Taking your work home with you verses leaving your job at the office can be a tricky prospect when you're an actor--especially when you're an actor who has written a screenplay that was clearly meant for you and your actor boyfriend to play opposite each other. But that's exactly rising talent Zoe Kazan when she penned RUBY SPARKS (which opened in some markets today), a dark-romantic-comedy-fantasy story of a struggling writer, Calvin (Paul Dano, Kazan's long-time companion), who sinks so far into his own head to pull out a new novel that a woman he creates, Ruby (played by Kazan) in a story comes to life in his apartment as his girlfriend.
And although Calvin vows not to write anymore about Ruby because he loves her just the way she is, when she begins to show signs of distancing herself from him, he returns to his vintage typewriter to make a few adjustments. As silly as the premise may seem, Kazan and directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (who directed Dano in LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE) keep things about the deep levels of insecurity that plague many artists, and by the end of the film, things take several disturbing turns.
However you look at it, as a first screenplay, Kazan has created something kind of incredible. She's a child of Hollywood, being the daughter of noted screenwriters Nicholas Kazan and Robin Swicord (as well as the granddaughter of director Elia Kazan), but she came to the foreground as an actor with roles in such films as FRACTURE, IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, ME AND ORSON WELLES, MEEK'S CUTOFF, and several episodes of "Bored to Death" on HBO. But if you really want to see where her talented shined through the most, check out 2009's magnificent and grossly unseen THE EXPLODING GIRL.
Of her many upcoming projects, I think the one I'm most curious about is the Joss Whedon-penned and -produced IN YOUR EYES, which we'll hopefully see by year's end or early next year. I was lucky enough to sit down with Kazan recently in Chicago early one morning after doing a Q&A with her, Dano and the directors (I'll have interviews with all by week's end), and she made for a really easy interview subject, with her intelligence and charm shining through from the moment we sat down. Please, the first thing she asked me about was GODZILLA. How could I not think she was cool. Please enjoy Zoe Kazan…
Zoe Kazan: Hi, Steve. It's good to see you. How are you? Sit down please. Bright and early!
Capone: I know, and I went to dinner after the Q&A.
ZK: You did? It was so late.
Capone: I don’t know if you’d heard me tell Paul, I had just gotten back from Comic-Con maybe three hours before the screening started, so I had no time to grab a bite.
ZK: Oh, right. Did you see the GODZILLA stuff at Comic-Con?
Capone: No, I was doing interviews that whole day; one of our other writers covered that.
ZK: Got it. My friend wrote that. [I'm going to guess she means Max Borenstein, who is credited as co-writer with David Goyer.]
Capone: I love Gareth [Edwards, director]. I was really impressed with his last film, MONSTERS, so I think that’s exactly the right choice for this material.
ZK: Awesome.
Capone: Just following up on what came up last night, I do want to kind of talk about what you brought up about the term "manic pixie dream girl," which I’m sure you’re sick of talking about. Did you know that the person who actually coined that phrase lives in Chicago? For the record, I don't think Ruby belongs in the category or in the conversation about those type of characters.
ZK: Nathan [Rabin, from the Onion's A.V. Club]? Really? It’s such a funny thing because it’s so hard to talk about. I woke up, actually, this morning thinking about it, his ELIZABETHTOWN review that he coined that term in. I read that review when it came out, and someone forwarded it to me recently because I’ve been made to talk about this so often. I feel like it’s a really good review, and it’s a really good sort of door to open in terms of having a term to use in order to be able to critically discuss the two-dimensionality especially of female characters, which is something that is frustrating to me as a woman, and also as an actor and a writer. But the misuse of that term is enforcing the misogyny that it originally was used to criticize.
Capone: Right.
ZK: The sort of rampant use of it to describe any girl who’s a little off-center. I just think it’s like the misuse of a label is a pernicious thing. Do you know what I’m saying?
Capone: Of course, and it’s weird that it even came up, because it never even crossed my mind that the character in this film fits into that mold, which I guess goes to your point.
ZK: I don’t think they’re describing it; they’re just bringing it up to me and I feel that...
Capone: I don’t think you’ve really played characters that would fit in that mold either.
