Issue date: 6/18/09 Section: ARTS & LIFE

Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't.

This is the tagline for director Marc Webb's offbeat romantic comedy "(500) Days of Summer" about a woman who spurns the existence of true love and a young man who falls in love with her.

In an excerpt from a recent interview, the stars of the film, Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, discuss their ideas on love and confronting clichés head on.


Q: So the movie seems to be a harking back to the era of Cameron Crowe and Woody Allen comedies that rely more on heart than surrealism or gross-out gags. Was it a welcome change of pace for you two to do something so different?

Zooey: Yeah, definitely.

Joseph: Yeah. My favorite kinds of comedies are the ones where it's not necessarily from a punch line or from some gags.

Zooey: Yeah, yeah, agreed. Yeah, my favorite movies are definitely more along the Woody Allen-Cameron Crowe lines than the gross-out comedies.

Joseph: Uh-huh.

Zooey: And I had been sort of waiting with bated breath for something like this to come along, and even better was with Joe. It's like a dream come true.

Q: In the film, both Tom and Summer experienced a fairly extreme transformation of ideas about love. In fact, they seem to interchange their ideas. Have your ideas about love changed in your own lives?

Zooey: Definitely, of course. I mean, I think that it's just like believing in God or believing in anything, that's like a lifelong question. But I think, you know, just depending upon how you grow up and your experience is, you're going to have different points of view about it. And as your experience continues to happen in your life, you end up having a different perspective, which is why you have more perspective as you get older just because you've been through myriad of things.

Joseph: All you need is love.

Q: Zooey, Summer is a very musically-inclined character in "500 Days". Is that something that attracted you in this picture, or is that something you brought to the picture?

Zooey: All the music references were there in the film and they were all. Both Tom and Summer have what I considered to be very good taste in music, but I think one of the things about the film more than anything that it's saying is that like this is sort of how we present ourselves to the outside world. Music isn't just something to be inspired by and moved by, but also it's a way that we express ourselves.

Joseph: It's a creative act.

Zooey: Yeah, exactly. That the way we communicate with others is partially like our taste.

Q: Joseph, what made you decide to do more independent work after "10 Things I Hate About You"?

Joseph: Well, for me, I actually don't really make such a distinction between independent work and studio work or whatever. You can put things in a lot of different categories, but what's important to me is if there is a good script. Is there a cool filmmaker that I connect with? Who else am I gonna be working with? That's what matters to me. "500 Days" is a perfect example. I mean, it's kind of an indie movie, but it was actually produced by Fox Searchlight. What matters is who are the people that are making the movie.


Q: What clichés do you think "(500) Days of Summer" avoids?

Joseph: That's an interesting wording of it because--so you're asking what clichés it avoids. I think "(500) Days of Summer" doesn't so much avoid clichés as it kind of walks right up to them and has a conversation with them, and sort of follows some of them and deviates from other ones. That's what I like about it because avoiding clichés, I think, then you just know and then you start becoming obscure.

Q: There is something of an exaggerated realm in this movie. How do you keep your characters grounded, keeping them from being too naive and love-drunk or too much of a cold witch?

Zooey: I think we're both just trying to be as sincere as we could in the moment. I mean, Summer is pretty straightforward about her wants and needs and where she is; and then Tom has his own thing. So I think your feeling is sort of more of just an unfortunate event than anything.

Joseph: And I think the entire sort of larger-than-life elements of the movie, they don't come because, well, we just wanted to do this larger-than-life thing. It all comes from a sincere point of view, even the most surreal parts like the dance number…


(500) Days of Summer will be released in theaters on July 17.

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