Movie that will not fit into any particular box

Zoe Kazan has crafted an uncategorisable movie that breaks all the rules. She explained how it happened to Film Critic Tony Earnshaw.

Pitching a proposed movie to a roomful of executives is, according to my sources, every filmmaker’s living nightmare.

Most liken it to a Christian versus lions scenario with a passionate artist desperately trying to communicate to dead-eyed, unenlightened philistines. Will it make money? Does it have a car chase? Is there a role for Tom Cruise?

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It’s the sort of experience made for a fly-on-the-wall documentary – an inside look at the mechanics of how films are green-lit (to use studio parlance) and why some projects never get past the threshold.

When Zoe Kazan wrote Ruby Sparks, the story of a writer who literally puts his dream girl on paper and she comes vividly to life, she avoided the travails of “the pitch”.

Herself the daughter of writers – her father is Nick (Reversal of Fortune) Kazan, son of On the Waterfront director Elia, and her mother is Oscar-nominated Robin Swicord, co-writer of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – the 29-year-old opted to give it to collaborators 
who would “get it”: husband and wife team Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton.

It was Faris and Dayton 
who broke through with 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine, which was nominated for four – and won two – Oscars. For the last six years, fans of the film have wondered what might happen next. Enter Ruby Sparks.

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I suggest to Kazan that the film does not fit easily into any particular box – that it is dark and twisted and dysfunctional and most definitely not of the quirky variety. She nods.

“I’m so bad at pitching. I’ve tried. I’ve gone into these rooms and talked to people – ‘It’s Forrest Gump meets Les Miserables’ – and I’m terrible at it. I can’t do that. So I didn’t pitch this to anyone.

“I thank you for not thinking this is a piece of whimsy or just quirky because I agree with you. I think it is hard to talk about because it is something unusual. That was definitely our intention. The movies that we look to – that we love – are all movies that are very hard to put in one slot.

“I like that this movie is hard to define. It would be very hard for me to walk into a studio and say ‘This is the movie I wanna write’. I wouldn’t know how to do that. What I did know how to do was write it to the best of my ability and give it to people who I thought could understand it. If Jonathan and Valerie had not agreed to work on this, we would have had a much harder time. ”

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In many ways the Faris/Dayton-Kazan/Dano dynamic – Kazan stars in the film opposite real-life partner Paul Dano – represents a perfect combination. For Kazan it was a meeting of like minds. For Faris and Dayton it was a return to real cinema after years of being asked, and refusing, to polish production line Hollywood tat.

For everyone it was a case of keeping the story within the realms of plausibility. Author Calvin is unlucky in love. Ruby comes to life and makes him happy. Then he becomes jealous and begins to re-write their romance. It all gets rather dark and more than a little creepy…

“It was easy for me to conceive of something like that because for whatever reason that’s how my brain works,” says Kazan. “I saw the internal logic of it but when I brought it to people a lot of them asked me questions like ‘How do you intend to shoot the fantasy stuff?’ and I’d think ‘Hmmm, I don’t think that we’re speaking the same language’. But when I brought the script to Valerie and Jonathan, they saw the same movie I did. In fact they saw a better movie than I did.

“Then we started talking: how do we keep this very real and grounded in reality? How do we let the emotional content of the movie sing by not burdening it with a lot of fantasy elements? I rewrote the movie for nine months under their care and that’s where a lot of our work was – in creating that balance.”

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Not a romance, not entirely a tale of manipulation but certainly a deceptively murky tale of love gone bad – Dayton calls it “a place people don’t really expect the film to go” – Ruby Sparks defies pigeon-holing in a genre-busting way that is refreshingly anti-lowest common denominator.

“My parents are writers and I was raised believing ‘The word is king. You don’t mess with what’s on the page.’ Very early in my acting career I always felt I had to get everything word perfect and I couldn’t ask any questions. Recently, since our movie, I have totally revamped my feeling on that. Now I’ve become this monster – the writer’s worst nightmare. It’s done something strange to my brain.”

Ruby Sparks (15] is on nationwide release.

Born with a writer’s pedigree

Zoe Kazan was born in Los Angeles on September 9, 1983.

Her father, Nicholas Kazan, is a noted playwright and screenwriter whose films include Matilda (1996), and her mother Robin Swicord’s screenplay credits include Memoirs Of A Geisha (2005)

After graduating from Yale University in 2005, Kazan made her New York stage debut a year later in an off-Broadway revival of The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie alongside Sex And The City actress Cynthia Nixon.

Kazan is also a playwright whose first drama, Absalom, was produced at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2009.