By Ester Khachatryan
Two directors who cater to a young audience were guests at the second installment of Jason Reitmanâs â95 three-part speaker series on Jan. 8 for a student, faculty and alumni audience.
From the hour-long MTV show, “The Cutting Edge,” which hosted bands and soloists of alternative music, to commercials and music videos, to a feature film, “Little Miss Sunshine,” directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have made their careers entertaining youth.
The two directors trust and rely on one another in all stages of the filmmaking process, from selling their ideas to clients to directing on set, Faris said.
“We form a united front,” Faris said.
Their Oscar-winning film “Little Miss Sunshine” portrayed social and psychological problems that face youth and family relationships through the story of a girl and her familyâs pursuit of her dreams.
The film consists of a series of the most ordinary events that trace the triumph of family over the status quo.
By speaking in the language of youth, Dayton and Faris expose the family “next-door” with eccentric but plausible problems.
“We love our films, we love our family. So many of these balance in [the film],” Dayton said.
To keep the film realistic, certain scenes were altered for the screen, Faris said. The hospital scene, in which the family kidnaps the grandfatherâs body and stows it in the trunk of the car, was changed to a less gory version in keeping with the directorsâ real-world vision of the film.
In preparation for production, Dayton and Faris enrolled in acting workshops where they were exposed to director-actor relationships that helped to coordinate their “performance-driven” film, Dayton said.
The directors met at UCLA, where Dayton, then a film student, was asked to make a film with dancer Faris. A strictly collaborative relationship turned into a romance and a marriage with three children.
Dayton and Faris said that they try to work as little as possible, but work hard when an extraordinary project presents itself.
“Passion is one of the greatest tools of film,” the three directors agreed.
