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The parents of 'Little Miss Sunshine'

Rookie husband-and-wife directors had to audition for Steve Carell, not the other way around

MIAMI BEACH — Five years in the making before almost getting derailed and not made at all, the low-budget independent comedy Little Miss Sunshine has gotten the last laugh.

The dysfunctional family road trip picture — which opens locally on Friday — set a new record at the Sundance Film Festival, getting acquired for a tidy $10.5 million.

Fox Searchlight Pictures Read reviews of "Little Miss Sunshine."

Now all it has to do is find an audience in the dog days of August.

Whether or not this Little Miss shines at the box office, it introduces moviegoers to the promising husband-and-wife directing team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who moved up into features from the world of videos and commercials.

Their movie follows the Hoovers, a family of Arizona eccentrics, including a father (Greg Kinnear) trying desperately to push his self-help book, a son (Paul Dano) so angry he has not spoken for a year, a suicidal brother-in-law who is an underappreciated Proust expert (Steve Carell) and a grandpa (Alan Arkin) who dabbles in drugs and porn. The comparatively normal matriarch of the clan (Toni Collette) has her hands full keeping the family together, a chore made exponentially harder when they all hop into a Volkswagen bus to take young Olive (Amanda Breslin) to a pint-sized beauty pageant in California.

Along the way, each of their dreams get dashed, but they learn to bond.

As for Dayton and Faris, they started thinking that their own dream might never happen.

"It was very frustrating, especially when it's your first film," says Faris at a South Beach hotel, traveling the country to publicize the movie. "You start thinking, 'We're just never going to make a film. I guess it isn't meant to be.' "

First, the couple could not believe their luck when the screenplay by first-time writer Michael Arndt, Matthew Broderick's former personal assistant, came their way. "Usually when you get a script, that's just the starting point," notes Dayton. "But we felt this script was ready to shoot. When we read it, we went, 'I don't know how this landed in our laps, but we have to make this movie.' "

It turned out that they were one of 13 directors — reportedly including Goldie Hawn — who were sent the screenplay, each expected to pitch his approach to the film to the producers in order to win the assignment.

"At the time, we felt it had kind of the grit of an American Beauty and a little bit of Billy Elliot," recalls Faris. "I'm not saying that's right, but that's what we said. I think that we saw the movie as having more depth than just being purely a comedy."

Studio not enthusiastic about project

Faris, who seems perpetually optimistic, just knew they would get the nod. "It was funny, I think because we waited so long to find something that we loved and we loved this so much, I never questioned it," she says. "I felt like this was written for us and we had to make this movie."

She was right, but the pitching did not end with the producers. "When you come onto something like this, you have to sell it to a studio and you have to sell it to six actors and you have to sell it to an audience," says Dayton, still chipper from a day of selling it to the media.

Although Focus Features agreed to make Little Miss Sunshine, in hindsight Dayton and Faris do not feel the studio was ever as enthusiastic as it should have been. "Focus bought it and they seemed to get it, but they are very driven by foreign sales and stars," says Dayton.

"Tonally, the script could have gone a couple of ways," chimes in Faris. "So I think that they were nervous that it wasn't going to be a Focus type film and they didn't know us."

After an exchange of increasingly perplexing memos from the Focus executives about the movie and their casting suggestions, producer Marc Turtletaub bought back the rights to the movie from the studio and bankrolled the entire $8 million budget himself.

Carell picked long before he was star

Ironically, Dayton and Faris lucked into having a hot property in Carell, who was cast long before The 40 Year-Old Virgin and TV's The Office made him a star. Even so, the directors found that they had to audition for Carell rather than the other way around.

"Steve Carell actually had seen our (sample) reel and really liked it," beams Faris. "At the time, The Office had been shot, but it was not public yet. We mainly knew him from the Jon Stewart show. But he liked the script and liked the movies we liked and so he too took a chance on us."

With the studio pressure gone, the directors were able to hire the actors they loved, regardless of their bankability.

Of Collette, Faris says, "No one would argue that she's a great actor, but she doesn't open a movie." Adds Dayton: "We were thrilled to get her. She was one of those few people who could be truthful and funny. Could be emotionally real and yet make you laugh."

The film climaxes at the Little Miss Sunshine contest at a nondescript hotel just off the freeway in Redondo Beach. Knowing how important these scenes would be, Dayton and Faris spent much of their time prior to the shoot getting to know actual junior pageant contestants. "It was very important to us not to fake that," Dayton says. "We didn't really want to comment on it. What we wanted to do was accurately depict it and then let the audience draw its own conclusions."

"We didn't go out of our way to make it more than it is," Faris says of the pageant they staged. "And to tone it down would have been a lie."

If they were worried that the contestants or their mothers would be too skeptical of the filmmakers to participate, they should not have been. "Part of why they do what they do is for the attention. They want to be seen," says Faris. "So they're not going to turn down being in a movie."

Asked about the division of labor in their co-directing, Dayton says without hesitation, "There is none. The key is that we're fairly organized. We have to come to set with a plan that we both know well, so we can divide and conquer."

Divide and conquer was also the strategy at Sundance, where the film's rights resulted in a bidding war and all-night negotiation session.

"Well, that was fun, because we had Synetec, which is the premier brokering company," explains Dayton. "The producers hire them and they have a team that's expert at fielding offers. They just know what the market is and who's likely to pay what. They have a condo at Sundance and all the studios come there. We were in our hotel room, on the cellphone, getting calls, keeping us updated."

When dawn broke, the movie belonged to Fox Searchlight — the boutique studio that distributed such other R-rated comedies as Sideways and Garden State — for a cool $10.5 million.

Since the movie sold for $2.5 million more than it cost to make, Dayton and Faris should be rich now, right?

"No. We didn't get a penny of it. That's fine, we're not complaining," he says, and almost sounds convincing. "For us, the benefit is getting a movie out there that we're proud of and that shows what we like. Hopefully, somewhere along the way it will make money for the people who invested in it.

"If it crosses over $30 million, we get a little bit," notes Faris. "We make more in a day on a commercial than we'll make on this. I hate to say it."

But the directing team, which has directed commercials for Volkswagen and IKEA and videos for R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers and Smashing Pumpkins, now has its first feature film. And it's a film that they are inordinately proud of. "We felt when we did this, that it would be our one chance to define ourselves," says Dayton. "In as much as we ever want to fully define what we do, this is it.

"Because it's a small movie with a great cast, a really strong script, you laugh and you're hopefully moved emotionally. Those are things we want to keep doing. Do I want to do another road trip family thing? Absolutely not . . . tomorrow."