With five years elapsed since their last directorial effort, “Little Miss Sunshine,” Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris are certainly coming back in a big way. The duo have teamed with real-life couple Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan to bring a script by Kazan to the screen, assembling a terrific ensemble to tell the Charlie Kaufman-esque story of a writer (Dano) who achieves success early in his career but begins to face struggles. As the young protagonist follows the advice of writing the woman he thinks will love him in a bid to overcome his writer’s block, he ends up willing her into existence.
The project, however, has now added another actor to the mix with ‘Twilight‘ star Toni Trucks set to join as the sister-in-law of Dano and wife of Chris Messina‘s brother character.
A relative unknown, Trucks’ previous claim to fame seems to be a role in Bill Condon‘s “Dreamgirls” that ended up on the cutting room floor, but she’s risen in popularity by playing the nomadic vampire Mary in the upcoming “Twilight: Breaking Dawn” two-part conclusion, and now joining Dayton and Faris’ long-awaited sophomore effort behind the camera.
The film is set to star Annette Bening playing Dano’s mother, Antonio Banderas as her hippie boyfriend, Steve Coogan as a rival scribe, Elliott Gould as his therapist and Aasif Mandvi as his agent, with Deborah Ann Woll rounding out the cast. Lensing is taking place in LA as we speak, with the shooting schedule possibly setting Dayton and Faris up for a return to their old stomping ground, Sundance. [Variety]