It starts as what sounds like a silly argument. Busily preparing for a dinner party at the condo apartment they share, she asked him to bring home a dozen lemons. He only heard "bring home some lemons:"

Jennifer Aniston plays frustrated Brooke. Vince Vaughn is good-hearted (but maybe immature) Gary in the story he says was inspired by real-life experiences:

"Whenever I got scripts for romantic comedies they always had some kind of bizarre sub-plot to them that really didn't have anything to do with relationships ... like 'if you don't marry the girl you will not inherit the family fortune and the mean guy who works for me will take over the company' ... or 'I have to write an article for a paper; oops, I really did fall in love with the girl, what do I do?' I always felt relationships were odd enough as they are, so it was an idea I actually had 10 years ago," said Mr. Vaughn.  "It wasn't so much based on any one relationship that I had, but there are elements of relationships that I had and I thought there was stuff that was very universal about not remembering to bring home 12 lemons and having the argument be about the lemons, but really about so much more than the lemons."

Jennifer Aniston believes audiences may find these seemingly petty disagreements all-too familiar:

"No one is really the bad guy," said Ms. Aniston.  "They both sort of fall short and that's the problem: they fail to communicate in an evolved manner, which would have probably solved the whole problem to begin with."

Aniston admits there is a certain irony that the script for The Break-Up came to her as she was going through her own highly-publicized break-up with former husband Brad Pitt:

"Yes, it's pretty ironic," she said.  "I kind of didn't believe it when I first got the phone call that a movie called The Break-Up was coming. I kind of laughed and thought 'well, that's funny.' I found it something like a sign to do it because it was, in a way, a cathartic thing. I felt very lucky that it came to me. If this had come to me at any other time in my life, I don't know if I would have been able to really 'get it' for myself on a level that I really would have wanted to as an actor."

"The movie is not really telling a story about whether a couple ends up together or not. It is really telling the story about how this relationship affects those two people," said Director Peyton Reed"

He says he set out to break some rules of the romantic comedy genre; but he believes that makes "The Break-Up" more realistic and, therefore, easier for audiences to relate to:

"Every individual sees it through the prism of their own relationships and the most amazing thing to me is to see the movie with actual couples," he added.  "At certain points, when something is said you see people look over [as if to say] 'you said that.' Whether you're in a relationship now or not, you've been through relationships that didn't work and you've taken something with you from that relationship that's positive and you're going to apply to the next one. To me, that was what I always liked about the story:

The Break-Up was filmed on location in Chicago and the ensemble cast also features Jon Favreau, Joey Lauren Adams, Vincent D'Onofrio, Judy Davis and romantic comedy veteran Ann-Margret.