Rob Reiner’s tragic death has had me thinking about the movie a lot — so I took a deep dive into the making of When Harry Met Sally…, and discovered a lot of interesting, hilarious, and heartwarming facts along the way:
1.
Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron initially met over lunch so Rob could pitch her a different movie, but she rejected it before they’d even ordered.
The next time they met, she rejected another idea of his. When he then briefly mentioned he was interested in exploring the way sex can ruin a friendship between a straight man and woman, Nora got excited and immediately knew how she’d structure the movie.
2.
Nora Ephron interviewed both Rob Reiner and producer Andrew Scheinman about their dating lives for inspiration for the script, describing it as a “horrifying experience.”
3.
While Nora Ephron worked on a number of drafts of the script, Rob Reiner shot both Stand by Me and The Princess Bride, before coming back together with Nora to focus on developing and making When Harry Met Sally…
4.
The character of Harry was very heavily inspired by Rob Reiner and his experience of being single after divorce (from Penny Marshall, with whom he was married from 1971 to 1981).
5.
Meanwhile, Sally was partially inspired by Nora Ephron, and many of her quirks, including her particular way of ordering food, came straight from the screenwriter herself.
6.
It was Rob Reiner’s idea to include the documentary-style interviews with couples throughout the movie — he was inspired to do so after asking entertainment executive Alan Horn’s dad how he met his wife, and watching the reserved old man light up.
7.
The old couples are all actors, but the stories they tell were inspired by real people — mostly people at the production company that Nora Ephron interviewed.
8.
The creative team had trouble deciding on a title for the movie, and Rob Reiner even ran a competition amongst the crew on set, offering a case of champagne for whoever could come up with a title that stuck.
9.
Titles used before the final one was decided on included “Scenes From a Friendship,” “How We Met,” “When They Met,” “Boy Meets Girl, “”Just Friends,” “It Had To Be You,” and “Harry, This Is Sally” — which was the one Nora Ephron liked best, even more than When Harry Met Sally…
10.
Rob Reiner said he didn’t like the title When Harry Met Sally until he came up with the idea to add an ellipsis at the end. “The three dots were a big thing for me,” he said, revealing that once he added them, When Harry Met Sally… became the title for him.
11.
Even though he thought Billy Crystal would make a good Harry from the start, Rob Reiner talked to several actors about the role — including Albert Brooks, Tom Hanks, Richard Dreyfuss, and Michael Keaton — before offering it to Billy.
The pair had been best friends since playing onscreen buddies in All in the Family, and Rob was worried that casting Billy as Harry might put their friendship at risk if something went wrong in the movie. Billy, meanwhile, really wanted the role but thought Rob wasn’t interested in him for it, since he was talking to so many other actors.
12.
Molly Ringwald auditioned for the role of Sally.
13.
When Harry Met Sally… was Meg Ryan’s first leading role, and she dropped out of Steel Magnolias, in which she was signed on to play Shelby, in order to play Sally (Julia Roberts, of course, took on the role of Shelby in Steel Magnolias in her place).
14.
Billy Crystal said there was just one problem with working with Rob Reiner as a director: “He laughs during the takes.”
15.
Rob Reiner was concerned Billy Crystal would come off as too “sweet” for Sally’s instant dislike of Harry to feel believable, so he added the part where Harry rudely eats grapes when they first meet, and Billy added the detail that he’d be spitting the seeds at the window.
16.
In one scene, Harry can be seen reading Stephen King’s Misery, the adaptation of which would be Rob Reiner’s next movie.
17.
Billy Crystal improvised the funny voice and “pecan pie” line Harry does in the museum scene, and Meg Ryan was so thrown she glanced at Rob Reiner off-camera, but he indicated she should roll with it, so she did. They did two more takes after Meg knew what was happening, but none felt as special as the first one featuring her real surprise and spontaneity, so that’s what ended up in the movie.
18.
A lot of the Pictionary scene was improvised — Rob Reiner told Meg Ryan she had to draw “baby talk,” but let her decide how to depict it, and was pleased when the final drawing was “so perfectly unclear.” The guesses from the guests were all real and improvised by the actors, too, including Bruno Kirby’s iconic, “baby fish mouth!”
19.
The infamous fake orgasm scene came about after Rob Reiner and Andrew Scheinman challenged Nora Ephron to tell them something they didn’t know about women, since she’d been grilling them about men. She told them “women fake orgasms,” to which Rob responded “not with me,” and Nora said “absolutely with you.”
20.
In the initial script, the scene didn’t include Sally actually faking an orgasm, but Meg Ryan suggested she should do it, and it was then decided the moment should happen in an “incongruous place” — which is how it became set at Katz’s Deli.
