At the LA press day for the Universal Pictures movie, Vaughn revealed the idea for the story of four friends dealing with assorted relationship issues hit him now because he'd gotten to the stage where he was ready to have kids and a family. "[…]I started thinking, 'What makes a relationship work?' There had been a series of romantic comedies, but I thought it would be funny to do one that would encompass a larger group of people that would be couples. That way it wasn’t just one thing to dive into, but it’s that dynamic that we all have. If you have a good guy friend, you really are thankful if the girls get along. And if you have a good girlfriend, you like it if their guys get along," explained Vaughn. "People come over and you BBQ, or you go to a game or concert together, and you have that dynamic within the group. And I’ve always found that it’s easy to see other people’s stuff and go, 'God, if they just did this,' or 'Boy, they’ve got problems.' But you never can really see what’s going on with yourself. It’s just the nature of all of us. So I felt it would be fun to take a bunch of regular folks, who are having a hard time conceiving, or their wife left them, or you think that you’re doing good at life because you have a job that’s working, make a kids a priority and then go and realize, 'What happened to us in all of that?'”
"The danger of not dialing in to each other is that the trust is gone. I wanted to take that group and put them in an exceptional setting with the promise, in a Wizard of Oz way, of some expert or some kind of enlightened person taking them on a journey. It’s about looking in the mirror. You have the control over the choices that you make yourself, one way or the other, and you’re in charge of your life. And it really was important for me to have a character like Favreau’s character and Kristin Davis’ character, for folks that felt like, 'God, they’re just so far past even trying.'"
Vaughn added, "In life, sometimes when you go through hard things, like losing someone in your family, losing a job or getting a disease, it’s easy to focus on the problem and not where you want to go to. Sometimes when things are meant for our harm, God or life will use it to pay you back double, or use you in the future as a way to promote you. Sometimes people take their own power or faith away in that moment. With The Break-Up, I had a thesis to say, 'Here’s two immature people who handled a relationship immaturely, but at the end of the movie have grown from that. The lesson was not wasted on them. They’re in a better place in the future.' My thesis with Couples Retreat was to say, 'Take regular folks with regular problems and give some hope, love and a little optimism for the case for marriage and the reasons for the value of it.' That was the intention of the idea for this movie."
Couples Retreat presented Vaughn and Favreau with the challenge of writing a story that didn't shortchange any one of the four couples central to the film. "We’re really well-prepared. This script had eight characters and four relationships. There’s no B-story. Every relationship has a beginning, middle and end. And it was important to me, for my actors, to make sure that everyone got their respect and they had their relationship realized fully, from beginning to middle to end," said Vaughn. "It’s really an ensemble. But the challenges of saying, 'How do I buy into this guy who feels like his marriage is over, and to this guy whose wife left him, and really do it in a way where it arcs and everyone gets their authentic journey, but at the same time, not have the audience feel bored because they’ve been through it too many times?...' The editing of the ending came out of necessity. If you saw all these scenes played out literally, as we wrote them, they were well-acted, simple, truthful scenes, but by the time we got to the third couple resolving their issues, you felt like you were drained. So we had to find a way to make it a collage and connect it all."
"The job of an actor is to look like you’re not acting," explained Vaughn. "Sometimes I think people reward people who go to extreme emotions. I can look at it, and other actors can look at it, and go, 'I can see the work in it.' But people go, 'That must be powerful because you’re crying.' But, that would make everyone’s crazy aunt a great actor. So I’ve always felt the real thing to do is make it effortless. Like any performer in music, on stage they look effortless, but there’s a lot of work that goes into looking effortless. The same thing for the dialogue with comedies. Comedies are much more difficult, especially when they’re story comedies, than drama. For example, if there’s a scene where a father says goodbye to his son because he’s going to go to work, you have to be simple with what sounds real and how that would really play out. In a comedy, you have to do it in that way, but also make people laugh."
"Whether it's Wedding Crashers, Swingers or even Old School, we’ve always collaborated and come up with stuff. And hopefully we’re having fun and buying into what we’re doing so that, for the viewer, it looks like, 'Oh, these guys are just having a good time.' It’s not that we don’t love our work, but it’s a lot of work to make it look like it just happened in that moment. If you went in with no screenplay and sat around with a camera, especially for a movie with four couples where they have to track and you have to buy that they get back together, you would really put yourself in a no-man’s-land position where the equation wouldn’t add up to what you would need it to. There’s too much little stuff that goes on along the way."
