For the next two hours I looked on as Meyers painstakingly went over musical cues with Zimmer and his team, tweaking a bar ever so slightly here, revising a string of notes more decisively there to get at the exact sound she heard in her head. “Bar 6 through 27,” she said in her authoritative yet undivalike manner. “The whole thing sounds like one crescendo. The piece should grow in intensity.” And about a scene in which Streep asks Martin if he thinks she’s too old for him, Meyers said: “She can do the heavy lifting of the line. Don’t make it somber.” Meyers, who loves Frank Sinatra (she sent him a fan letter proposing marriage when she was 12), Burt Bacharach and the Beatles, clearly regards this part of moviemaking as being as important as getting the right angle on a shot. She looked over at me, conscious that she might be seen as overly controlling, and quoted Truffaut: “Making movies is an accumulation of details.” And a little later, she remarked that “directing redefines multitasking.” As if to prove her point, she used the occasional 10-minute breaks in scoring to do everything from cleaning her hands (“How can you see a hand sanitizer and not use it?”) to Skyping on her computer with her second-camera unit as it took establishing shots of the swing outside the house of Streep’s character. “Get away from the chains,” she instructed them. “Now raise it up a little bit . . . more. No, too high.” It was late in the afternoon by now and everyone else appeared to be slowing down except Meyers, who hummed happily to herself.

Watching Meyers at her rigorous fine-tuning, I was struck by how deftly she got her point of view across without grinding anyone down in the process. Her editor, Joe Hutshing, who also worked with Meyers on “The Holiday” and “Something’s Gotta Give,” describes her manner as “very persistent — in an encouraging way. If she’s feeling differently about anything, she tries to coax you into giving her what she wants in a way that’s not reprimanding or dictatorial.” Indeed, in the two days I spent with her, one of her more noticeable traits was her friendly attitude toward various assistants. At one point, when she started to fall over the strap of someone’s bag, she said, “Ooh,” before catching herself and then apologizing to the bag.

It would be tempting to attribute Meyers’s uninflated manner to her being female — to having been trained from birth in the art of the soft sell — except for the fact that she is more straightforward than girlish, more clear than coy. “She’s just really smart and doesn’t seem to be impeded by all the weirdness that everyone brings to whichever gender they are,” says Helen Hunt, who starred in “What Women Want.” “She must have had great parents. I can only assume she had great mothering.” But with all that, there is no missing the fact that there is an iron will behind Meyers’s velvet-gloved presentation; that she is what Jack Nicholson terms “an indomitable force.” Nicholson, who worked with Meyers in “Something’s Gotta Give” and refers to her as a “taskmaster” — he affectionately calls her “the chief” — says that he wouldn’t put her directorship “on a gender basis.” He recalls one argument he had with Meyers over a particular shirt he wanted to wear in the film that she objected to and he insisted on wearing all the same. “I still like the shirt,” he grumbles genially into the phone, as though this little contest of wills just took place the day before. “It’s a memorable shirt.” All the same, given her apparent lack of hubris, it’s easy to forget just how important a player Meyers actually is within the Hollywood system; aside from Nora Ephron, it is hard to think of another female director with as recognizable a cinematic imprint as hers, a certain look and feel that you can point to and credit, for better or worse, as uniquely hers.

Image Nancy Meyers may have become the most powerful female director in Hollywood by making, as one critic said, ‘‘sweet little middle-class romances.’’ Credit... Photo Illustration by Zachary Scott. Prop Stylist: Brandon Klein.

III.

PART AND PARCEL of that uniqueness is Meyers’s focus on making films that both feature and speak to middle-aged women, a demographic that studios traditionally ignore for fear of not bringing in the all-important opening-weekend numbers by which a movie’s position is assessed and its future success seemingly foretold. The simple truth is that any movie that is not aimed at 15-year-old boys, who come out in droves on Friday night for movies like “Transformers,” is seen as something of a risk. Movies like “It’s Complicated” unfold at the box office in a different pattern than movies that are skewed younger; their success is based more on long-range playability and word of mouth than on instant impact. Still, in a movie culture consumed by youth and its trappings — vampires, werewolves, stoners and superheroes — Meyers’s decision to pay attention to a part of the population that is often construed (and often construes itself) to be invisible stands out in bold relief. The fact that this decision has proved to be commercially shrewd says something about her instincts as a moviemaker but also says something about a previously unsatisfied hunger, composed of two parts daydream and one part hope, that is finally being addressed. “She’s a pioneer with regard to representing older women,” Diane Keaton said over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “She’s the only one delivering the fantasy for women over 55. You’re beautiful, charming and you get two guys instead of one.”

Meyers, then, has rushed in where angels fear to tread to rescue the middle-aged and manless woman from her lonely plight. She has taken this sorry creature, who is bombarded with reminders of her vanished youthfulness everywhere she turns, and placed her in an alternate universe, where she is not only visible but desirable just the way she is. (It helps, of course, if she looks like Diane Keaton or Meryl Streep, and if she gets to wear a carefully chosen wardrobe of flattering clothes.) “Feminism didn’t admit the longing for romance,” Barbara Probst Solomon, a writer and critic, says. “And it also didn’t admit that romance often didn’t go with success. Her movies give women their reward — you feel nourished, the way you used to feel about old-time Hollywood movies. You’re not just an old bag sitting with your laptop at the beach — you’ve got your prince. It permits you to have your fantasy.” It is not unique, of course, that Meyers’s vision of life is unabashedly romantic — call it retro or call it postfeminist — but what sets it apart is that she is putting it at the disposal not of unformed 18-year-old girls but of accomplished 50-something women for whom romance is generally no longer considered an option, either because they are too old or because they are too threatening.

In this sense she is proposing the somewhat radical notion that there are second acts in women’s lives and that they don’t necessarily hinge on being a desperate housewife in search of the next “It” bag or a cougar on the prowl. Far from it. The interesting thing about “Something’s Gotta Give” and “It’s Complicated” is that the women in them aren’t remotely on the hunt, seeking proof of their sexual appeal in the form of studly younger men — or men their own age, for that matter. These women are self-sufficient and notably energetic. They may not have men, at least when we first meet them, but they make do with friends and children and siblings, for whom they whip up tasty dinners and homemade pies and laugh over their own situations. When men do appear on the scene, whether in the form of a babe-chasing player like Jack Nicholson’s Harry or Alec Baldwin’s renewedly impassioned Jake (or Dennis Quaid’s Nick Parker in “The Parent Trap,” for that matter), they awaken dormant desires that nevertheless have to be fit into pre-existing, busy lives. “It was a window into my future,” says Elizabeth Hayt, a friend of mine in her late 40s who considers “Something’s Gotta Give” to be a cultural lodestar, “and it gave me amazing hope that I was going to remain vital, sexy and, even more than that, desirable for my accomplishments to men of all different ages, statuses and backgrounds. It was everything that the image of the woman past her prime isn’t.”