When a charming film like Little Miss Sunshine appears, it deserves a break, and some scrutiny. Who is this married duo of directors, and how did Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton happen to so brilliantly craft this dark comedy about a dysfunctional family with a 10 year old daughter who wants to compete in these bizarre beauty pageants? Yeah, the story does hit all the expected indie comedy marks—much to the chagrin of the Voice and Timeout critics—but so what? These two did it well, with ease and a twist or two.
So let's face it, few films feature an effective husband-and-wife team, let alone one that has been the successful creators of an impressive body of music videos for the likes of The Smashing Pumpkins , Jane's Addiction , Macy Gray , Janet Jackson , Oasis , Weezer , and The Ramones ; a hit MTV series, The Cutting Edge; and a slew of enduring commercials for all sorts of major brands.
On top of all that, they chose to do a really off-beat, laugh-out-loud indie film (it took five years to finally complete) and assemble a top flight ensemble of actors for the family ranging from Dad (Greg Kinnear) to Mom (Toni Collette) to the suicidal brother and Proust scholar (Steve Carrell) to drug-addled Gramps (Alan Arkin). Along the way it took last year's Sundance Film Festival by storm, stirring up a bidding war to become the highest selling film in the festival's 24 year history.
The Epoch Times (ET): This film really has great emotional impact. How did you get this project; it took you a couple of years to film?
Valerie Faris (VF): Oh no. It was actually pretty quick once we started to film, then we finished, we went to Sundance with it, and we sold it.
Jonathan Dayton (JD): We finished it four days before it screened.
VF: And it was exactly a year ago that we shot it so the long part, the hard part was getting it made.
JD: It was nice because we enjoyed making videos, commercials and documentaries, and while we wanted to do a feature, it wasn't something that we had to do in the abstract. We really wanted to find the right script, and when we read this, we knew this was the project for us because it wasn't a music video director's piece; it was hopefully what you would not expect from a music video director. We were hopefully excited about taking it on, and knowing that performances were going to be the challenge, not some visual trickery.
ET: How did the script come your way?
VF: Through Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger, two producers whom we've known for a while—they produced "Election," and Albert produced "Crumb." We were always interested in working with them, and they had given us a few scripts that we weren't crazy about; then they gave us this one. Actually when we first read the storyline, we were like, "Tsk. I don't know. Beauty pageant?" It just sounded bad.
JD: "Road movie? Dysfunctional family?" all these things didn't seem very appealing. What's great about the script is that it takes this genre and turns it on its ear. That really meant a lot to us.
VF: I never even felt so much like we were doing a genre film. I just felt like it was a bunch of characters that I really felt I loved, and wanted to see come to life. I know I never felt, "Oh, we're doing a road movie comedy." In fact, we hardly approached this like we were doing a comedy. We weren't laughing on the set after each take. It was more of approaching it from the kind of comedy we like, which is where the comedy comes from the kind of characters, and the situations where you're really identifying with them, hopefully more than laughing at their follies.
JD: If it's truthful, it's so much more satisfying than if you feel like they've chased a life, and here's this big joke delivered. If it feels like, "Oh my god! That's just like my life," when you're laughing at this, you're laughing at your own travails.
ET: Weren't you at first tempted to do your own script or story as your first feature?
VF: It would take too long (laughs).
JD: Well, you know I have a lot of respect for writing, and while I enjoy it, there are people who are better at it than I am…
VF: Michael [Arndt] is a really disciplined, hard-working writer. We'd worked with other writers developing things, but we worked with Michael a little on the script just to trim it down, and get the tone to a place where we felt it was consistent for the movie. We had a great time with him. He's just a very disciplined guy. He knows film inside and out.
I guess it's just that we clicked, and I would rather have Michael write our scripts although there are stories now that we have now, and now want to work with Michael on. It was just a good pairing for us. That's all he does: he writes, and we do too many other things to have the time to spend just ten years to write a script.
ET: The casting here was crucial--I can see how you wanted everybody you have because they all have this body of work--but especially with Steve Carrell. Of course it was before Steve broke out; you'd seen him on Daily Show But that was it at the time.
JD: We always felt that Steve was an incredibly smart actor, and even when he took on the silliest of roles…
VF: Like in Anchorman.
