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Ruby Sparks is being positioned as the indie film of the summer poised to enter the mainstream. The long-awaited follow-up to married directorial couple Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ runaway hit Little Miss Sunshine, Ruby shares a similar light-hearted tone that heads down a darker path as the film progresses. Sunshine’s Paul Dano stars as Calvin, a prodigy writer who cannot muster up the strength to write a second novel years after his acclaimed debut, leading to a lackluster social and love life. Calvin finds the solution to both of his problems in the most unusual way – by writing about the titular dream girl who literally jumps off of the page of his typewriter. Zoe Kazan (Dano’s real life girlfriend) plays Ruby and pulls double duty, also writing the screenplay of this film. The two couples were in Boston to promote the film, discussing it in roundtable interviews. Up first is the interview with directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.

Frequently finishing each other’s thoughts, one can’t help but wonder if the creative couple could relate to Calvin’s struggle of figuring out how to follow-up a critical and audience-winning first feature. During the discussion, the two of them talk about: the answer on why it took six years to make a follow-up film, finding the right tone, shooting digitally, and how they lit a scene using only an iPad.

It has been six years since Little Miss Sunshine. What about Zoe’s screenplay grabbed you and made it feel like this was the next story you wanted to tell?

Jonathan Dayton: We loved [Zoe’s] voice. It felt very true and singular and certainly the idea about doing a film about men and women and their relationships was very attractive.

Valerie Faris: And I think there was an appeal in being this mix of high concept while being totally grounded in reality, not making anything of the magic.

JD: It was a challenge, though. “How do you sell an audience on this?” Because there are no like funny machines that spit Ruby out or a comet that flies above the sky and there she is. And we liked that.

It’s very Woody Allen.

VF: Yes. The Purple Rose of Cairo. But I think where the story goes was very appealing to us. The first conversation we had with Zoe about the script was very good; we all seemed to be on the same page. We worked for about nine months to just kind of shape it into the film we wanted to make. But she is a great collaborator. The sense that we had from the first time we talked to her and then we started working with her was that she was going to trust us with the film, which was scary for us, because she is the actor and the writer, so if she was going to cling onto her script and be precious about it, I don’t think we would have done it.

JD: I had nightmares about her stopping in the middle of a scene and going, “This isn’t the way I saw it!” (laughs).

VF: But she is so not that way. She’s so great and she said from the beginning that this is your film and that is a great feeling. Once we arrived at a script we were all happy with, she could just let it go and completely assume the role of Ruby and not the role of a writer.

When you are directing, were there ever arguments over certain scenes or the overall direction of the movie?

JD: Not really.

VF: I don’t remember.

JD: Oh, I say “no” and she says, “I don’t remember.” (laughs)

VF: I’d call them discussions.

JD: But we constantly debate every aspect of the movie. The real secret for us is prep, and because there are two of us, we are able to actually act out the scenes at home and explore the material. We are terrible actors, but we know what we are asking our cast to do and we know the feelings.

VF: We’ve been done the road together and we try as much as possible to address issues that arise ahead of time off the set. Anything we have a dispute over can get worked out beforehand. We come to the material from a very similar angle. It’s not like I have one idea and Jonathan has another.

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