TORONTO – It’s the true test of a relationship in the film world: working on the same set.
Actors Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan, who’ve been together for about five years, know that all too well after co-starring together in the new dramedy “Ruby Sparks,” which she also wrote.
“Going to work together, fantastic, great,” Dano, who lives with Kazan in New York, said in a recent interview. “All I can ask for is the best scene partner possible and Zoe is that; makes me a better actor and hopefully I can make her a better actor just by bringing everything we can to it.
“Sometimes going home after a 14-hour day, mmm, you know, has its challenges,” he added with a grin as he sat out of earshot from Kazan on a swank hotel’s rooftop patio.
“Somebody might get a little cranky – me or her. Little domestic things, but we survived.”
Kazan, who first met Dano when they worked together in an off-Broadway play, conceded the exhaustion of shooting the film at a breakneck speed while not getting enough food or rest made the 28-year-olds “really cranky.”
“Normally there’s someone on the outside going, ‘Honey, you need to eat a good meal tonight and here, let me draw you a bath,'” she said. “And instead both of us were like, ‘I don’t want to listen to the radio, I want to listen to iPod,’ and then the other person would be like, ‘I need some pop-music escape right now,’ and then we’d fight about it. So dumb.”
“Little Miss Sunshine” directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris helm “Ruby Sparks,” which opens in Toronto and Vancouver on Friday. It hits Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Ottawa, Victoria, Winnipeg on Aug. 10.
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Dano (“Little Miss Sunshine,” “There Will Be Blood”) plays Calvin, a bookish author suffering from writer’s block as he struggles to craft the highly anticipated followup to the bestselling novel he published at age 19.
Calvin’s story inspiration eventually comes from a dream he has of a girl, whom he names Ruby (Kazan) and falls in love with as he makes her the protagonist of his next novel.
When his dream girl magically appears in the flesh in his house, Calvin learns that while he can rewrite the Ruby on the page, he can’t control the Ruby in front of him.
The film’s co-stars include Annette Bening, Antonio Banderas and Steve Coogan.
A Los Angeles-born actress and playwright, Kazan (“Revolutionary Road,” “It’s Complicated”) got the spark for the story in the summer of 2009, when she saw a mannequin in a trash bin outside a department store. At first she thought it was a real person and it got her thinking of the Pygmalion myth, in which an artist falls in love with the sculpture he creates and wishes it into life.
Kazan said her characters were clear to her in the beginning but she wasn’t thinking about the actors who would play them – that is, until Dano suggested they star in it.
With that, she wrote the rest of the whimsical fantasy (her debut feature as a writer) with them in mind.
“He keeps saying it was obvious that I was writing it for him, because I wrote Calvin, like, 28, skinny, tall, glasses. He’s like, ‘Who else were you writing this for?'” said Kazan, daughter of screenwriters Nicholas Kazan and Robin Swicord, and granddaughter of late film and theatre director Elia Kazan and playwright Molly (Thacher) Kazan.
“But honestly … the character was just so incredibly clear to me. He was his own person, so when Paul said, ‘You’re writing this for us, right?’ I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I am!'”
The New York-born Dano said he related to Calvin’s career path, having also achieved fame so early in his life with his role as a sullen teen in the Oscar-winning “Little Miss Sunshine.”
“I mean, first the idea of writer’s block and not being able to do the thing that sort of fuels you and that you love, and missing out on inspiration, I totally relate to, and that was something I was really able to dig into,” he said.
“Also the pressure of what other people want and expect of you, and how often other people determine what success is for you.”
Kazan said the film is ultimately about taking responsibility for yourself in a relationship and “that it’s much harder to choose to love someone than it is to be compelled to love someone.”
“At the beginning of a relationship, it’s all compulsion, like: ‘I have to be close to you, I have to be next to you, I need to smell you and touch you,’ and later as the relationship evolves it’s much more about, ‘I choose to love you, I know all your faults and I choose to love you, I know that relationships are hard and I’m going to choose to stay with you.'”
So, would Kazan choose to work with Dano in another film?
“Definitely,” she without hesitation. “I think maybe I have a little Stockholm Syndrome about it where I’m like, ‘That was really fun.’
“But I think that Paul and I feel that we don’t need to act together any time soon again, partially because we’re so happy with this movie.”
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