JD: He approached it with such vigor, and intelligence…
VF: …and freshness. It may be just schtick, but coming from him it doesn't feel like that.
JD: He always keeps it fresh. He demands that of himself. We were very excited about throwing him this role which was so different because we knew that he would rise to the occasion. When we sat with him just to talk about his role, we saw that we were on the same page. It was a very exciting thing.
VF: The ironic thing is that Steve was the biggest leap for us. During production, he was the one that we knew the least about in terms about doing this kind of role, but the minute we started rehearsing with him, it was just clear that it was going to be easy in that sense.
JD: He was so serious about the role. He's one of those great performers that's very funny, but doesn't need to be funny every moment. There's no neediness there. He was just very focused like the rest of the cast, and that made for a great set. There were no distractions while you waited for someone to crack everyone else up. They were really aimed at making the movie.
ET: Was this cast pretty much the cast you had wanted?
JD: Pretty much.
VF: Some of them, no, we didn't think of them until later. Steve we hadn't thought of in the role until right before, a couple months before we starting shooting. Greg [Kinnear] we always thought of in the Richard role. With Toni [Collette], we had met a lot of great actresses, and Toni popped up, and we thought, "Oh my good, she's perfect for this." Abigail [Breslin] we had actually found, and Paul [Dano] we had found two years prior to starting production, and we were just worried that they'd get too old, but luckily they stunted their growth somehow.
JD: We had coffee and cigarettes for all of them.
ET: How did you find those two?
JD: We had this great casting team, and they've done all videos, and commercials, and they've done Spike Jonze's movies, and they launched this international search. Every country where they speak English, they went to. Abby was the only person that we found that we felt was right.
VF: She was six years old when we first auditioned her, and we thought that she was almost too young, but she was great. She was in "Signs" when she was four.
JD: Her gift is that she's still a child. She's not like a mini-adult; she's a child who's smart.
ET: That's so important for that role.
JD: It's everything for that role, and we were just so happy. When we said, "You've got the job," we said, "Thank you. We are so happy. Let's find Olive," because you could have the biggest cast lined up, but if Olive wasn't right, you'd have nothing.
ET: Who do you think had more jitters: Alan Arkin being directed by the likes of you or you directing Alan Arkin?
VF: (laughs) I can only say that we had jitters, first even talking with him on the phone. "God, it's Alan Arkin."
JD: We had so loved his work; we'd grown up with it. We first thought that he was too young for the role, but then we realized, "Come on, it's Alan Arkin. He'll do it. My god."
VF: The minute we talked to him on the phone, we knew that he loved the character, and he got it so thoroughly. In fact, he was so great that his concern at one point when we were shooting was that in the scene with him and Abigail, he was concerned about going too soft.
JD: When they're in the hotel room, and she asks him.
VF: Originally, the way it was written it was even more sweet, and we just loved the fact that he was, "I just don't want to be this sweet old guy the night before I die." We worked with him to make that scene not purely sweet. There was a little humor, and the way he talks to her is just a little less precious. Thank god we had him, because he had the right concerns. With all the performers, you don't audition people when you have you have actors like this. You meet with them, but we felt from all our meeting with these actors that they got the characters, that they saw the movie the way we saw it, that it was going to be played very real, and not just purely comedic.
JD: He was definitely the one that said, "Two directors?" He was really suspicious.
VF: "How does this work?" We were nervous the first couple of days thinking, "Is Alan just laughing at us? Does he just think that this is a joke?" And I actually think that the rehearsal process is the key.
ET: Can you talk about the VW bus scenes when they travel to the beauty pageant? It's funny because you can actually see them making this jump every single time. How did you film that?
JD: We had a stunt coordinator there to make sure everyone was safe, but what was so beautiful was that everyone said, "Oh, I'm going to do it. No stunt doubles." I think that that was such an important part of the film that the actors were so committed, and they loved what they were doing, and they were just eager to dive in.
VF: Greg did all the driving pretty much. There are a couple of shots where its second-unit work, and a little bit of stunt-driving when they get to the pageant, but for the most part Greg was driving, sometimes it was a stick, sometimes it was an automatic. He was on the freeway with the whole cast, and us in the back, and the cameraman.
