(500) Days of Summer: (15) Questions for Marc Webb and Alan Bell

“You should know up front. This is not a love story.” So says the narrator of director Marc Webb’s first feature, “(500) Days of Summer,” a film about nothing if not about love. But that disclaimer, along with the hard stop suggested in the film's enumerated title, predicts a particularly bumpy run of love between Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel). We're not surprised then when Tom, a would-be architect who writes treacly copy for an LA-based greeting card company, says he's in love with new employee Summer, or that he spends much of their year-and-a-half relationship waiting for her to say it back.

Because this “postmodern” romantic comedy is told entirely from Tom’s point of view, Webb and editor Alan Bell were challenged with creating onscreen nothing less than a multitrack capture of Tom’s love-besotted sensibility. They managed it by leveraging a rich mix of production and postproduction techniques such as nonlinear narrative, dream sequences, musical numbers, and split-screen exposition. And they edited it all together in realtime HD using Final Cut Pro.

Recently, Webb and Bell discussed how they used Final Cut and other tools to realize their vision for the film.

Your film is described as a postmodern love story. Why?

Marc Webb: Postmodern means different things to different people. People use the term for “(500) Days” because it's a self-aware fusion of different techniques and styles (dance sequences, black-and-white educational films, split screens, narrators) created to relate what's going on in Tom's head rather than capturing some objective reality. That said, at heart it's a very traditional story about relationships.

What in the script made you want to direct it as your first feature?

MW: It was the script I wish I had written. It just felt real to me, and alive, like whoever had written it had something they wanted to say. It was fun; it had heart; but it also touched on big ideas. The technical stuff was an interesting challenge, but at the end of the day this story had a soul. My job was pretty simple — try to invoke in the audience what I felt when I was reading it for the first time.

How was it working with your lead actors?

MW: Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are both fantastic actors, but their approach and preparation are different. Joe and I had a lot of deep, long conversations about the arc of the character and the beats within the scenes. We spent a lot of time blocking stuff out. Zooey prepares in a more private way. She's extremely thoughtful, but her greatest gift is her intuition. She flows in this magical way, reacting to the life in the moment. You can sense she's feeling everything that Summer is feeling. And when you put the two of them together, it's magic.

How did telling the story from Tom’s point of view affect the shoot?

MW: It gave us the license to get creative: we were relating a feeling rather than capturing reality. But it also gave us some important rules about how to cover the film: we literally see only what Tom sees (even if it's in his head); we never enter a room before he does; we never (well, rarely) see a face that he doesn't see. We're with him all the time. These simple things really help put the audience in Tom's shoes.