Several years ago, when “Little Miss Sunshine” still was in the planning stages, relatively unknown husband-and-wife filmmaking duo of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris had a heck of a time convincing actors to sign up.
“It’s an ensemble film, and there are six somewhat equal roles, so it’s not a film that’s easy to attract big-name stars. They want to be the featured person, and they cost a lot of money,” says Dayton, sitting with Faris.
“The other thing that’s hard–and we’re still dealing with this now–is that it’s not an easy film to describe. … We actually were told the story before we read the script, and we weren’t interested. A dysfunctional family? A road trip? It just felt like something we’d seen too many times.”
Through sheer luck, Dayton and Faris ended up with a marquee-ready list of actors anyway: Greg Kinnear as the down-on-his-luck motivational-speaker dad, trying to strike it rich with his nine-step, self-help program; Toni Collette as the put-upon wife; Steve Carell as her suicidal, Proust-reading brother; and Alan Arkin as the foul-mouthed grandpa.
Rounding things out are Paul Dano as the dour, silent, hate-it-all teenager and Abigail Breslin as precocious Olive, whose dreams of pageant glory give the fractured family a common goal.
The actors combined to make “Sunshine” a crowd favorite at the Sundance Film Festival, and the movie raked in $600,000 on just seven movie screens when it opened in select cities in late July.
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