JD: We were stuffed eventually where grandpa's body ends up. Val and I were in there, looking at a monitor.
ET: You were actually in there?
JD: In the van, yeah. We were filming out the front window looking back at the car. We were on a tow unit. We realized pretty early on that the van was another character in the film, and in fact the ending originally didn't have them pushing the van, but we eventually realized that after the pageant, you needed to have one last connection with that van, and that when you saw them all working together without speaking a word essentially, that tells you how far the family has come.
ET: Even though a lot has changed, a lot of things are still the same.
JD: Exactly, that was very important. We didn't want to have that Disney ending. That's why the language is important, and we didn't want it to get all sweet and syrupy.
ET: Was the van always a part of the script? Have you really driven a van?
JD & VF: Oh yeah.
ET: Because I had one.
VF: Did you ever have to push it?
ET: Oh yes. Believe me, we broke down, and I had the yin yang sign on the front of it, and all that. It's got its own story.
VF: They should do a VW van documentary story because so many families have stories. I went across Europe in a VW camper with my parents, and then we had a passenger van that broke down and that we had to push it. Michael [Arndt], the writer, swears that the door fell off his van, and that's where that came from.
JD: When we first started dating, I had a VW van. I won't say anything more.
ET: Have you the "National Lampoon's Vacation" movie. Did you ever think of rethinking your film with that in mind?
JD: I'd never seen that movie, and I kind of made a point not to see it. I knew of course about the grandmother, and we watched European Vacation just to see the tone, and I felt like there was a different enough tone, and that was in the script, and that was a really funny thing. The challenge was how can you pull this off in a believable way? I don't know what it's like in the National Lampoon's Vacation, but the tire on the top of the car…
VF: We were thinking Weekend at Bernie's …every time you touch upon a dead body you're going to think of those films, but…
JD: Originally, the script was a little more…not slapstick, but they originally pushed the body out of a three-story window, and so it was bloody, but we just felt like….
VF: I don't know, I think the way that we approached it, without consciously saying, "Oh, let's steer away from that," was because what was so important to us was that if you're following these characters, and identifying with the way that they're acting on some level, like the way that Greg has to go to the hospital. It's reasonable to take the body, because you wouldn't want to leave him there if you loved him. You wouldn't want to leave the body, but he wanted to do what his daughter wanted—if you felt that those conflicts, that the stress that he was under was real, or as real as we could make, that act would not seem as outlandish. I think that was really the challenge of that scene, to try to make you think, "Yeah, they are doing the right thing."
ET: After that, Greg's character tends to be a fully rounded person instead of just "The Heel."
JD: Right, and it's a turning point
ET: Had you ever thought about making a documentary about pageants (laughs). What kind of research did you do, and this being your first feature film, how did you approach doing a comedy about this subject?
VF: We never really thought of it—well, we knew it was funny, but we liked that it was purely a comedy. I think pure comedies are so hard.
JD: I don't think it sounds like fun.
VF: It doesn't sound fun. It's like a technical thing.
JD: Basically, the audience is sitting there thinking, "Okay. Make me laugh. Where's the next laugh?" And I think you feel that on the set. What happens is that all the actors, and the filmmakers feel this pressure. "Oh god, I haven't been funny in fifteen seconds. Wait, maybe him walking across the lot could be funny." You end up with this terrible pressure, and this was so refreshing for us because you had a basic drama, and the laughs would pop out of there, and that was so much more fun to us. As far as the pageant goes, it was very important to us that the film not be about pageants. It's about being out of place, it's about not knowing where you're going to end up…
VF: And it's about the contest of life, just that final contest. The Richard character always feels like he's being put to the test. You feel like he's trying so hard, and that everything is a test. The final test is this contest where he has no control over it, but to kind of see him take over, and defend her is a really great thing. . . For us, the beauty pageant was a really clear contest, and a context to put this beautiful, little girl in contrast to girls that are brought up to be beautiful.
ET: What were directions did you give to whoever did makeup and styling for the girls in the contest?
JD: This is really important: there were no directions. Those were real pageant girls, done up by their mothers. They brought all their own equipment. They brought every aspect of that.