ZK: No, me neither, but some reporter said to me, “Your character in ME AND ORSON WELLES could be described as that.” And I was like, I think it’s a more useful term critically than it is creatively. I don’t think anyone sets out to write that character. But I do think that there is a failure of imagination that happens sometimes where music taste stands in for personality. I think it happens in that "indie rock boyfriend" is a type in a movie...
Capone: Yeah, that's true.
ZK: Chris Messina [who plays Dano's brother in the film] has played many nice supportive boyfriend/husband dudes. It’s not that there aren’t male types in the same way; it’s that I resist the wide swath that that term cuts through a lot of individuation in female characters. It’s a way of dismissing female characters.
Capone: I was about to say, it’s very dismissive.
ZK: Yeah, yeah, and I don’t fault the term; I fault the use. It’s like guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people. That’s sort of how I feel. I wish people would be more careful with their diction. It’s like the word "quirky" doesn’t really mean anything. Someone said to Paul once in an interview, "Why do you choose these quirky films like LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and THERE WILL BE BLOOD?" [laughs]
Capone: That’s quite a range.
ZK: Yes, I’m not really sure that those can fall under the same rubric.
Capone: Now that we're talked about what Ruby isn't, let’s actually talk about RUBY SPARKS.
ZK: Alright.
Capone: I recently talked to Sarah Polley about TAKE THIS WALTZ, and I asked her the same question, because even though they’re very different films, they cover this one idea that we’re never completely satisfied in a relationship. Everyone has always had the thought, "If I could just change this one thing about someone, this person would be perfect." And I think your film talks more directly to that point. What is it about us that makes us never quite where we want to be in a relationship?
ZK: Well, I think it’s Aristophanes--the myth that’s used in HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH of splitting the person down the middle. That we’re all looking for our other half. There’s a Shel Silverstein book...
Capone: "The Missing Piece."
ZK: Right. "The Missing Piece," exactly. I think that that is a myth, and that’s probably why we always…no two people fit together perfectly even though [directors] Jon and Val may attest to the opposite. Those differences…it remind me of something that my mom told me once, that a relationship should be like a Venn diagram. There should be two whole circles with a little interlocking part, and that the differences are as important as the things that you have in common. I struggle with it. I think that the idea of love is the first experience that we have of love, whether it’s watching a movie or reading a book or comic book, or just having a fantasy of love. I think that you spend the rest of your life trying to reconcile the real experience of love with that fantasy.
Capone: As dark as the film gets at points, you never let go of that idea that love is in some ways miraculous and magical. Not to talk about the ending, but I think that’s sort of what wins in the end, which it’s such an optimistic view of it.
ZK: Yeah, I think you have to protect it. I think that’s part of what I’m trying to talk about if I’m trying to talk about anything. What I mean by protect: magic is like a contract between the magician and the audience, right?
Capone: Right.
ZK: It’s like, I will help you believe, and you will help me by believing. That’s two people in a relationship, they have to believe in the relationship. They have to believe in the other person being lovable in order to love them. I do think it takes this enormous leap of faith. Paul and I have been together almost five years, and to wake up in the morning and believe that that person is beautiful even when you’re annoyed at them, or they’ve been annoying for the last couple weeks--that sort of belief that the heart is regenerative and that it’s worth it. You’ve got to believe in that...or you don’t. [laughs]
Capone: Yeah, exactly. To that point, when you’re writing a film like this where you more or less know from the beginning that it’s going to be you and Paul in these roles, did you realize at some point that if this movie got made, people were going to see that as an open door to ask much more personal questions.
ZK: Yeah.
Capone: Did you two talk that through early on and say, “You realize we’re going to have to be way less private than maybe we already are?”
ZK: [pauses] We should have. We should have, but we didn’t. It’s true. I will say that some of our favorite movies--whether they’re Woody Allen’s movies with Mia Farrow or Diane Keaton, or whether the movies that Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes made together, or even Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart--I felt like there’s a long tradition of people working together. I think that their relationship helped make those movies feel deeper or more true, so it seemed like a worthy risk.
Also, it really doesn’t feel like Paul and me up there, to us, and I had some control over that because I was writing the parts. I worked with a feeling like "I’m not going to put this little thing from our life in there, and I am going to try to listen carefully to these people and not be writing so much with us in mind." I think that’s a boon, but you’re right. We didn’t have that conversation and we should have.
