| "Little Miss Sunshine" Directors Brighten The Day With Debut Feature - Page 4 |
| Written by Brad Balfour | ||||||
| Monday, 07 August 2006 11:08 | ||||||
Page 4 of 4
Kinnear, Collette, Carrell and Dano in "Little Miss Sunshine"
A scene from "Little Miss Sunshine"
Steve Carrell and Toni Collette getting out of the van
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, like where he goes, "Fuck the contest." 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. Q: What 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. 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 one 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. Q: 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 explained that Dwayne [Paul Dano--the nihilistic teenage son is going to come in and say, "This place is fucked up," and that the grandpa taught her this dance, and the family doesn't know what this dance is, and that when she performs it, they're going to discover it for the first time. 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 we could've avoided it is to not have a pageant at all. We had to have that. Q: You have kids, right? JD: We have three children. Q: Would your kids get to see this? JD: They've seen it VF: Multiple times. Q: 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. Q: How did they feel? JD: They love it. They love acting out the scenes where the language gets… VF: Their favorite shot is seeing Dwayne do that move on stage; that just cracks them up. Q: Does your daughter think Paul is dreamy? 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. Q: 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. Q: What are you working on now? 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.
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