It's a story about love... as the poster says! it's funny that people assign it into whatever title they want to, but i think the best genre specification would be to call it a coming of age story masquerading as a Romantic Comedy. I think the phrase 'love story' was a phrase we wanted to side step... at first i thought 'oh it's a quip, they're not going to pay this off' but then when i finished reading it the line made perfect sense. The same piece of information and mean something very different depending on what in you life you look at... like in The Graduate.

Yeah. I remember my dad showed it to me when i was a kid. You sense something deeper and more powerful than the cartoons you were watching. Obviously you don't get the irony until you've been through something like that in real-life. The other great thing about the Graduate, in terms of a precursor, was that it was told very strictly from the perspective from Benjamin's point of view. There are a few others from a male Point Of View like Annie Hall and High Fidelity... but the one which is kind of a weird reference is Children of Men. it was very informative as to how we shot the film, and i think it's a brilliant film by the way. What Alfonso Curon does is put a tether on the camera and attach it to Clive Owen, there's the scene where where Michael Caine is being shot and you want to reach out and stop it but you can't. Any other director would have done it in Slow Motion and put the camera underneath him... it means you have a very powerful connection to that character. I remember we were watching it whilst developing this script and it was like a textbook on point of view film making. You have so many questions as to how you're going to film something and if you have some sort of code to help unlock it, it makes the process a lot easier.

Probably. For me it's less about the 'guy' than getting the single person POV, in a lot of movies you split that. I think it's less about gender and more about youth, more about a naive approach to love and his understanding of romance. I identified with that.

Well that's a good point. i think a bit of both. he bares some culpability, and there is some selfishness as to how he approaches it. But it is so identifiable and we've all been there... i think they are both sides of the same coin.

He was the first guy i met with who really got underneath it. The first time i met with him he asked me 'Well why are you making this?' and i thought that a simple, stupidly obvious question that nobody had asked me before. We had a great discussion about that and about hoy guys end up being the subplot in these sorts of films. Like in Hitch, where Will Smith is so charismatic that it survives on that but there is also the message that if you wax your back and learn to dance you can date a supermodel... which is bullshit. It's a seductive yet false way to look at the world... we had a character who has those expectations but we tried to make it less cynical. I know people who found each other without going through the 'Summer' experience and they tend to like the Paul character who says "She's better than the girl of my dreams... she's real" which i think is really the most important message. And they find it amusing but probably not as emotionally resonating.

I wasn't 100% sure, but they had been in a movie called Manic before. When i met Jo, i asked him and he thought of a few people but then said it really should be Zooey. But then he got depressed when they were both cast because he thought nobody would back a movie because they weren't bis enough stars. It's one of the benefits of making a movie with a small budget is that you don't have to stuff a star in it. They already knew each other and had that respect and chemistry which is so important... it a movie doesn't have that it's dead in the water. She's very talented and very funny and he's following her into the world of Summer which they developed. We were very tight on cutting out unnecessary lines and taking the dialogue and plucking out lines.

We were very careful to try and choose as much of the music before we filmed the scene because it allows you to get the architecture of what is happening. For example the Reality/Expectations scene which is a fun moment but when the music comes in you realise this is kind of ominous... there is a line where it says "he never saw it coming at all" which fit perfectly. In the Ikea scene when they are running through the store and you here the doves play out "There goes the fear" and that's exactly what is happening in their relationship. It makes more sense to have that in the melody of the song than have one of the characters stopping and saying "I not afraid anymore!" which would have been stupid".

I find it hard to watch the first 20 minutes or so, because there is a scene i'm not too sure of. But i really like the Reality/Expectation scene and the bench scene at the end... i think the reality one was says so much about what the film is and i was so happy with the way Jo and Zooey performed that scene that i like watching that. It's quite technical with the subtle changes and differences.