Robin Williams, Alec Baldwin, and David Duchovny were all considered for the part of Richard Hoover, which eventually went to Greg Kinnear. Since the movie was in production for so long, many Hollywood names were discussed before the final cast was confirmed.

BILL MURRAY AND ROBIN WILLIAMS WERE CONSIDERED FOR ROLES. By 2006, it was finally completed and ready to screen. He bought the rights back from Focus and financed the project himself. Luckily, producer Marc Turtletaub intervened. But two years of arguing with the directors over the shooting location and cast took its toll on the studio and they eventually dropped the movie. After several rounds of failed pitches, the producers managed to sell Focus Features on the project. Languished in development hell for half a decade. But it wasn’t until they read the Little Miss Sunshine script in 2001 that they made the leap into features. Throughout the 1990s, the pair directed music videos for the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Smashing Pumpkins (like this one).

They married eight years later and decided to collaborate on some short films. The couple met as college students at UCLA in 1980 he was a film major, she was into dance. A MARRIED COUPLE DIRECTED IT.ĭirectors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris are partners both professionally and personally.

After winning an Academy Award for his very first script, he went on to pen the screenplays for Toy Story 3, Inside Out, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He eventually quit to focus on his writing, and it paid off big time. THE SCREENWRITER WAS MATTHEW BRODERICK’S ASSISTANT.īefore Arndt wrote Little Miss Sunshine, he held down a job as Matthew Broderick’s personal assistant. There’s something so demeaning and insulting about referring to any other person as a loser, and I wanted to … attack that idea that in life you’re either going up or you’re going down.” 2. Screenwriter Michael Arndt was struck by a speech that Arnold Schwarzenegger gave to a bunch of high school students which included the lines, “If there’s one thing in this world that I hate, it’s losers, I despise them.” As Arndt explained at a 2007 bookstore appearance, “I thought, there’s something just so wrong with that attitude. The Terminator himself accidentally inspired the Little Miss Sunshine screenplay. In honor of the indie darling’s 10-year anniversary, check out these facts about the movie’s Arnold Schwarzenegger-inspired screenplay and numerous Breaking Bad references. But Little Miss Sunshine managed to turn the Hoover family road trip into a delightful experience. Riding around in an old VW bus with a motivational speaker, an angsty teen, a depressed Proust scholar, and a surly grandpa sounds like a terrible time.

Little miss sunshine book