VF: If you go, that's what you'll see.
JD: It's tricky here, because this is a community that has been beaten up so much, and they were really paranoid…
VF: Very sensitive.
JD: Our first sentence to them was, "Okay, this is not going to be Jean Benet Ramsey" [the little girl found murdered who had been a pageant devotee]--just to get it out on the table--because they know. They're so exhausted.
VF: They're so bruised.
JD: We knew you couldn't fake this, because these are girls who have been working at this all their lives.
VF: We just stood there. When we did the bathing suit contest we said, "Okay do what you do in a bathing suit contest." I don't know what it is. So we get one of the moms to organize this. "We want them standing at the back of the stage. How do you have them usually come out?" They told us, "Well, this is how we do it," and they all came out just to hit their poses, and she comes out pigeon-toed, and that was just the way it happened.
JD: That was life. That was life. Our point is not to make a big editorial statement about beauty pageants, it's to depict it as honestly as we can and then to let the audience make their judgment.
VF: If we wanted to make them look bad, and show the mother and daughter fighting, and the daughter crying, there was a scene in there where two little girls laugh at Olive because she's…
JD: Chubby.
VF: Chubby. They say, "Are you on a diet?" And she says, "No." And one of them says, "I didn't think so." That was a scene; we shot it, we hated it. People will draw their own conclusions, and most people are going to find it pretty offensive I think, but there's no way around it. You can't show that scene without it being offensive to some people.
ET: How did the parents react, the ones that have seen it?
JD: We haven't seen it with any of the audiences. We made a point of going through the whole story with the parents, and the kids so that they knew; it was really important to us not to abuse that trust. We told them that it's kind of like this story about a little family dog, this little mutt, and you said, "I'm going to take this dog to a dog show."
VF: "That dog is so cute."
JD: And you arrive, and you realize that all the other dogs are purebred, and that they've all been combed, and have their little prance, so they got that.
VF: And they watched the whole thing go down, and they were there at the shoot, in the audience.
JD: They had a great time. All the girls were learning Olive's steps afterwards…well, not all the steps, but they all thought it was funny, and they knew the context. I think the hardest thing is these moments when people will snicker, and a girl just walks into view…
VF: We never asked them to smile at all. They came up, and that's what they do. It's going to be a little bit of shock because I think if they go see it with an audience, the audience is going to have a reaction to this stuff, and I don't know if there's anything—the only thing we could've avoided it is to not have a pageant at all. We had to have that.
JD: We really hope that this doesn't get seen as a beauty pageant movie. For the most part, we hope people don't know that they get there so that that drama remains.
ET: You have kids, right?
JD: We have three children.
ET: Would your kids get to see this?
JD: They've seen it.
VF: Multiple times.
ET: How old are they?
JD: Twin boys that are 10, and a 13 year old girl.
VF: So old enough to have heard those words [that the Grandfather speaks] many times.
ET: How did they feel?
JD: They love it. They love acting out the scenes where the language gets…
VF: There favorite shot is seeing Dwayne do that move on stage; that just cracks them up.
ET: Does your daughter think Paul is dreamy?
VF: Paul. . .(laughs)
JD: Maybe not dreamy, but she really loves him. We saw so many actors for that role, and Paul was just—we love "Harold and Maude" and Paul is not Bud Cort [lead of this classic black comedy], but he's this distinctive…
VF: You just don't need to do a lot.
ET: He's almost instantly likable.
JD: Originally the script called for him to have a Mohawk…
VF: And really well-built.
JD: He's just one of those actors that's just a great person, and the thing that I'm happiest about is that we didn't choose people because they're good people to be in this movie, they just happened to all be amazing people in life, but I think that that does come through.
VF: Who they are as people—I think that's true of actors. You can't get around some element…
JD: Seeps through.
ET: What are you working on now?
JD: We have a couple of projects that we're working on that are being written, but unfortunately it's going to take forever. We have a Red Hot Chili Peppers video that's coming up next month, and we'll continue to do other things as we nurture these films along.
VF: I think that we see ourselves doing more small films; that's the way we like working. We never felt like we were on a low-budget film doing this film. We had the best cast that you could imagine.
Feeds