For two people who know how to make an intelligent, thought provoking, emotional, complex and furiously funny motion picture debut, husband and wife directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris are awfully insecure about making sure they don’t come across as unintelligible amateurs.

“Just try and make us sound…”

“Intelligent…”

“Articulate…”

“Fun, I like fun…

“Authentic human beings.”

As if they need to worry. These two are so good at expressing themselves trying to make them sound stupid is a virtual impossibility. Trying to subscribe quotes to them, however, is a completely different story. Interviewing these two was almost like what I assume it would be like to interview my parents. Free flowing, all over the place, a cavalcade of ideas, expressions, motivations and feelings. But, even more than that, they complete one another’s sentences, and maybe I missed that day in class but I’m pretty sure feature entertainment interviews like this one weren’t covered in Communication 101.

What’s really interesting, though, is this interview is exactly what watching their delightful independent marvel and Sundance favorite Little Miss Sunshine is like. That movie understands complex family dynamics better than almost any I’ve seen in ages. Sitting in their suite at the Fairmont Olympic hotel in downtown Seattle, it was plainly obvious to me that Dayton and Faris understood this fact brilliantly, which, to my mind at least, was probably a very good thing. After all, they are the directors.

“Actually, when we first heard the story line, the whole family taking a road trip to a beauty pageant, we were actually like, no thank you, we don’t really want to go there,” comments Faris before her husband can interject. “But, obviously, as soon as we read Michael [Arndt’s] screenplay, we realized it wasn’t really about beauty pageants at all.”

“It may have a climactic scene there,” continues Dayton, “but it is really about so much more. We were struck by these characters and how much we could relate to them, how much we liked them. So many times I don’t really like the people in the scripts that I read. I mean, don’t even want to spend two hours with them let alone two years making the movie about them. But it was just these eccentric characters…”

“We just loved all of the characters so much,” interrupts Aris. “We loved how they had these longings, these yearnings, for something more in their lives. A genuine want to actually get somewhere. I kind of feel like a lot of times in movies the characters are just there, they have a coolness to them. Here [Arndt] wrote characters that have lots of feeling, lots of passion.”

“Lots of pain,” interjects Dayton.

“Yes, lots of pain,” continues Faris, giving her husband a smirk (and a poke in the ribs as she does so). “These characters are not types. They’re people, and the key for us to make it all work was definitely in the casting. We had to find [actors] who could play it very real, that they had compassion for the character they were playing and were not trying to make a joke of that character.”

The actors they got to fill these roles weren’t just a bunch of no-names. Past Oscar nominees Greg Kinnear (As Good As It Gets) and Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense) grabbed the two plumb roles as the family patriarchs trekking their clan to California, while super-hot comedian Steve Carell (NBC’s The Office, The 40-Year-Old Virgin) snapped up the part of a suicidal Proust scholar fresh out of the hospital for trying to commit suicide after being dumped by his gay lover. Throw in two-time fellow Oscar-nominee Alan Arkin (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter), indie favorite Paul Dano (L.I.E.) and talented pipsqueak actress Abigail Breslin (Keane) and you’ve got an ensemble most filmmakers dream about assembling.

“The rehearsal period on this was extremely important,” said Faris. “We spent time before we stared shooting to develop the relationships between the characters and try and create a sense of family. When that bonding starts to happens, when they all start connecting with their characters, I think great things happen kind of organically.”

“We always kept our eye on making things grounded, making it sure it didn’t travel into farce.”

“Keeping it truthful,” adds Dayton. “Keeping the reality.”

“Truthful, yeah,” looking over at her husband as she responds. “Definitely truthful.”

Truthful, but not always happy, and definitely not always light. Little Miss Sunshine travels into some pretty outrageously dark and uncomfortable places, but never do the directors allow the film to get to a point where it is so heavy and uncompromising that sense of joyful familial warmth, responsibility and togetherness dissipates. While it doesn’t pull any punches, the truth of the matter is that at the end of the day these characters love one another, and that’s the one thing that convinced the duo Arndt’s script was the one for them to make their theatrical debut. “We loved that about the script,” said Dayton. “I think that combination is what drew us to it right from the beginning.”

“We have a family,” continues Faris. “We’ve been married for a long time, we worked together for six years before we dated, we’ve got children, and we’ve been working together as directors in music and commercials for pretty much that entire time. So, we know what it is like to be a family with a lot on your mind. Family life is a constant shift. It can go from total absurdity bordering on farce, to absolute pain, drama, tragedy almost in an instant.”

“Life doesn’t pull any punches. It isn’t there to ease you into these situations; they just hit you like a ton of bricks. But you’ve got to deal with them and you’ve got to move on. I think we felt this script and the way we saw the film, it felt life-like. We related to it. So I guess our M.O. while making it was to always feel connected to it in terms of our life experiences.”

“And to keep all the complexities that were there [in the script] in the film,” adds Dayton. “To Michael Arndt’s credit, there are always three things happening in a scene. Each character is a full universe and those universes are always spinning. Our goal was to create life in front of the camera – not just our goal, really, but everyone’s – and we likened it a little bit to assembling a group of great musicians whom you’ve chosen carefully and then, once you’ve made the right choices, they play the music. The score is the song…”

“…And that song is the script,” states Faris, “and we did tell the cast it was important to us, not to show off as filmmakers, but to bring these characters to life. We wanted them in the scene together, bouncing off one another, creating their own rhythms. And in this way they were doing it together, they were on a level playing field and no one was trying to get a bigger laugh or a bigger moment, and so I think all of these things contribute to make it all feel more like real life.”

“The cast were all thoroughbreds,” continues Dayton. “Not only are they all stars, they’re all top of the line actors. When we got them in the room together and got them working it was clear they had done their homework and were arriving [on the set] at a very advanced stage. It was more about giving them their character’s histories and then trying not to talk your cast to death. The key is to give them experiences, not talk, so it all doesn’t become some intellectual enterprise.”

“When I think about this it’s almost disturbing that we were doing this, because who were we to do this sort of thing to Alan Arkin and so on, but we gave them all journals and asked them to do entries in character, as their character.”

“We prompted them with questions,” explains Faris, “like, asking Alan to write an entry as Grandpa talking about his feelings in regards to his son Richard. We had them do this sort of thing and then read their answers/entries aloud to each other and, in doing that, it was incredible for us because we really got a sense of their take on their characters, discovered who they thought their characters were and what their relationships were to the others. It was really informative for us and, I think, really informative for them, too. Really kept them, and us, working intuitively.”

That said, intuitive, introspective, emotionally complex, darkly comedic movies about families taking road trips that don’t come to easily digestible conclusions aren’t always an easy sell. Even after their success at Sundance and an advanced buzz screaming – gasp! – Oscar, the husband and wife team has to wonder if their film is even going to make a dent in the marketplace. Or do they?

“On some level, we’ve already gotten everything we already wanted with this film,” states Dayton.”

“Beyond,” adds Faris, giving her husband another nudge.

“Beyond,” he answers, giving her a playful glance before continuing. “The most important thing was to make something that we liked, which we do. I just hope that this is a film that people can discover. A film that they can hear little bits about, but not too much that it spoils the experience.”

“I hope people will go see it in a theater,” continues Faris. “Being in that room with two, three-hundred people all laughing together, I just think that’s wonderful. It’s just not the same sitting on a couch at home. You just don’t get that cathartic experience which, I think, is really good for people. It’s a tonic. And I hope people can experience, appreciate and enjoy [the film] together like we imagined they would when we were making it. That would be really exciting.”