Ruby Sparks

Zoe Kazan started from a discarded mannequin and the Pygmalion myth, wrote 20 pages, put it away for six months, and came back once she had fixed on setting the idea of love against the actuality of it. Five pages in, Paul Dano asked her whether she was writing it for the two of them; the description of Calvin, tall, skinny, glasses, hadn’t seen the sun or a gym in a very long time, had made him wonder. Kazan and Dano have been partners since 2007, and she is also one of the film’s executive producers. Kazan rejects the manic pixie dream girl label for Ruby, calling it reductive, diminutive and basically misogynist, and says the film is about how dangerous it is to reduce a person down to an idea of a person. For Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris this was the first project since Little Miss Sunshine in 2006; that film’s producers brought them the script. Shooting stayed mostly in the Silver Lake and Los Feliz districts of Los Angeles; the party house is the John Sowden House by Lloyd Wright. A good fit if the doubling matters to you, with Kazan both writing and playing the written. Not for anyone after a light romance; late on, Calvin types sentences that make Ruby perform humiliating things.