Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton discuss key themes

Calvin (Paul Dano – Looper, Little Miss Sunshine) is a young novelist who achieved phenomenal success early in his career but who is now struggling with the double whammy of writer’s block and a stagnant love life. A breakthrough comes, though, when he listens to his dreams and, apparently completely out of the blue, creates the eponymous Ruby who starts to fuel his professional life and his romantic fantasies.  However, when Calvin finds Ruby (Zoe Kazan – It’s Complicated, Revolutionary Road) actually cooking him breakfast one morning, he must face the fact that his wildest dreams have somehow become a living, breathing person.

The quirkiest and most original romantic comedy of 2012, this tale of all-empowering love features a stellar supporting cast including Annette Bening (The Kids Are Alright, American Beauty) as his hippy mother Gertrude, Antonio Banderas (Puss In Boots, The Skin I Live In) as Calvin’s misunderstood stepdad Mort, Steve Coogan (Tropic Thunder, Alan Partridge) as fellow author Landon Tharp and Elliot Gould (TV’s Friends, Ocean’s Eleven) as his long-suffering but supportive therapist.

Written by the supremely talented Kazan and directed by the creative team behind the acclaimed and similarly whimsical Little Miss Sunshine, Ruby Sparks is breathtakingly sweet, original and hilarious and the perfect answer to all your Valentine’s Day prayers!

You’ve bided your time since Little Miss Sunshine came out six years ago. Was that deliberate?

Valerie: We were trying to get something off the ground all that time.

Jonathan: The truth of it is simply that we’d worked on films non-stop since finishing Little Miss Sunshine but that experience was so profound and satisfying that we really wanted to protect our work and only return with something we were really proud of and which was made under the right conditions. That’s hard to do. It took us four years to make Little Miss Sunshine because we insisted on the right circumstances…

Valerie: The right cast…

Jonathan: …And so we wanted to do that with our other projects. This was the first time everything lined up properly.

Little Miss Sunshine has had a very successful afterlife on DVD and Blu-ray. Can you understand why people want to watch it over and over again?

Valerie: I love that. I’ve watched it a lot and I still like it. When we make a movie we imagine we’re watching it in a theater with an audience, but the reality is more people will see a film like this at home by themselves or with a smaller group. And we do seem to think about stories that are more timeless and can be watched in years to come. Little Miss Sunshine was about family and Ruby Sparks is about relationships. Twenty years from now those subjects will still interest people.

Jonathan: [Laughs] Issues of control will still be around.

There’s something wonderful about having these characters on your DVD or Blu-ray shelf, to get down whenever you want to spend some time with them…

Jonathan: I love that too and also the fact that how your library of books somehow reflects your sensibility, likewise having a library of films is a great way to connect with what’s meaningful to you. I hope Ruby Sparks has the same kind of shelf life. The challenge with this film is that it’s a not a strict genre picture. It’s a love story that has comedic moments and like Little Miss Sunshine it defies simple categorisation. That’s why it took so long for Little Miss Sunshine to be made, because people didn’t know what it was.

When you got Zoe Kazan’s Ruby Sparks script did you know straight away you wanted to direct it together?

Jonathan: Yes because it was about something real that happens between people. Even though you have this fantastical premise, it explores love and relationships…

Valerie:… And the balance of power. We respond to good writing and both scripts, for this and Little Miss Sunshine, have an economy to them. They’re very efficient but they have a lot to them – there’s a lot to mine for in the story. The real story here is Calvin [Paul Dano] struggling to write his second novel and the love story, him finding or creating Ruby, helps him write that novel. The fact that it deals with creativity and creative work, along with everything else, was very interesting to us because it’s about our relationships and our relationships with work. It felt like it had a lot of different facets to it.

Talking of the balance of power, who is the boss on set?

Valerie: [Laughs] The best idea is the boss.

Jonathan: There’s really no rhyme or reason to our collaboration. We both do everything. It’s about the conversations between the two of us as we work.

Valerie: The most important thing is that we spend a lot of time dreaming about a movie together before we go to make it. We have this shared vision of what the film is before we start shooting so we’re really chasing after the same thing. It’s so important to have a vision of what the film is and maybe even more so when you’re a team.

Jonathan: All directors have to do that. Hopefully that vision gets passed on to the crew and the cast.

Valerie: But some directors like to keep things close to their chest. They don’t like to have anybody know what they’re seeing, like Woody Allen where the actors don’t get to see the whole script. I’m not interested in that way of working.

Woody is famous for only directing actors when he thinks they’ve done something wrong, not when they’ve got it right…

Valerie: And I do understand that actually. You do sort of go ‘What’s wrong with this? What isn’t working?’ because whatever is working you don’t really need to discuss. You don’t want to mess with it because if you say ‘Good’ the actor might think ‘Great, now I’m going to do that again’.

Did Zoe Kazan come as part of the package?

Jonathan: It came to us with Zoe as the lead and Paul as Calvin.

Valerie: We’d stayed in touch with Paul after Little Miss Sunshine and had met Zoe, but we didn’t know as she was writing this that they were thinking of us. We only found out when we had the final script.

Jonathan: We were really excited to work with Paul again and we thought it was great that this film could introduce audiences to Zoe. So many times you have to overcome an audience’s association with an actor when they’re starring in a film but she would be, for most people, fresh and new.

Valerie: It’s fun to watch audiences realise she also wrote it. They can’t believe she can do all that but she’s really a great new talent.

Casting real-life couples can be tricky, can’t it?

Jonathan: That was an area of concern but we rehearsed with them. They’re a wonderful couple but they aren’t Calvin and Ruby so we had to work in a way to remove certain habits they have with each other as a couple.

Valerie: We had to sort of estrange them from each other because they were so comfortable as a couple. We were going to have them stay in separate places during shooting but ultimately we realized that they’re professionals. We didn’t need to rule their lives, but it is tricky and you never know what the chemistry is going to be like on screen. The biggest challenge was their familiarity with each other and trying to make it feel new.

Which other films were an influence on Ruby Sparks?

Valerie: Early on we watched films like The Purple Rose Of Cairo.

Jonathan: Then Midnight In Paris came out and that was an interesting movie.

Valerie: The Red Shoes was also interesting because it’s sad and tragic.

Jonathan: We delved into magical realism and that tradition of storytelling. There’s Stranger Than Fiction and Weird Science but we tried to stay away from those because they have a very different tone.

Valerie: But we don’t usually watch other films before we’re shooting unless it’s a case of ‘We should look at this so we know what to avoid’. With The Purple Rose Of Cairo I wanted to see again how Woody Allen introduces the idea of the characters coming off the screen and it’s fun to see how matter-of-fact it is. 

What do you see as the key theme of Ruby Sparks?

Valerie: It’s exploring the fact we have an idea of a person when we first meet them, then as we get to know them we have to reconcile the idea of them with the real person and to control our desire to make them into this idea we have. It’s about those dynamics and urges we have to create the perfect mate.

Jonathan: I hope couples will watch this film at home together. You can make dinner, sit down at home and watch the movie with your partner and you’ll really have something to talk about. There’s a lot to identify with and a lot to explore. We all have the urge to control our partners at various times and if anything this film suggests it’s probably better that we don’t have those powers. The pleasure of a relationship is the surprise and not knowing what your partner is going to do. It’s about every day finding something new in not knowing what’s going to happen next.

Valerie: Love is best when it isn’t in your control.

If you were going to ‘write’ the perfect partner would it be each other?

Valerie: [Laughs] I’ve never really sought perfection.

Jonathan: And that’s why we get along!

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Ruby Sparks comes to Blu-ray and DVD on February 11