The narrator of (500) Days of Summer begins the story by telling the audience the film they're about to watch is not a love story. And that's true enough, I guess, in the classic definition of the term. During the LA press day for the Fox Searchlight film, the two stars had their own ideas as to how to classify (500) Days of Summer. Deschanel called it a 'post-modern romance' while Gordon-Levitt says it's a reborn romantic comedy. "I think it’s sort of in response...in fact it's explicitly in response to a culture where we’ve grown up watching a bunch of movies that are sort of, we know are selling us a false bill of goods and Tom suffers the consequences of buying into those sort of simplified 'twinky romances.'"
As different as they are in their attitudes toward love and relationships, Deschanel found much to relate to in both of their (500) Days characters. "I think they sort of represent two sides of our generation, like ambivalence towards love and romance and its place in our society and in our everyday lives."
"I think everybody’s been a Tom at some point and have been a Summer at some point," added Gordon-Levitt.
"I’m saying it’s less important just because people don’t have to get married. Society is not imposing that upon people, imposing that rule upon people, as well as it’s not necessary that you get married to support yourself. We’re a generation that has progressed in many ways, from the ones before us, or evolved I guess would be a better way of putting it," explained Deschanel. "I think that the idea of romantic love, which was always a sort of luxury before, now all love is romantic love in our generation in the Western world. And so it’s not a luxury anymore. Getting married is not a necessity, and staying with one person is not a necessity. And so it’s like in the generation after God Is Dead, several generations after that, is love dead too and then what keeps love alive if there is no society enforcing it and there are no other things that are keeping you with a person, what is? So I think that makes people question it. And so people get very, very romantic and very cynical. It’s just polarized, that people vacillate and swing the pendulum back and forth."
"And you have to find it through yourself," offered Gordon-Levitt. "Instead of letting the rules tell you, 'Okay, you’re going to fall in love and this is how it feels, so you should feel that way,' that I think people nowadays are more ready to define it for themselves and embrace their own unique identity. And I think that’s what this movie is kind of about, is that here’s a guy who’s bought into certain notions and rules and says like, 'This is how it’s going to be. This is what love is.' He writes greeting cards that are normative. They’re saying, 'This is how you should feel.' And that’s kind of what he discovers, is like, 'Well, it turns out that these things that I’ve been told that I’m going to feel aren’t really happening the way that I expected them to, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no more such thing as love.'"
Summer's an interesting character and the sort of role must young actresses would love to sink their teeth into. Asked if this was a role she actively pursued, Deschanel laughed. "No, I actually didn’t go after it," explained Deschanel. "I never go after parts. Ever. It never, ever works for me. And it was a movie that like, the first drafts that I got was different, and Summer was...you saw even less of her and she was even more of an enigma. I was kind of like, 'Well, I liked the script and I thought it was really entertaining, but I wanted Summer to have a little bit more.' And then I read the script like, I don’t know, six months later, a rewrite, and they had done a lot of work on it. I guess it was sort of subtle work, but it really helped give her a little more of a life. It was just something more to grab onto and then I was like, 'Oh yeah, I really like this.'"
"But I think Mark [Webb, the director] had an idea of the film he wanted from the beginning and I think we both were part of that. He just had to sort of go about convincing people to cast us. Or let him cast us," laughed Deschanel. "So yeah, again, I don’t pursue. I always hear stories about actors going after parts and I’m like, 'How do they do that?' It seems so weird."
So how does she describe Summer? "I saw her as somebody who, within the context of the story, let me go to this, I saw it as a really interesting challenge because I wanted to make a very truthful character within the context of a very subjective film," answered Deschanel. "So I didn’t want to be like playing into the romanticization of her too much. I wanted to leave that to Mark. So I wanted to create a character that was a girl that he is deified."
"And you grounded her," said Gordon-Levitt. "I remember when we were talking about it, how to approach it and what tone should we go with, because it could be, you know, the movie you could sort of elevate it. And you really thought, 'No, I think I want to just play it very real.' And I think you were so right to do that because then this sort of dreamy, cinematic stuff is grounded in something that feels genuine."
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(500) Days of Summer hits theaters on July 17, 2009 and is rated PG-13 for sexual material and language.