21.
It was Billy Crystal who came up with the idea that a fellow customer would say the line, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
22.
Rob Reiner decided his mother, Estelle Reiner, should be the actor who delivered the line. When he told her the moment might not make it into the final movie if it wasn’t funny enough, she said, “It’s OK, I just like spending the day with you.”
23.
Even though acting out the fake orgasm had been her idea, Meg Ryan was nervous to shoot the scene in front of so many people. She planned out how she’d do it in her hotel room the night before.
24.
The morning they were due to shoot the scene, Meg Ryan’s nerves remained, and she went to Billy Crystal’s trailer to talk it through. She told him she wasn’t comfortable in what she was wearing, and took a sweater from his wardrobe, which is what she’s wearing in the final scene.
25.
The first two or three takes that Meg Ryan did of the fake orgasm were “tepid,” so Rob Reiner sat in front of Billy Crystal to show Meg how he wanted her to do it — basically acting out a huge orgasm himself. He later said to Billy, “I made a mistake, I shouldn’t have done that….I just had an orgasm in front of my mother.”
26.
The fake orgasm scene gave the movie an R rating, which Nora Ephron described as “ludicrous.”
27.
At a royal screening of the movie in London, Princess Diana apparently thought the scene, and the whole movie, was very funny, and arranged for a private screening for herself and her friends at Buckingham Palace.
28.
The movie gave Harry Connick Jr. his big break and his first Grammy. Rob Reiner had asked him to do the music for the film after being given his demo by a friend.
29.
Tracy Reiner, Rob Reiner’s eldest daughter, whom he adopted during his marriage to her mother, Penny Marshall, appears in the movie as Emily, Harry’s younger girlfriend — something Billy Crystal described as “slightly awkward,” since he had known her since she was a little girl.
30.
For the scene where Harry and Sally separately speak to Jess and Marie on the phone, and there’s a three-way split-screen, the actors filmed it simultaneously on three adjoining sets on one soundstage, delivering their dialogue in real time with no cuts, which meant that if something went wrong, they all had to start over again.
Rob Reiner said somewhere around the 50th take, they got it perfectly, only for the sound guy to reveal it had been ruined by the rustling of birds in the rafters. They got rid of the birds and continued filming, finally capturing the complete scene from the movie on the 61st take.
31.
In the first draft of the script, Harry and Sally didn’t get together in the end or even repair their friendship — the sex they had did, in fact, ruin it. “In the original ending, they drifted apart and then ran into each other one day on the street years later, and chatted about where their lives went, walked away, and the camera pulled up,” Rob Reiner said.
32.
“That to me has always seemed like — forgive me — the true ending,” Nora Ephron said of the original ending, in which Harry and Sally go their separate ways.
33.
Rob Reiner said the original “unhappy” ending felt right to him, too, as he couldn’t see a way Harry would ever get in another serious relationship — until he met his future wife, Michele Singer, while filming the movie. Falling in love with her made him realize, “it made sense that Harry and Sally could get together,” and the happy ending was confirmed.
34.
Rob Reiner later described meeting Michele Singer on set as like another one of the love stories shown in the movie. Before filming began, director of photography Barry Sonnenfeld had told Rob, “I have a friend in New York. Her name is Michele Singer. You’re going to marry her.”
Rob initially dismissed the remark, but months later he was drawn to a visitor on set, only to learn it was Michele Singer, there to have lunch with Barry Sonnenfeld and his wife. Rob invited himself to lunch, and he and Michele were married seven months later.
35.
Rob Reiner said that, next to meeting his wife, the best thing to come out of making When Harry Met Sally… was that his friendship with Billy Crystal got even deeper, despite his initial concerns it might ruin their friendship.
36.
Billy Crystal wrote much of the final speech in which Harry declares his love for Sally, including the detail about the crinkle above her nose and the line, “when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
37.
Rob Reiner’s voice can be heard in the scene kicking off the countdown to the new year.
38.
Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal totally improvised the “interview” scene featuring Sally and Harry.
39.
After the success of When Harry Met Sally… Rob Reiner, Nora Ephron, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan would occasionally discuss a potential sequel. But they all agreed every time that it was “perfect as is.”
40.
On the 30th anniversary of the movie in 2019, Rob Reiner said that Harry and Sally would still be together. “That doesn’t mean they haven’t had tremendous ups and downs or been on the verge of divorce and got back together, just like any relationship. But I do think they’re still together.”
Billy Crystal added, “For all of us who believe in happily ever after, that’s where they live.”
What’s your favorite fact about When Harry Met Sally…? Tell us in the comments.