The movie turns 10 this week
“Gene Wilder is my Marlon Brando.”
Its weapon is absolute sincerity.
It has a kind of purity to it."
Credit: Everett Collection
For example, there’s probably a great Farrelly brothers comedy in there somewhere based on that brief pitch.
Did the concept initially turn you off?
CRAIG GILLESPIE:It actually did.
I almost wanted to say no right there on the phone.
I wasn’t even in a hurry to read it; it sat there for three weeks.
And then I was walking by my living room, and my wife was reading it.
She said, “Have you read this script?”
I’m like, “The one with the sex doll?”
And she was like, “Yeah, it’s really good.”
I said, “Really?”
So I read it, and Nancy Oliver did an amazing job.
Did it scare the studios?
For me, it didn’t feel tricky at all.
So I couldn’t get any traction, and we pretty much went everywhere with it.
Then, I managed to shootMr.
Just getting the onus off of not being a first-time director managed to let me get it set up.
Did you have doubts that you could get us there?
For me, the most stressful part is actually the casting.
Because that’s going to set the tone of the film and let the audience know how to participate.
And then the other really hard part of that equation was Paul Schneider.
Again, it felt very real and very relatable, but it was also funny with Paul.
Some actors don’t have that.
We actually had an embarrassment of riches.
I hadn’t seenHalf Nelsonuntil we were literally three weeks from shooting.
But I had a huge amount of respect for Ryan, and in fact, after I didMr.
My first choice was Ryan, so I decided to send the script to him on a Friday.
And the script’s been dormant for five years.
And we just offered it to him.
That happened incredibly quickly.
And he was going to be fearless with it.
That was sort of in the script, and there is this earnestness to it.
Usually, there’s that dark moment where somebody challenges him.
But instead, you go in the other direction: They join Lars and Margo and bowl with them.
Did you have to de-cool or de-glam Ryan to play Lars?
Ryan turned up 20-30 pounds overweight witha mustache a week and a half before the shoot.
I wasn’t expecting it.
And they were good; they didn’t push it.
But it was a question that came up.
Did he really sleep in Lars' garage apartment?
Yeah, he spent the first week there.
The problem was, it was so loud outside.
People were chatting right outside his window.
But yeah, he spent that first week there.
Did he ever take Bianca off set for a date?
No, he didn’t.
We stayed really diligent to that.
And it was a very complicated process.
There’s a whole algorithm of which body throw in she was in, and hairstyle, and freckles/no-freckles.
She went through this whole evolution throughout this film.
I read that you personally went to the factory in Southern California to pick out the perfect Bianca.
Was it trial and error or did you just envision the one in your head that was Bianca?
It’s ridiculous, the number of permutations [these dolls have].
The math just gets endless.
So I left there and then I happened to run across a book in a store.
So we went back there again and I said, “This is the one I want.”
Because there was this really accessible quality to this doll, in the face.
It just felt much softer.
[Laughs] So he actually pulled out the cast and redid it for us.
Do you know what happened to Bianca?
Does she exist in some museum?
Unfortunately, that silicone, it just keeps decaying.
They don’t last that long.
I still have the head, but the body starts to fall apart.
Did Ryan already know what she looked like before she’s unpacked from the box?
I didn’t talk to him at all about what Bianca was going to look like.
He only got to see her a week before production, at the table read.
What was Ryan’s reaction?
He was very quiet.
He processes a lot.
We talked a lot about the character throughout the year leading up to production.
One of the big things we talked about was everything that’s happening off-camera with him and Bianca.
If it was my girlfriend, I’d be trying to make her comfortable.
Like, walking up to the front door, she’d be nervous."
I said, “Go ahead.
And so he came up with that whole thing about remembering peoples' names.
After that, I was like, “Talk to her as much as you want.”
None of that’s scripted, which to me, takes it to a whole other level.
Tell me a little bit about the lake-side kiss scene.
When we first started screening the movie, that was the scene where I absolutely held my breath.
you couldn’t hear the dialogue because people were laughing so hard.
And there was just a lot of laughter throughout the film.
You could hear crickets.
That’s when I thought, “Wehavethe audience, and it connected.”
But it just felt like we were saying too much in a way.
I’ve never kissed her in the movie.”
So the next day, that’s what we did; just two takes.
He committed to it.
It just felt right, and we had producers behind us that were really strong and backed us.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but have you seenBlade Runneryet?
I’m dying to see it.
