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'Dan In Real Life' Stars Steve Carell & Juliette Binoche Talk About The Film |
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Friday, 26 October 2007 |
By Christina Radish
 The fresh, clever and hilarious slice-of-life comedy Dan in Real Life (released by Touchstone Pictures) follows ordinary guy Dan Burns (Steve Carrell), a widowed father and family-advice columnist who is still reeling from the heartache of loss. Taking refuge by trying to maintain order with his three rebellious young daughters, Dan dodges anything unexpected or outside the box. But, soon after he arrives in Rhode Island for the annual fall weekend thrown by his family, he meets an alluring woman named Marie (Juliette Binoche) in a bookshop and, for the first time in a very long time, he feels a real attraction.
Upon discovering that Marie is, in fact, the brand-new girlfriend his brother Mitch (Dane Cook) proudly introduces to the family, Dan tries to squelch and cover up the growing attraction between them. Yet, no matter how hard they try, Dan and Marie can’t help but fall in love and, no matter how wise safety might seem, when it comes to real life, he’s just going to have to break all the rules.
Director/co-writer Peter Hedges knew that, to play Dan, he needed an actor who could take the character through the gamut of emotions and still be a deeply likable Everyman. And, in The Office star Steve Carell, a father to two young children himself, Hedges found someone who was believable as a father filled with love and worry for the three spirited daughters he’s trying to raise.
 “I have a 6-year-old daughter, so being around 9, 15 and 17-year-old girls just felt like my life accelerated by a few years,” Carell tells MediaBlvd Magazine. “It’s scary to be around these pre-teen girls, who are making the transition between childhood and adulthood, and are full of all these hormones, thoughts and angst. I can only imagine what it’s going to be like for me and my kids. I’m incredibly scared because you don’t want to be overprotective. You want to let them make their own mistakes. And, I don’t want to wrap them in a cocoon of security because that’s not going to help them either. You have to gauge how protective you are. When they’re little kids, you worry about them getting hurt, physically. When they get older, you worry about them getting hurt, emotionally. It’s hard because they will get hurt, emotionally, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s what the character of Dan is going through. He doesn’t want them to get hurt because he’s hurting, and he doesn’t want them to feel the way he has felt. He wants to protect them. But, at a certain point, you can’t protect them anymore. You have to let them make some bad moves.”
In playing Dan, Carell responded to the fact that he was just a real guy. “He’s honest, and he’s caring. He really loves his family a lot, and he loves his kids. He is willing to give up his potential happiness to preserve his relationship with his family. That’s a very kind, very selfless thing to do, but also kind of short-sighted. And, I definitely understand putting other people, including your children, so far ahead of yourself that you don’t take care of your own needs, which short-changes them as well because you’re not giving them the best version of yourself that you could. That’s what I liked about him.”
 Carell also reveals that, even though he’s not a single father, he can still relate to Dan. “I have kids, and I struggle with that. There are times that I’ve felt lost within that. Dan is like a lot of people that are just trying to get by, at a certain point in their lives. There’s obviously something missing, but there is no way of really knowing what that specific thing is. And, there’s the irony of the fact that he is an advice columnist who clearly needs advice more than most. The analogy I use is a doctor trying to diagnose his own illness. That’s a hard thing to do. And, I think he struggles with it. People struggle to get by, but don’t wallow in self-pity either. They just do their best.”
When it came to the character of Marie, the object of Dan and his brother’s dueling affections, Hedges recruited Academy Award-winning French actress Juliette Binoche to play the love interest. “I met with her before we started shooting and I could not have been more nervous or more intimidated,” declares Carell. “But, within moments, she had completely disarmed me. She’s just so charming, kind, self-deprecating and funny. She has this huge laugh, and I felt at ease, within moments. She just has that effect on people. Three years ago, if you’d have said, ‘By the way, in three years, you’ll be playing Juliette Binoche’s love interest in a movie,’ I don’t think I would have believed that.”
Binoche was attracted to the screenplay’s blend of comic and real situations, along with the fact that Marie was a complex and sophisticated woman. “I was not aware that this was a Disney film,” Binoche tells MediaBlvd Magazine. “I didn’t know it was a Hollywood film. At the time, when I read the script, there was something about it that I liked, and I had to meet with the director. I hadn’t seen his films. So, I saw Pieces of April and loved it because of the sincerity in it. It felt authentic to me, and the subject touched me very much. Peter is very good at that. At the same time, I loved the comic aspect, but also the tragic aspect of life. It’s so true to life. And, I think that his films represent that.”
Living in France, Binoche admits to not having been familiar with Carell, or co-star Dane Cook, prior to working with them. “I hadn’t seen any of their work. We did get The 40-Year-Old Virgin, or The Office. We started to notice Steve with Little Miss Sunshine. And, we don’t know Dane. Steve was already attached to the project before I signed on. Dane, I met in L.A. because they wanted to see if the chemistry would work. I had to sing with Steve, and dance with Dane, to see if the sexual chemistry was working.”
Being the dramatic actress alongside two comedians, it would be natural to assume that there would be lots of ad-libbing. But, Binoche says that was not the case with Dan in Real Life. “It wasn’t improvised at all. People ask me what it was like to work with two comics, but I wondered how it felt for them to work with a dramatic actress. It was two different worlds, having to meet, and the commitment was serious. They were very real, thinking actors, lifting the story into a comedy, while still showing the inside of the characters.”
 “We play around with the script a lot on The Office, but didn’t do that too much with this,” adds Carell. “It’s just a different discipline. This was much more like doing a play because Peter comes from a theater background and, when you do a play, you don’t improvise lines. You do them as scripted, and you rehearse. There were a lot of very big group scenes, and that can be a disaster if you start improvising. They were scripted to the point of making them look unscripted, which really speaks to the quality of the writing. They were written in a way that didn’t sound written.”
While Binoche has Disengagement, Summer Time and Paris coming out, Carell spent his hiatus from The Office filming the big screen version of Get Smart, due out June 20, 2008. “I’m not trying to do an impersonation of Don Adams,” he explains. “And, I’m not trying to better anything that he did because there’s no way that I could. Like I did with The Office, I just tried to think about what elements of the character were important, and apply that to my characterization. I hope it works. I think there will be enough of the original show that fans of it will be satisfying, while it also brings in new fans.” |
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