ANAHEIM, Calif. — In “Love, Brooklyn,” director Rachael Abigail Holder’s feature film debut, the New York City borough is the setting for a romantic comedy about the past and present of love and geography

Journalist Roger (André Holland) shares an easy, comfortable friendship with Casey (Nicole Beharie), his ex-girlfriend who runs a storefront art gallery. Yet stronger feelings lie below the surface for both as they meet for cocktails, check out a museum show and hang out in Prospect Park.

Roger’s also involved with massage therapist Nicole (DeWanda Wise) who’s happy to invite him for late-night romance as long as he’s gone by the time the single mom’s young daughter wakes up in the morning.

As he rides his bicycle through beautiful tree-lined Brooklyn neighborhoods and evolving commercial districts, it’s clear that Roger’s torn by his feelings for both Casey and Nicole. But he’s also conflicted by his feelings about the ways in which Brooklyn has changed in recent years, the topic of the article he pitched and sold, and now can’t find his angle into telling it.

“It just felt timeless to me,” says Holder on a recent video call from her home in Jersey City, New Jersey. “I wanted to hang out with these people more and they felt like my community. It felt like the Brooklyn that I know, so it was very easy to pitch on the project.”

The characters in screenwriter Paul Zimmerman’s script felt like people she knew in Long Island as a child and friends and family in Brooklyn, Holder says.

“The women especially had a sort of unapologetically honest way,” she says. “Like there are no villains in this story. Everyone’s just a human with work that they still have to do, just like everyone who’s breathing has work to do.

“I just felt like women who are brutally honest, especially in film, in stories, it’s hard for them to not feel hard and sort of rough around the edges in a way that’s off-putting.

“And I felt at ease with them,” Holder continues. “I felt comfortable with them. They made me feel calm.”

Nicole and Casey both know their boundaries. They communicate them clearly to Roger. And Roger, in turn, treats each with respect and kindness, even as he’s struggling to reconcile how he feels about past and present.

“I think on the page this feels like, OK, this is a movie about a man deciding between two women,” Holder says. “But seeing it through my lens, and what I hoped the story could be through me and whoever I was collaborating with, I felt very much like it was a story about two women who are deciding whether or not they want to be with this man.”

And they’re doing that in front him, too, she notes.

“They’re not doing it with their moms and their friends and their brothers or whatever,” Holder says. “It’s in front of him on their walks, in bed. They’re deciding whether or not this is their person.

“I just loved the comedy of that. I loved that it was laugh out loud sometimes, and then also just the sort of quiet amusement of life.”

“Love, Brooklyn” opens Friday, Aug. 29, in New York City before coming to Los Angeles and other cities on Friday, Sept. 5.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Holder talked about the significance of casting Black actors in the film, how she chose her trio of leads, how Brooklyn itself is a character in the movie, and more.

Q: The original screenplay didn’t identify the characters as Black. How did you decide it worked that way.

A: I think one of the reasons I was so keen on being the director of this movie was because I saw myself without having to try. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, if I close my eyes and squint this way maybe they’ll be?’ I saw Black women in Casey and Nicole. I saw a Black, sensitive, soft man, wounded by these two women.

And I was excited to bring that idea to life because I had never really seen that in modern romantic storytelling before. But it felt like a very familiar feeling, and so I was excited to create that feeling in something that an audience would then feel like they’d never seen before.

Q: You’ve talked about how it felt good to tell a Black story without having to have your characters stand for all Black people. Can you talk more about that?

A: I mean, I can’t speak to other Black filmmakers before me and what their processes were, but for me personally, I am writing and directing and storytelling from a place of my own soul and sensibility and community. And if that feels unlike what I’ve seen before, it feels like I’m filling a space that needs to be filled rather than sort of representing a different kind of Black person.

I think it’s just sort of knowing that we’re not a monolith, and just also being who I am and feeling like I wasn’t like anybody else since I was small. That as a filmmaker that would translate into my work probably regardless of the culture that I come from.

Q: André, Nicole, DeWanda are all wonderful in it. Did you know them before or when you got into the casting?

A: A little bit of both. I did not know André. He was a complete stranger, like a movie character in my head when I first met him. When I pitched the story to him, I said basically we fell in love with you in “Moonlight,” but as a whole we want to see André Holland fall in love as a full story, light on his feet and funny.

Nicole Beharie has been my favorite actress for so many years now. She so brilliant and underrated in a way that is baffling. André and I both really wanted to work with her from the start. We shot this in 2023 and we had to shut down production because she was shooting the third season of “The Morning Show.” We didn’t recast. We were like, “No, let’s wait for the magic.”

And DeWanda is someone that I’ve known since 2006. I cast her in a play in New York back when we were starving artists and sort of at the beginning of our stories. She’d sort of rose, and like you said, has been in a million things. [Credits include “Murderbot” and Spike Lee’s TV series “She’s Gotta Have It”] I was really excited for her to play someone that she hadn’t played before and for people to see her soft and sensitive and vulnerable talent combined.

Q: Brooklyn is like another character in the film. It’s gorgeous to see from the perspective of Roger riding his bicycle everywhere.

A: Paul wrote that Roger was riding his bike a lot and I definitely saw the cinema in his writing. I wanted Brooklyn to feel like a character in our movie but I also wanted to show the Brooklyn that I know. I think one of the north stars for me as a director of this movie was to create a calm and to have our audience leave with a feeling of solace.

And I wanted to show the parts of Brooklyn that make me feel that way. There’s just so much green, all the trees and the moments of nature that we have in our city that physically give us relief.

Then, also, it was important to show that while there is a lot of change happening, we are still very much there. Overall, the objective was to show true Brooklyn, not the iconic but also sort of over-used tourist spots of Brooklyn.

Q: We’re so used to seeing Central Park as the only park in New York movies or just the bridge or promenade in Brooklyn movies.

A: We shot in Fort Green, in Bed Stuy. We shot at Owl’s Head Park, which is a lesser park. That big hill was at Owl’s Head. Those are the days that my mind goes to when I think of shooting.

Q: I have to ask you about the shoot. You worked on this for years and ended up shooting it when you were seven months pregnant. I can’t imagine.

A: It was terrifying. [laughs] I journal every day, just as a person, but pregnant and filming, there wasn’t as much time to journal every morning, but I made a point to write things down as much as I could. Because before I was pregnant, and when I was in my first trimester, I would read stuff about other pregnant people doing wild and courageous things.

And the writing around it was like, “Isn’t this so brave and awesome?” I was just like, “Please be honest about this (stuff). This is (bleeping) hard.” There were days where I felt completely like a badass, running up that hill, giving a note. I don’t like to yell. As a director, I’m a very quiet, mellow director. I needed to talk to my actors in person so I was doing a lot of climbing while holding my belly.

And there were days when it wasn’t top of mind, but yeah, being nauseous and tired and hot and pregnant is definitely a hard thing. I made a note to myself, because I wasn’t going to remember all of it. I wanted to remember it so that when people ask me about that I could say to the reader who may be pregnant or not that it was hard.

Q: Are you also back to work on a new film or TV or even theater project?

A: Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely to do theater. I wish. Yeah, I’m back to work fully. I was a television director mainly before this, and sort of a playwright, screenwriter masking as an episodic television director. That was sort of my day job.

And while shooting TV has been fun, it’s felt like scales on the piano, and I’ve really been excited to play a song. After playing this one I’m hoping to play other, and I’m in the midst of trying to make that happen now.

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