The husband-and-wife-team of Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton directed "Little Miss Sunshine."

By Barbara Vancheri
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette The beat-up VW bus in "Little Miss Sunshine" may be neither fast nor furious, but the movie's makers hired the stunt guru from the 2001 thriller about Los Angeles street racers.

Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who also happen to be husband and wife, wanted to make sure no harm came to their 9-year-old leading lady, Abigail Breslin. Or any other member of the cast.

"We had the stunt coordinator from 'The Fast and the Furious' there. Even though we had no deeply challenging stunts, we were very careful, and when she jumps in the van, he's right there to catch her, but you don't see him obviously," Dayton says.

When the VW's clutch burns out, one person has to take the wheel while the others push the bus and then hop in, one by one, as it's rolling.

"Little Miss Sunshine" follows a dysfunctional family on a road trip and stars Breslin, now 10, along with Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Alan Arkin and Paul Dano. The trip is paved with good intentions and deadly detours.

"Because we wanted to shoot it all on location, on the highway in the middle of summer, it was not exactly a comfortable set or situation," Faris says, clutching one phone in a Philadelphia hotel suite while her husband has the other.

They smoothly take and yield the floor as they talk about the Sundance Film Festival hit scheduled to arrive in Pittsburgh on Friday at Destinta Bridgeville, the Manor and AMC-Loews.

The movie used four VW buses, none of which had air conditioning. "Only the one that was towed, we had a giant tube of air we could funnel into the van. That didn't work that well. They were dying," Faris says. "They were cooking," her husband adds.

But they weren't besieged by fans. "Los Angeles is so jaded, for the most part, it was just another crew," Dayton says. "I think people couldn't really see who the cast was, so that worked for us."

"Little Miss Sunshine" doesn't fit neatly in any of the usual genre boxes marked drama, comedy, action, adventure, romance, thriller or other. Faris calls it a comic drama while Dayton says he hopes it's in the spirit of "Harold and Maude" and other Hal Ashby pictures, "dark comedies with a distinctly human touch."

This is the first movie directed by Dayton and Faris, but they've worked together for two decades making commercials and music videos. "Little Miss Sunshine" also is the first produced screenplay from writer Michael Arndt, who created a quirky family whose language and actions earn an R rating.

Members include a gay, suicidal Proust scholar, an angry teen who refuses to speak, a grandfather with a taste for heroin, porn and profanity, and a motivational speaker who has a nine-step program for success that isn't working ... for anyone.

"We tried not to be super-manipulative in terms of telling the audience what to feel but, hopefully, people will identify with the characters to the point where they are kind of feeling what the characters are feeling," Faris says.

Carell is the Proust expert who is released from a hospital into the care of his sister, played by Collette. She brings him home in time for dinner, and he's the first the audience connects with, Dayton says.

"He's the character, Uncle Frank, who comes to this family very reluctantly, and we see this family through his eyes and get introduced to individual members. I think we identify with him first. Hopefully, over the course of the movie, you identify with each of them and ultimately, finally with Richard," portrayed by Kinnear.

"Little Miss Sunshine" pivots on the performance of young Breslin, and the couple turned to casting directors they use in their commercial and music video work.

"It was really a very challenging role so in any one community, it wasn't like we did these giant open castings," Dayton says. "We really looked for people who had some acting experience, everyone from school plays to feature films, and there was only one person, and that was Abigail Breslin."

She played Mel Gibson's daughter in "Signs," and she and brother Spencer were among Kate Hudson's young charges in "Raising Helen."

"Her mom is a real mom," Faris says. "She deals with Abigail as her daughter, she's not her manager. She's always watching out for her as her mother," and she decided the script was good-hearted and shielded Abigail from much of the R-rated language. When her grandfather lets loose, the girl has headphones clamped over her ears.

"I think that her mother just felt this is a great role and she really does get to shine in this movie." Olive has a scene that could make moviegoers squirm or cheer, and she has to strike the right note for that to work.

The movie charts the family's attempt to drive from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, Calif., for a beauty pageant.

"It was a tricky thing because we didn't want to make this in any way about pageants," Dayton says. "It's not a movie about pageants, and this community has taken so much abuse. We're not here to pass judgment. We felt the best thing we could do was to portray it accurately and then let people form their own opinions."

His wife chimes in that it's a subculture unto its own, and outsiders might be charmed or horrified. The movie's budget didn't permit building its own pageant, so the directors relied on real participants to provide their own costumes and spray-tan machines.

To make Olive stand out from the crowd, she donned glasses (Abigail picked the frames) and a bit of padding to restore the slight belly she had when she first met the directors. She had grown and slimmed down and then lost some weight while rehearsing her pageant routine.

Dayton says they didn't want to make this about a chubby girl, which brings its own set of cliches. "We just wanted her to not be the perfect ideal of a child," particularly in the world she aspires to join.

The couple finished the movie two days before the 2006 Sundance Film Festival where bidding commenced as soon as the screening was over. Fox Searchlight Pictures bought the distribution rights.

"They have such a good track record for films that are independent kind of, in spirit, but I think have the potential to be very commercial, like 'Sideways,' 'Napoleon Dynamite,' 'I Heart Huckabees,' not your mainstream studio film but still approachable," Faris says.

Her husband adds, "They do something that is really ideal for us. They do these word-of-mouth screenings. For us, that is the way we want people to hear about this movie, through friends and through real criticism."

They just don't want people to hear too much. They want moviegoers to hop into that sweltering VW bus, say "California, here we come" and wonder if they'll ever make it.