BOP Interview: Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano
By Ryan Mazie
July 25, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
One of the most talented couples in the indie film world (Dano broke out as the self-silenced brother in Little Miss Sunshine followed up with There Will Be Blood; Kazan has some stage credit to her name with parts in Revolutionary Road and It’s Complicated), this classic romantic comedy with a contemporary edge might catapult the duo to the next level akin to the stars of the studio’s 2009 summer romcom breakthrough (500) Days of Summer.
However, Dano (the introvert to Kazan’s extroverted personality) says the only thing he is looking for in an acting project is a good script, a talented filmmaker, and something to get excited about, “When I’m not excited, it makes acting really hard for me... I feel very privileged to act so I just try to respond to things.” In this interview, find out what there was in Ruby Sparks to get excited about, how the script fell into Little Miss Sunshine directors’ hands, the importance of casting, and how a Macy’s mannequin in a dumpster catalyzed the film.
Zoe, what was the light bulb moment for you to create Ruby Sparks?
ZK: Yeah, I have always been inspired by the Pygmalion myth. I just like Greek mythology and obviously that myth has been super provocative and inspired George Bernard Shaw and many others. I was walking home from work and it was nighttime, I used to live by a Macy’s and there was a discarded mannequin in the trash that I thought was a person and it scared me. So I had this uncanny moment and I thought of Pygmalion and how that must have been how the myth came about. Like someone thought they saw the statue move out of the corner of their eye and I thought what I would do with that myth when I went to sleep and like [the film’s main character] Calvin, I woke up in the morning and the first five or 20 pages were just delivered to me.
You’ve written plays before, so what about this idea made you think that it was suited to be a film or is that an afterthought?
ZK: No; that is definitely like the first thing. I feel like I receive pictures, I am a really visual person, so the first inspiration for me, it’s always visual. For both of my plays, I saw it on a stage, like the first picture I got was a stage picture which is sort of two dimensional and you are using the space in a different way. Stories tell you what they’re supposed to be and the first image I had was the first image of the movie of Ruby backlit. And I think there is something really subjective about film; it pulls you into its reality and doesn’t let you go. You’re sitting in the dark looking at something bigger than life and that was important for me in terms of the leap of fantasy this movie takes – that it’d be an easier leap to take in a novel or film than it would be on stage.
And a film like this, there has to be a strong initial suspension of disbelief.
PD: That’s why Chris Messina’s character is so important, because somebody needs to be like this can’t fucking happen (laughs) or you’re crazy or let’s call the doctor, but to really try and prevent it and then get proven wrong. One question I don’t get is why don’t you explain how Ruby came about?
ZK: I think people will feel more comfortable if it was like a magic typewriter or if there was a shooting star that explained everything. But for me, that makes it sillier than what it… I don’t know. Part of what the movie is about is the creative process, which seems magical to me. It seems magical to me that I was in our studio apartment and wrote down an idea and kept writing and that seems like a crazy thing, that there’s an actual object in the world that has money and time and energy poured into it that has its own life now. That feels like magic, so how do you explain that? (laughs) That’s a point in the movie and also besides the point, that it’s magic. You believe. There you go.
How was it acting in a movie that you wrote?
ZK: It was much easier than I thought it was going to be. I was concerned that it would feel weird or that I wouldn’t be able to turn off my writer brain, but to be totally honest, I’ve been writing while I’ve been acting for a long time. Never on the same project, but while I’m doing a play I’d be off writing something earlier in the day so I think my brain is used to switching back and forth so it didn’t feel so weird.
On set, was it tough to separate yourself from the script? Criticizing your own words?
ZK: I know what you are talking about. I’ve written two plays and had them both produced and it was really painful for me both times. I’ve had good experiences; I loved the people I was working with and happy collaborations, but every night I’d sit in the audience and want to die, because all I would hear was places where the re-write didn’t quite line-up or where it was missing something. I’ve been working on the script with [Valerie and Jonathan] for nine months before production and we went through every line. I literally read the whole script aloud to them and told them what I thought and what pictures I saw in my mind. We had these really in depth conversations and because of that, by the time we went into production, I really felt like it was ours. There were obviously moments where I would go, “You’re not saying that line correctly,” and I spent hundreds of hours working on that line so why aren’t they saying it right? But other than that, I think, I don’t know. It was easier for some reason.
At what point did you think of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris as potential directors?
