Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterExclusive Audio Podcast: Oscar-nominated Little Miss Sunshine Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton
Feb 14, 2007 2:40 PM, By Darroch Greer
Digital Content Producer's and Millimeter's coverage of past and present award nominees/winners
Exclusive Podcast: Little Miss Sunshine Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton
Listen in on an exclusive interview with Little Miss Sunshine Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton talk about creating the award-winning film (just announced as being an Oscar nominee for best motion picture of the year), and the importance of the Sundance Film Festival to its success. Millimeter contributor Darroch Greer asks the questions. To listen, click here
Accompanying Story by Darroch Greer
There aren’t too many movies as enjoyable as Little Miss Sunshine. While a heroin-snorting grandfather, a suicidal Proust scholar, and a teenage devotee of Nietzsche who won’t speak until he is accepted into the Air Force as a test pilot could be the subjects of comedy or drama, in the hands of husband-and-wife directing team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine is both an outrageously funny comedy and a moving ode to the dysfunctional American family. By almost any measure, this gem of a film, made for only $7 million, is one of the best films of 2006 and one of the best comedies in several years.
“We knew that we had to keep a simple approach,” Dayton says. “We knew that we didn’t want to do a quasi-documentary style. We also didn’t want it to look ostentatious. We felt that the performances were most important, and if you got too fancy, it would distract you and take you out of the scene. We wanted it to be as if you were at the dinner table with these people, you were in the car with these people.”
The film does have visual flair, however, and among the influences were the garish Americana of photographer of William Eggleston and the films of Hal Ashby, particularly Harold and Maude. “We were interested in shifting scales: to be in a close-up and then to cut to a wide landscape shot," Dayton says. "To be able to not move the camera in dynamic ways, but have certain shifts that would at least give a little bit of punch.”
“In addition, we decided to shoot in 2.35 format,” Faris says, “and that was really for the landscapes. We loved the idea of these nice wide landscapes, and also it allowed us to do a lot of shots that all six faces could be in. At the dinner table we could get the entire table with all six characters in a wide shot. In the car we could shoot from the front windshield angle and have everybody in the shot. That was really important.”
They used a range of lens between 35 and 50mm on their Panavision camera. Long lenses were mostly used in the beauty pageant sequence for a bit of a documentary feel. However, the filmmakers’ original intention to help include everything in the frame was to shoot anamorphic.
Dayton: “At the last moment we switched to Super 35 with a matte. What was great about that was when it came time to do the TV version we had all this real estate we could open up to so that, instead of having to pan and scan we could just go to the negative and there was all this stuff above and below. The other thing that was good about that is the anamorphic lenses are so much slower, and enormous – ”
Faris: “–and heavy.”
Dayton: “When we thought about shooting in the van and bouncing down the road those lenses would have shaken more than our standard lenses did. So, it was a really good way to go.”
Faris: “We made that decision days before we started shooting. We talked to a friend of ours who has shot an entire film on anamorphic lenses, and he just said, ‘No! Don’t do it!’”
Dayton: “‘Stay away!’”
Faris: “‘It’s a disaster!’”
Dayton: “If you want to work in low light of any kind, it’s inviting a disaster.”
Dayton and Faris do not divide up their directing duties. This initially made Alan Arkin nervous, but it apparently has worked well for them over years of making music videos and commercials. “It’s not the most efficient thing,” Faris says, “but we just stick together throughout the day, and we have an ongoing dialogue, so when something comes up we discuss it and then we make a decision. Maybe one of us carries it out or goes to tell somebody something, but we’re really in dialogue all day long. There’s no consistency to who does what.”
A technique they’ve developed, which both keeps them on the same page and saved them a great deal of time during their brief 30-day shoot, is to make trips to their locations between scouting and filming and block everything out with a video camera. They put together a sort of video storyboard and are thus able to show their DP accurately what they want, anticipate potential problems, yet leave them more free to include actors’ suggestions or any changes that come up once on set. “The video printer, the little paper printer is just the greatest invention!,” Dayton says enthusiastically. “We use it in editing, we use it in planning. The more you can visually communicate what your intentions are, it just makes everything move more quickly….And, of course, since there are two of us, I think it is probably more essential because we’re needing to make sure that we’re actually talking about the same thing.”
Another handy, low-tech trick is Post-it notes. Dayton and Faris had them custom-cut to 2.35 aspect ratio, then used them as quick-sketch storyboard panels to stick into their script. Keeping in this spirit of low-tech, they did not do a DI, but depended on good old fashioned color timing. Dayton and Faris attribute the success of their film to their collaborators and especially writer Michael Arndt. “I think it was really the writing style, the voice of the writer, and the characters that we loved,” Faris says. “It’s kind of similar to picking a song. We’d never do a video for a song that didn’t somehow inspire us. You have to like the song. And it’s very similar in that way. A song either speaks to you and you like it, or it doesn’t.”
