Labors of Love
By Nicole Rivard
Patience has proved to be a virtue in the careers of the husband-and-wife directing team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris of Bob Industries, Santa Monica. They never wavered in their efforts to bring their first feature film, Little Miss Sunshine, to the big screen this July despite an arduous five-year journey that involved the duo clashing with studio execs over the vision for the movie. And while other feature projects came their way, they never settled, waiting for the moment when they could make a movie they really wanted to make.
“Wait for the right thing. You always do your best work when you love something and when you can find some connection to it. Doing our first feature film relatively late in our careers wasn’t such a bad thing for us,” Dayton relates. “The fact that our career seems to be as strong as ever after doing it for so long I think does stem from the fact we have always stayed connected. It’s never been just a job.”
“I think it is important to encourage people not to give up just because they turned 30,” adds Faris with a laugh.
Their commercial work and feature film offers have escalated because of the success of Little Miss Sunshine, but the directors still remain committed only to projects they really care about. “Working on features draws it all the more into focus that it takes so much of your life–all our work takes so much from us–that unless we love it, it’s a prison sentence….For us given the fact that it permeates so much of our lives, we really do have to feel a connection to what we are working on or it is just not worth doing,” Dayton says.
What they loved about Little Miss Sunshine was that it was a comedy that had a certain level of humanity to it. “It wasn’t purely funny. It had an emotional life to it that we thought was pretty rare,” he says. Little Miss Sunshine introduces audiences to an endearingly fractured family–the Hoovers–who embark on a road trip to a pre-pubescent beauty pageant that results in death, transformation and a touching look at the surprising rewards of being losers in a winning-crazed culture. “We just really loved the characters and the idea that we could really go into each of these characters. You don’t get to explore much in commercials. And the ensemble nature of the movie really appealed to us,” says Faris.
Getting great actors (with a cast that included Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and Alan Arkin) helped the directors face the challenges of creating a character-driven piece. “It definitely opened our eyes more on how to get great performances from people and hopefully that will inform our commercial work,” says Dayton.
Faris says they really enjoyed staging the movie. But not having input from clients or agencies took some time to get used to. “After we would finish shooting something we would kind of wait for comments from somewhere. We’d sort of look at each other and say, ‘Does anyone have anything to say?’ And then we realized if we are happy, that’s all that matters,” Faris says.
What still resonates was watching the film with an audience during the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. To be in a room full of a 1,000 people who are giving their undivided attention–unlike in TV and commercials when you are fighting other channels, people and sounds–and to feel the audience stay with the movie was exciting, as was the standing ovation they received. “We were just glad we basically were able to make the movie that we wanted. We didn’t have contractual final cut but we did finish it the way we had envisioned. So the movie good or bad is what we intended. Now to have people respond so well to it is just incredibly gratifying,” says Dayton.
Also gratifying were the spots they did for Hewlett Packard in-between Sundance and the release of the movie. The spots feature well-known personalities like Jay-Z and Shaun White revealing how their PCs are personal to them through the content they keep on their systems. The commercials are inventive–you only see the celebs from their shoulders to their waist, and there are plenty of visual effects. “We just felt like the spots were different,” says Faris.
“We like always mixing it up in our commercials, maybe doing something that is a pure comedy spot and then something that has effects or stunts…I think we have been fortunate not to be pegged in any one style,” adds Dayton.
They began their careers at MTV in ’83 where they created and directed the series the Cutting Edge before going on to make their mark helming music videos for musicians like REM, Macy Gray and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
After 18 years of marriage, they learned while filming Little Miss Sunshine that when they’re doing something they really love, they get along even better.
“People always say, God, how did you manage, how did you make it through a film together?’ I always say we got along better than ever because we were both so passionate about it. It’s kind of how you feel about your children.”
Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More