PD: Probably Zoe had written ten pages and she showed them to me and I said Jon and Val should direct this and Zoe said, “Yes.” (both laugh) But that was a dream idea so we kind of daydreamed the whole time that they would be the people we sent it to. If we had not gotten them, I wouldn’t have known what we’d have done, but they would have been the inspiration for what we wanted in terms of sensibility and luckily we didn’t have to consider other options, because they said, “Yes.”
Speaking of Chris Messina’s character earlier, how developed were the supporting characters before you started filming or was that mostly the actors bringing the characters to life?
ZK: [Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris] are sticklers for it has to be on the page. They don’t like a whole lot of improvisation and I’d say 95% of the movie is as scripted. But there’s a funny alchemy that happens when you cast an actor where the character exists in a platonic state and then the actor exists and when you meld the two, this new person shows up.
PD: A great example is when Jon and Val suggested Antonio Banderas for Mort, who I think probably Zoe was thinking while writing it, or at least on my first read, Mort was nothing close to Antonio Banderas, but some totally different person. So it’s the same words, but it is a really inspired choice that brought something out of that character and that’s the beauty of collaboration.
This movie just has that screwball tone to it. In certain scenes, not the whole film…
ZK: Well, a lot of that has to do with Valerie and Jonathan’s direction.
PD: And I think romantic comedies used to be … I guess we like older romantic comedies more compared to modern ones.
ZK: Yeah, I think the romantic comedy platonic ideal used to be done with more elegance and that now the romantic comedies that you and I respond to are ones that bend the genre a little bit more.
How old are we talking about? Like His Girl Friday?
ZK: Yeah, yeah. We watched a lot of those just for inspiration. The Awful Truth.
PD: Philadelphia Story is the best.
ZK: It’s just a genre I love so much.
Earlier, we were comparing it to Woody Allen movies like Purple Rose of Cairo. It’s like you don’t ask questions; that takes the fun out of it.
ZK: Sure. Purple Rose of Cairo, Groundhog Day. Those are like two of my favorite movies and definitely an inspiration for this. Other things we looked at a lot are Tootsie. Even though that’s not a magic, realist leap you still accept that everybody believes this man is a woman and that Dustin Hoffman as a woman seems like a jaunt to me (laughs). I think that asking people to suspend their disbelief is central to making art.
You could have written this as a straight romantic comedy, but then it takes a dark turn, so why did you decide to go that way?
ZK: That’s a really good question and I asked myself the same question while writing it. I wrote the first 20 pages and then stopped for like six months, because I felt like I could see what that broader version was and I knew that wasn’t the game I was after. I could sense in myself that I didn’t want to write that version and I don’t think that version has its own place when I would look down on it; it’s just not what I wanted to do.
So then I started to think about it and realized I was interested in talking about what happens in a relationship when one person is basically afraid of the other person. Where one person’s independence threatens the other and what happens when issues of control come a part of the love dynamic. And the idea of a person superseding their reality and that’s something I’ve experienced in relationships and have seen in my friends relationships; that more emotional, darker subject line. So it was important for me to keep it funny and allow the comedy to come out of character, but I felt if you dip a toe in the man controls woman trope, if you have to go all the way or it’s a little bit sexist. If you don’t take it to this logical extreme, then you’re allowing him to get away with something and it allows for the audience to root for the manipulation instead of making them pay for it a little bit, too. I think it’s worth it to be a little riskier and hopefully start a conversation.
How did you come up with the name, Ruby Sparks?
ZK: It just popped into my head. And you know, it’s one of those things where it didn’t use to be the title and now it is and I look at it and go, “What if I named her Ruby Goldman or something?” (laughs) It could’ve been anything.
What titles did you have before?
ZK: I just had one, it was a working title, “He Loves Me,” which was never supposed to be the title of the movie. It was just like what the document was called on my computer (laughs).
You could have written the character as a woman writing her dream man. Did it ever occur to you to do it that way?
ZK: No. Honestly, to me so much of the inspiration came from the myth and I think it was gendered for a reason. It has come down to us, surviving gendered male to female for a reason, and a part of that is psychologically revealing of something in our culture and I think that has to deal with how men tend to look at women in a different way than women look at men. And it’s not a fantasy for a woman to create a person, it’s biology. It happens every single day in the natal wards and for men - I don’t know. For women it corresponds biologically with the fact that we can physically create with our bodies and for men, it is the seed, the pen. It’s the seed of inspiration. I don’t mean to get gross, but it’s the second sex. I’m not the first person to come up with these ideas. I just think that that impulse is particularly male. And I was trained to write things that spoke to me in terms of relationship dynamics and in the relationships I’ve been in, I felt a dynamic much closer to Ruby and Calvin’s than to the gender reverse of that.