When a very early manuscript of Laura Zigman’s novel, Animal Husbandry, arrived on Lynda Obst’s desk, it was love at first sight. Not only did she think it would make a great movie: the book also took Obst back to her early career as a journalist and editor in New York.

“I read it in loose pages, not even galleys, and I loved the sensibility,” recalls the producer, whose Lynda Obst Productions has a five-year, multi-picture deal with Fox. “It was completely unique, and that’s something which is hard to find because I’ve made a lot of romantic comedies.”

Animal Husbandry - whose movie-adaptation title changed to Someone Like You during post-production - is about Jane Goodale (Ashley Judd), a young woman who works in New York as talent booker for a popular talkshow. She embarks on a dream romance with the show’s dashing new executive producer, Ray Brown (Greg Kinnear), but this suddenly, inexplicably and devastatingly falls apart. And, since Jane has just given up her apartment to move in with Ray, she is not only without a partner but without a home as well.

To solve the apartment problem, Jane moves in with Eddie Alden (Hugh Jackman, the young Australian actor who played Wolverine in X-Men). Eddie is a serial womaniser, but theirs is a purely platonic apartment-share: Jane gets the spare room. What she also gets, however, is the chance to watch Eddie in action. And she suddenly finds herself realising a key truth about how human males behave: that it’s not much different from how bulls behave.

“She comes across an article in The New York Times about bovine male behaviour that says once a bull has mated with a given cow, he will not go back to that cow a second time,” says Tony Goldwyn, who directs Someone Like You. “So Jane says, ‘Wait! That’s just like guys!’”

When Jane shares this observation with her best friend, Liz (Marisa Tomei), who edits a men’s lifestyle magazine called M, the latter persuades her she should write an (anonymous) magazine column called (you guessed it) ‘Animal Husbandry’. The column becomes a huge success and its mystery author, whom Jane and Liz have dubbed Marie Charles (after Marie Curie and Charles Darwin), becomes instantly famous. So famous, in fact, that Jane is put under intense pressure to book her by her boss, glamorous talkshow host Diane Roberts (Ellen Barkin). “Who else?” laughs Obst about the actress playing the role of Diane. “She’s sexy, she’s smart, she’s funny and at the top of her game. I couldn’t imagine anyone else but Ellen.”

The whole New York magazine-journalism background to Zigman’s novel was instantly familiar to Obst, who majored in philosophy at Columbia University and began her career working for Rolling Stone, before becoming an editor at The New York Times Magazine. Before long, however, she was recruited by producer Peter Guber, and began her movie career by developing Flashdance.

Hugh Jackman as Eddie

When Obst says she has made ‘a lot’ of romantic comedies since then, she isn’t kidding: she lists such genre-defining movies as Sleepless in Seattle, Hope Floats and One Fine Day among her credits. But she immediately recognised something unique in Zigman’s novel.

“I am constantly theorising about human and particularly male behaviour,” she says. “And, like Jane, I use scientific and socio-biological descriptions to get a handle on the inexplicable.”

Obst commissioned a screenplay from Elizabeth Chandler, whose best-known credit is the acclaimed A Little Princess. “I knew within the first 30 pages that I definitely wanted to do it,” says Chandler. “I just thought it was hilarious. I hadn’t written a romantic comedy in a while, and I loved the story’s romantic angst. It’s about issues we all deal with and we’re neurotic about, and it had a take on it that I had never seen before.”