Emma Roberts and Directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden on It's Kind of a Funny Story's Unexpected Uplift

"There's a lot of pressure sometimes to cast older people in these roles because it's easier to work them full days, but we thought it was important to cast somebody who was really Craig's age and a real kid, not a Hollywood actor type," said Boden. "As soon as we met Keir, we got this really great vibe from him, like he was the right person and the right age and had really gone through some of the stuff that Craig was going through."

Though Gilchrist admitted to Movieline that he never thumbed through Vizzini's source novel -- "Keir probably didn't read it because he's lazy," laughed Fleck -- the book already had a devoted fan in Emma Roberts, who had picked it up years before and found herself intrigued by Craig's spiky love interest, Noelle. "I read a lot and I was browsing the bookstore when I was 14 or 15 and saw the book," Roberts told Movieline. "I read it and fell in love with it. I thought all the characters were so original and interesting, especially Noelle."

Roberts pursued the filmmakers and jumped for joy when learning she had booked the role, but the young actress (currently shooting Scream 4 in Michigan) was insistent that Noelle not fall into cliche. "The main thing that attracted me to this role was how Noelle was a totally different character than anything else I'd done," she said. "She's so unique. That's one of the reasons I changed my look for it. I dyed my hair blonde and had it shorter. I didn't want to play her as a typical androgynous teenager with pale skin and dark hair. I wanted her to be different. Anna and Ryan were really supportive about that too, which helped."

Still, Roberts confessed that she was nervous about the heavy improvisation that Boden and Fleck like to encourage -- something that has become one of the directors' trademarks. "The kind of movies we like seem to incorporate that real-life, captured feeling that improv lends itself to," Fleck explained, though the approach did have one drawback. "I just remember shooting this handheld scene where we just let Zach go off and improv," said Fleck, "and he was being so funny that the camera starts to shake because the camera operators couldn't keep it together, they were laughing so hard. It was a room full of spontaneous laughter."

That's a noise you wouldn't necessarily associate with the directors' other movies, but according to Fleck, all three of their films have more in common than you might think -- and it isn't just how personal they feel.

"When it says 'Written and Directed By' at the end, our names will be on all three movies, so there's that," he said. "They're all very unique and distinctly different films, but if you really wanted to latch onto something, you could say that they're all about characters struggling to find their place in the world. They're movies about people who try to make sense of the world and see where they can fit into it."

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