Interview

VIDA: As you can tell from my car, which is filthy, we don’t live a grad-student life. [laughs] And we carry everything around with us.

EGGERS: It’s not that dirty. If this were my car, then we’d really be suffering. When I drop off our 3-year-old at preschool, the teachers look at the car each time to sort of send me a signal.

ENGLANDER: Right: “This is not a healthy environment for a child.”

EGGERS: They don’t say anything. They just sweep their eyes over it with a look of revulsion. Anyway, this couple, they’re basically unhinged, untethered. They’re looking for a new place to live. They don’t know where they’re going to raise this kid, because they don’t have to be where they were—which is outside of Denver. It’s partly a road-trip movie. And it gives the audience the opportunity to see different methods of child-rearing.

ENGLANDER: So it’s an educational comedy.

EGGERS: It’s quite instructional. There’s a workbook that comes with it.

ENGLANDER: When I’m updating my blog, and telling people everything I know about you two, everyone gets so excited that—

EGGERS: You have a blog?

ENGLANDER: No, I don’t have a blog. It’s more of a pay-site. But everyone gets so excited when I tell them Jim from The Office is in the movie. I’d love to talk about casting. There are a lot of exciting people in this film—including the Hot Pockets guy. You’ve got Jim Gaffigan.

EGGERS: Is he the Hot Pockets Guy?

ENGLANDER: You don’t know that clip on YouTube?

EGGERS: What does he do?

ENGLANDER: He does this bit about Hot Pockets, which has about 70 million hits.

VIDA: He was really good in the movie.

ENGLANDER: Would you talk about the cast? It’s the guy from The Office, who everyone has a massive crush on—

VIDA: John Krasinski.

EGGERS: And Maya Rudolph. What was really funny was that we wanted the guy to be kind of tall and lanky, for some reason.

VIDA: We had this image of what they would look like when they hugged, and we wanted it to look unnatural.

ENGLANDER: Sandra Bernhard and Danny DeVito.

EGGERS: They were on our list, those two. But we thought of Maya Rudolph first. And then we were trying to think of a lanky actor. I watch The Office, and so Krasinski came to mind. Then, oddly enough, they did interview, or . . . What did they do? Audition?

VIDA: Audition, yeah.

ENGLANDER: Stop throwing that lingo around!

VIDA: We still don’t get that lingo!

EGGERS: So, we had always written them into it. Sam Mendes did audition other actors, but then they ended up casting those two guys. [laughs] Of course, we got cocky and thought that we had input with all the casting—

ENGLANDER: I was just going to ask you about how involved you were.

VIDA: Well, Sam was amazing about taking our suggestions and humoring us.

ENGLANDER: In my interviewing prowess, I cut you off right when you were excited about an anecdote, about getting cocky with casting.

EGGERS: After that, we would go back and forth on ideas, and Catherine O’Hara came up early as a mom figure. And then we started recommending friends of ours.