Capone: Maybe you just didn’t think this many people would see it?
ZK: Paul's a lot more of a cautious person than I am, so if anyone was going to bring something up, I think it would have been him. I’m much more like, “Let’s wander off into this wilderness with this picnic basket!” [laughs] I’m not a good planner; I don’t plan ahead.
Capone: I want to ask about the scene toward the end, because when it does get dark, that scene scares me a little bit...
ZK: I think it should.
Capone: Was that tough to shoot? Just physically, it looked exhausting.
ZK: It was. It was really hard to shoot. I don’t know how much we talked of this in the Q&A last night
Capone: I don’t know if we did talk about the ending very much.
ZK: I can’t remember, they’re starting to blend together. I think I had written that scene but in very broad strokes. It was the most, not unscripted but underscripted scene in the movie. We talked for a long time about what should be in that scene, what should he make her do, and we could not figure it out. Jon and Val are sticklers for, “The script comes first.” They wanted it to be perfect or finished before we started, and that was something that was not blank, but much less filled in. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it.
So we shot that scene pretty late in our shooting. When we got there, we sat down maybe the day before, and I wanted to feel really controlled in that scene, so I asked them to come up with a list of actions, plus I came up with a list of actions, Paul came up with a list of actions, and we combed through them and made a kind of choreography. You’re really reliant in film as an actor on your directors to push you because they’re the people who decide when we move on. Sometimes you can ask for one more take, but in this case, we were shooting 10- to 16-minute takes of that scene, and they had these pipes that they would bang together, and then when they’d banged them together I could move on to the next action. There were a set of six, I think. I believe one of them got cut out. I couldn’t move on until they banged the things. So they just let me go until the point of exhaustion, and then past exhaustion. I wouldn’t have been able to do that unless they had something very specific in mind, and they didn’t stop until we got there.
Capone: You said everyone contributed ideas. Who came up with most repugnant actions for you to carry out?
ZK: I don’t remember.
Capone: Who came up with you getting on your hands and knees and barking like that?
ZK: I don’t remember. I actually don't, but I know that that ended up going a lot further than we thought it would. I think we were all surprised.
Capone: Your parents are established screenwriters. Does that make it easier or harder when you started to write? I know you’ve written some plays before this. Does that make it more intimidating or easier because they guided you a little?
ZK: I think it makes it harder, if only just because I had the example. I think that screenwriting and acting are both very tough businesses, but I knew firsthand--or secondhand--how tough screenwriting was just from watching my parents wait for a movie to get made, and then it gets made, but the director is somebody who is not on the same page as them, and they’re not happy with the final product, or the release gets messed up. There are just a thousand heartbreaks. So, I think that I looked at that as a young person and thought "I don’t want to do that," and then of course ran to a profession that’s even more heartbreaking.
I think for me, I didn’t want to be in the same profession as my parents; I didn’t want to write professionally, and then I was really bored. I had always written, I wrote in college, I always wrote as a child, but I was so bored waiting between jobs as an actor and going insane, drinking too much, and going to the gym like a crazy person. Just trying to do the things that you do to try to make you feel like your day is full when it’s not. So I think writing for me was like a life preserver.
Capone: I did want to ask about one thing you had coming up, IN YOUR EYES? I remember hearing about this a while ago, this Joss Whedon script that nobody knows anything about.
ZK: Yeah.
Capone: What is it exactly, and what do you do in it?
ZK: I play one of the two leads in the movie. It’s me and this kid, Michael Stahl-David who was in the movie CLOVERFIELD. It’s a supernatural love story, I guess. Joss wrote it and self produced it, and a guy named Brin Hill, who I think is fantastic, directed it. It’s a tiny budget. It’s a micro-budget Joss Whedon movie. So, I don’t know what that looks like, and I’m curious.
Capone: It’s probably going to look a lot like that Shakespeare thing he squeezed in after THE AVENGERS.
ZK: Yes. I don’t know whether it will or not, because I don’t know much about that project.
Capone: He just likes to cleanse the palette with these tiny films.
ZK: I love it; I think it’s so cool.
Capone: Thank you so much. It was really great to meet you.
ZK: Thank you so much for your questions. It's such a breath of fresh air to talk to somebody like you.
