Jason Ritter and Jess Weixler on Peter and Vandy, Onscreen Romance, and Zooey Deschanel's Unwelcome Bombshell

Both of you have done a lot of films with first-time directors. What are you looking for out of them? How do you know they'll be able to come through?

JESS: That's a good question, because sometimes it's really tricky. You can be like, "Oh, I really like this person," but you're not sure if you're gonna grow from it. There was just something about meeting Jay where I felt like I could learn something from this and grow from it. He had a very specific perspective and it was written with truth and honesty inside of it. There was this feeling of wanting to play it out and do it, and the fact that this guy wrote it and spent so much time with it, it was hard not to trust him because he cared very much for these characters. It's nice feeling like your director actually cares about the characters in the movie and is rooting for them.

JASON: What I look for is that I want to make sure [the director] is someone I can talk to. What I'm really looking for -- and you don't know if you'll have it until you see them on set -- is a certain amount of fluidity. They need to have a willingness to have a conversation about any given scene so that if I'm having problems, we can have a conversation. "Should it change? Is it flat?" A good director is one who does allow me to change my lines and intellectually grab on to something, as opposed to just being told "Shut up and do it" the way they wrote it.

JESS: Jay was very receptive. He even changed that scene in the middle of shooting it, the break-up scene, based on how we had played it out and how the rest of the movie was working. We felt him form it to us.

JASON: I like to have a director who will set a parameter, but within that, allow us actors to play around. He's basically saying, "This is the playground, but that's the fence, so you can't run into the street." [Laughs] Sometimes you get so wrapped up in your own thing that you only serve yourself on a movie, so it's important that a director allows you a certain amount to play around.

So many of your arguments in the film -- in fact, nearly all of them -- start from the characters' good intentions, then snowball. You guys are playing out these fights over very long takes...how do you keep things fresh in those beginning moments when you know this argument has to come down the pike?

JASON: It's exactly what you said: No one wants to get into a fight. So if you can try not to in a scene, it makes it a more interesting thing for your character to try to not get in a fight. And then there's a slow wearing-away of your resolve and your insecurities are being played on. That's what happens in real life! You try to help your boyfriend or your husband tie his tie, and you don't realize that--

JESS: --no one ever taught him to tie his tie.

JASON: Right, and that he's already self-conscious about that and you're opening up a whole can of worms by being another person in his life that's telling him he doesn't know how to do something. It's all these little things that spread out, and it was great of Jay to allow them to play out fully.

JESS: And they're not overt. Like, most of the conflicts have been couched in all the daily stuff; it's all these little things that you wouldn't usually notice as being a problem. It's not the stuff where you'd usually say, "Oh, this is why we have problems. This is why we have fights." It's all so buried in there and comes out of our history. That's what you go for. You don't have to go for the part where we call each other assholes. [Laughs]

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