How to follow the success of Little Miss Sunshine? Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton finally settled on a film that elides life and art: just the thing for a husband-and-wife team
As directing partners who happen also to be married, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris are doubly anomalous. Their comedy-dramas – Little Miss Sunshine, which inspired a Sundance bidding war and won two Oscars, and the new Ruby Sparks, a bizarre psychological love story – are searching, compassionate and zesty. Judging by the hour I spend with them, their relationship is no less stimulating. They welcome me into their hotel room with a merry babble of overlapping greetings. They don't so much finish each other's sentences as nip in and out of them, supplying any just-out-of-reach words or asides as though passing the condiments across the dinner table.
In his straw Panama hat, striped shirt and navy tank-top, Dayton, who is 55, looks like a bearded, bespectacled owl who became a west coast literature professor. Faris, two years younger, wears a sky-blue shirt and a nest of tousled auburn hair. Bob Balaban and Catherine Keener could play them without any time in the makeup chair.
For such an upbeat couple, they have made a relationship movie that is frequently uncomfortable. Ruby Sparks stars Paul Dano, the stubbornly mute son from Little Miss Sunshine, as Calvin, a blocked novelist unable to follow up his generation-defining first novel. Until, that is, he produces an idealised heroine; her name, Ruby Sparks, is surely a nod to Muriel Spark, whose novel The Comforters is about a woman who realises she is a character in a book.
Ruby, played by the film's screenwriter Zoe Kazan, comes to life, and Calvin discovers he can modify her characteristics – make her fluent in French, or pathetically dependent on him – simply by setting them down on paper. It's a horror film in hipsters' clothing. "Someone described it as Annie Hall meets Frankenstein," notes Dayton approvingly. "We felt if we played it as truthfully as possible," adds Faris. "We could lay the groundwork for the strange places it ends up going." These include a gruelling climax in which Calvin demonstrates the chilling extent of his control over Ruby.
As veteran commercials directors whose production company Bob Industries counts Gap, Apple and Sony PlayStation among its clients, Dayton and Faris maintain a special interest in the marketing of their films. "Ruby Sparks has been sold like a romcom in the States," says Faris. "But we never saw it like that. We were more interested in exploring that desire to corral your partner into being who you want them to be, rather than who they are. It's the same with work: if you control something too much, you can suck the life out of it."
Ruby Sparks is an almost absurdly fitting project for the pair, and not only because the task of balancing the wistful with the warped is well within their skill-set. It's also a film in which the division between life and art is elided, as it must be in the directors' own world. "I like being able to talk about work while we're making dinner," says Faris. "I'd rather discuss it at that moment while it's fresh." When their teenage children were younger, they would mistake their parents' passionate discussions for arguments, crying: "Don't fight! Don't fight!" "I'd tell them, 'Mummy and Daddy aren't fighting – we're working.'"
They met at UCLA in the late 70s: he was a film major, she was a choreographer looking to integrate dance and cinema. They began making documentaries together, and emerged fortuitously from film school just as the music video era was dawning. "There was this urgent need for new film-makers. There wasn't a lot of money in it, but we didn't need much." The couple directed music promos, as well as The Cutting Edge, an MTV show with a DIY aesthetic.
They worked together for six years without so much as playing footsie. "My girlfriends always got jealous," recalls Dayton. Once the footsie finally kicked off, they kept it a secret for a year, wary of external pressure. "Even our crew didn't know," Faris smiles. But they reckoned without the twitching antennae of David Lynch. "We were interviewing David, and between takes he said, 'So, are you guys married?' We told him we weren't, then he asked, 'Well, are you gonna get married?' I think we both blushed. So it's down to him that everyone found out."
Marriage didn't alter work, they say, but having children did. The dreaded pram in the hallway turned out, on closer inspection, to be a springboard. "We were a little lazy before that and it focused us," says Dayton. "We did all our best work after the children were born." That includes many inventive, award-winning videos. For "Been Caught Stealing" by Jane's Addiction, they shot a cross-dressing shoplifting spree with a fish-eye lens; "Tonight, Tonight" by The Smashing Pumpkins occasioned a haunted homage to Méliès. Red Hot Chili Peppers, REM, Oasis, Janet Jackson – everyone wanted them.
The pair took their time looking for the right movie project. They turned down Bad Boys II but seized on Michael Arndt's screenplay Little Miss Sunshine, a bittersweet comedy about a failed motivational speaker taking his largely unhappy family on a road trip to a child beauty contest. Even that was five years in the making. "The studio, Focus Features, didn't understand what we wanted to make and we didn't want to make what they had in mind," sighs Faris. "They weren't interested in ensembles because –"
" – they wanted a star for the poster," continues Dayton, "which is ironic –"
" – because by the time it opened, Steve Carell, who was in the movie, was that star."
Focus was among the studios bidding for the movie at Sundance in 2006, but Fox Searchlight bought it for $10m, a staggering amount for an independent production. After its runaway success (the $8m movie grossed more than $100m worldwide), the directors were inundated with poor scripts and dubious advice. "We were at an actual, cliched Hollywood party," recalls Dayton, "and a major studio executive said to us: 'Whatever you do, you've got to make another movie soon. You can make three bad ones and it won't hurt you: just don't wait.' We heard that from Spielberg too, didn't we?"
Faris furrows her brow. "Really?"
"Yeah. He told us: 'You've gotta make another movie before …'" Dayton trails off, leaving room for Faris to introduce a faint note of scepticism: "Hmm. I don't remember that."
The tip fell on deaf ears, anyway. They weren't about to rush into anything that didn't feel exactly right. Among the numerous projects that almost came off was Used Guys, a comedy set in a female-governed world where cloned men are traded like cars; the budget was so big they feared they would be overruled by the studio on every decision.
Nothing clicked until Ruby Sparks. Did the idea of an artist struggling to follow up a hit debut ring some bells for them? "We did find it funny that we, of all people, would be making that," Dayton laughs. But the marketplace to which they have brought the new film is a more desolate and desperate one. The press kit for Ruby Sparks claims that Little Miss Sunshine "redefined independent cinema". Dayton grimaces, and argues that any ground gained has been lost. "Maybe it demonstrated that independent films can be commercially viable. But conditions have changed now. Attendances are down, the DVD market has disappeared. It's a different climate."
This could be a subject for them, I suggest, given the preponderance of characters wrestling with failure in their movies. "That's definitely something that interests us," agrees Faris. "The American dream tells you that you'll have success if you work hard enough, and we have some concerns about that fallacy. Hopefully, the characters in our films learn to redefine success."
In keeping with that theme, Ruby Sparks did not follow commercially in the tyre-tracks of Little Miss Sunshine – blame the Olympics, or a release date that pitted it against The Dark Knight Rises, or the more ambiguous tone. Faris hopes it will go down better with European audiences. "I think it's a good date movie," she says. I tell her I'm dubious: won't it be more in the tradition of, say, David Mamet's play Oleanna, sparking arguments on the train home? "Sure," she concedes. "But good arguments."
• Ruby Sparks is released on 12 October
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/sep/27/perfect-couple-for-ruby-sparks
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