybe that’s just how it works, maybe people could just pick up on that. It was my first rom-com I’d ever written, [it] was always the one that got away. It was always the one I couldn’t let go of, because it was so dear to me, and it was the first feature I ever sold, and had so much of my own DNA in it.”

Netflix coming on board the project prompted it to transform. The first feature script that the Scrambled director andactress with credits in I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) and Busboys (2026) ever sold looked very different from the finished version. The story was originally set in Los Angeles and New York.

“Everything I write has to be very personal for me to really be able to latch on, and I want a city that could be a character the way that it is in a lot of these rom-coms, like Sleepless in Seattle. Seattle is a main character, there’s a gloominess to it, a wistfulness to it,” she told Deadline almost a week after the film’s arrival on the streamer “When [Netflix] didn’t want LA and New York, two towns that I know I was like, ‘Oh geez, can I get my hometown?’ I was very attached to the iconic locations, such as Fisherman’s Wharf, Golden Gate Park, the bench looking over the bridge, Battery Spencer [Observation Deck], so it was a lot of logistics [to shoot.]”

Hailee Steinfeld was originally attached in the role of Jill, who began as a woman navigating a television writers room with a dream to work at Shondaland with Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes. When McKendrick was given the directing reins, she sought out Zoey Deutch, who is no stranger to food as a scene partner, from the pizza she shares with Glen Powell in Set It Up (2018) to her cornetto cravings as a burgeoning baker in the Prime Video and Hello Sunshine Christmas movie Something From Tiffany’s (2022).

In Voicemails for Isabelle, though, the kumquat, “a small citrus fruit native to Southeast Asia” provides more of an enemy than a friend to Jill, who de-seeds and chops up hundreds of them each shift. McKendrick hinted at discussions with Deutch about making the material new and challenging for the actress.

“The chef idea took me a minute because I’m not a chef, and I can’t just phone something like that in. So I did a lot of research, and asked Robbeen [Martin],a close friend of my sister’s and a real pastry chef in San Francisco, ‘What’s a job that would be like culinary waterboarding that could make you go insane and make you want to quit? Like hazing?’” she said. “He said ‘Kumquats. They’re the worst.’ He’s like, “Nothing will make you want to quit the culinary world quite like kumquats,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s so visual and beautiful,’ and it doesn’t require a real chef to understand what that must feel like.”

If anything, leaning into certain rom com references provides the comfort and familiarity viewers seek. Said nods to cast members’ past works are a bonus. Robinson wears a jean jacket one moment in line waiting for Jill’s samples, harkening back to his lead role in Love, Simon (2018).

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“There were a lot of discussions about wardrobe, for sure, and I don’t want to take credit for that jacket,” she said. “But there are also a lot of Easter eggs like that throughout the film, and [viewrs] have caught so many, and I’m surprised there’s a couple that haven’t been brought up.”

Whether it be the niche language of references to rom coms past or more blatant name drops like Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan and You’ve Got Mail, McKendrick welcomes comparison to Love, Again (2023) starring Priyanka Chopra, Sam Heughan and musician and love guru Céline Dion and streaming on Hulu.

“I haven’t seen that one. I know that it has a similar conceit, and it’s kind of a miracle that they both got made, but also there’s similar conceits throughout all of rom-coms. “[People are] really latching on to the fact that [Voicemails] seems like it’s a romantic love story, and that exists 100%, but really, at its core, it’s about sisterhood, and at its core it’s about family, and how our soul mates are in a variety of places. I knew even when I came up with the concept that I wasn’t reinventing the wheel, but I knew that I, as a filmmaker, had my own unique POV, there’s space for all of us.”

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And though songs from both Taylor Swift and Robyn can be found in another Netflix hit from earlier this year, the film adaptation of Emily Henry’s People We Meet On Vacation, the artists’ songs in Voicemails are more than just needledrops for McKendrick. She wrote a letter to Taylor Swift for the use of “Marjorie” from the songstress’ album evermore, in a scene that aligns the ballad about Swift’s late grandmother to what Jill is going through with her sister’s death.

“I write a lot of letters. It’s very important to me. I don’t have [alternative]s with my music. I write my scene to my song. When it’s a list of one, you have no choice but to fight and beg,” she said. “I said that to Taylor, I said that to Robyn. I said ‘There’s no other song.’ When I was at the Eras tour, I cried [to “Marjorie”] holding other Swifties, and it was a spiritual experience for me. I cannot live without this song, and Netflix knew that as well, and luckily for me, Netflix is a bunch of Swifties too, so everybody was fighting with me, and she was very generous in giving me that and New Year’s Day.”

McKendrick made sure to communicate the scene overlay to the Swift too, to demonstrate her reverence.

“Same thing with Robyn, I made her a deck, I wrote her a letter. I think she was my first letter that I wrote, because right off the bat we needed to choreograph the dance, so there was a lot of work that needed to be put in immediately with with ‘Dancing On My Own,’” she said. “So I made her a deck, I wrote her a letter, and I explained, ‘This isn’t like a needle drop. This is a character. You are a character in my film. It’s not just a song, it is Robyn.

“I really do think that musicians, they’re artists like me, I am a filmmaker. It’s a beautiful relationship because I’m a fan of theirs, just like the audience, and I want to give my audience the most epic cinematic experience, and that involves music,” she added.

As many viewers have pointed out, McKendrick’s fingerprints are all over the film in more ways than one. Not only is she director and writer, but she also appears as Breeda, who tells Wes to run to Jill in the rain at the end of the movie.

“It was meta for sure. I wrote Breeda eight years ago, and when I wrote her, I was not like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna play this role,’ because she was getting married. That was always part of the script. And back then, I was the single girl. That felt so adult to me,” McKendrick said. “But in real life, I ended up getting married two weeks after we wrapped. It was really special to be able to deliver that line, and also to just be in the world with my characters as a writer-director, I think it’s one of the most satisfying parts of wearing all the hats.”

The cherry on top might be the fact that Ciara Bravo did not get a rehearsal for the Robyn dance sequence that closes the film.

“The sun was going down, and as soon as [that happens] the footage looks totally different, you’re running out of time, we have a bunch of background [dancers]. Zoe’s dancing, Nick’s dancing. It was so chaotic,” McKendrick remembered, fingers pressed to her temples. “ [Ciara] flew out, learned the dance, came to set, and I gave her one take. It was the final take of the day. We did it once, and then I was like, ‘And that’s a cut.’ It’s a little bit of a fever dream, and it was exactly what I needed, and Ciara was just thrown into the deep end and delivered like the legend that she is.”

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Next up, McKendrick has a Shania Twain biopic in the works at Sony Pictures.

“I think the most important thing when you’re bringing an icon’s story to the screen is that you have a deep, pure love for them, and that you see them as a human being, a well-rounded human being, beyond being an icon and a legend,” she said of the project. “I just love Shania Twain, I love Eileen, the woman behind Shania Twain, and I feel very close to her, not just because I grew up idolizing her, but because I’m a singer myself and [I came] up in a business that’s really like the wild west, I have the utmost respect for her, and I feel protective of her story. I want it to be done with the most nuance and pathos and reverence. I’m ready for the challenge. I think it’s going to deliver for all the hardcore fans out there, like myself, and for people that don’t know her story, I think it’s gonna blow their tits right off.”