Director Sam Mendes on the set of Away We Go.

Sam Mendes is perhaps best known for his work in Oscar-worthy dramas that dissect the American family (read: American Beauty, Revolutionary Road), exposing distress between husband and wife, beauty in plastic bags and a general sense of disillusionment in everyday life. Though it does take on the problems of various relationships, Away We Go is nothing like that.

The film, starring John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, is, on its face, a tale of two simple people encountering abnormality and eccentricity as they try to find a place for themselves and their unborn child. The final product, though, yields the subtle humor reminiscent of films like Juno, finding comedy in ridiculous characters as the two move across the country. Krasinski’s full-bearded Burt possesses a sincerity and naivete that makes his character endearing, while Rudolph’s Verona takes some adjusting to, though her apathetic vibe does subside by the end. Blessed with an array of comedic co-stars including Maggie Gyllenhaal as the Zen influenced, sex loving earth child and Allison Janney and Jim Gaffigan as the wildly inappropriate parents of two, the quirky film succeeds in maintaining a balance of farce and tender moments of honesty. Mendes’s lighthearted peek into the trials of domesticity has a few staggering steps, but the journey, the characters and the oddity make the film worth seeing.

North by Northwestern sat down with Mendes to discuss the film, working with television actors and the toddler version of Chris Farley.

What was the relationship like with screenwriters Dave Eggers and Vita, what was the relationship like with the writers?

It was a lot of fun. They’re proper writers and they just sit down and they write novels and magazines and screenplays and words pour forth. I think any time you’re working with the real deal it’s a pleasure as long as you treat them with respect and not like hacks or people who are just there to transcribe your ideas. I read the screenplay; it was kind of 4/5 done and a fifth of it they wanted to change and they did, we had no disagreements. I shot the script they wrote, you know, the movie is from their heads.

Had you read any of his work prior to seeing the screenplay?

Oh yeah, well the obvious Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I’d also read What is the What and subscribed to The Believer and McSweeney. I was part of the distant Eggers fan club, I wasn’t an active fan in the sense that I had never met him and now I’m more of the in-the-circle fan club.

It seems like there’s a really good balance between what’s spoken and the cinematography, whereas a lot of directors seem to gravitate. How do you maintain that balance?

I think that is something that I really work on because in this movie there’s a lot of very talky scenes. There are two movies going on simultaneously, well there are two stories going on simultaneously. The first story is a story that they are aware of and the other story is a story that they’re not aware of I think, a secret story in a way. But the other movie is about the landscape and the bigger journey which is to try and make sense of how we live and they’re not aware that they’re on that kind of mythic quest but we need to feel like their story has some kind of bigger meaning than just meeting a few people across America. It has a scale, so for that you need to tell that story in pictures and in music so that’s told with cinematography and with the landscapes and colors and atmospheres and, of course, with the music, which is Alexi Murdoch songs which are all really wonderful.

How did you get in touch with Alexi Murdoch about providing so much of the music that is included in the film?

Good old iTunes. I can’t say it was the Genius on iTunes that is like “You like Nick Drake, we suggest Alexi Murdoch,” but it was pretty close to that. The weird thing about songs in movies is that you can shoot the movie and be listening to songs while you’re doing it, convinced that you’re going to use the songs in the movie. And then you get in the cutting room and you put the songs in and it really doesn’t work. That actually always happens to me, I’ve never end up using the songs I was listening to when I was making the film –- except on this one occasion. I was listening to these songs, I put one in the movie and it worked and I just thought “Okay, that’s it then.” Gradually I put more and more of his songs.

It seems that when you’re working with music with lyrics, you have a whole other narrative going on. If he’s composing songs exclusively for the film did you talk to Alexi Murdoch about what the content should be?

No, no. I think with songs it’s like you want them to sort of brush against the movie and leave a color. Sometimes words float by you that seem to have a direct relevance to the scene and sometimes they don’t, but I was aware of where the lyrics were. I edited the music so that the lyrics fell in the right place, so that they felt like they meant something. There’s a sense of longing in the music and a sense of melancholy that I think is there in all the songs, which really articulates a whole side of the film that would otherwise might get lost. I don’t want to give them specifics, that’s just going to constrict them. Same with actors, if you get too technical with them they lose spontaneity and they lose life.

In terms of casting, you picked two actors known for their television work. How do you get them to dissociate from these characters that come into our homes every week and get them to play these very different characters?

Obviously I know both of them well from their work on TV but I never thought of John [Krasinski] as Jim from The Office because I worked with him before he did Jim from The Office and he’s nothing like Jim from The Office. He’s much more Tigger-like and energized, kind of like a wired bean pole – full of ideas and inspiration and improvisation and all of those things. And Maya [Rudolph], it turns out, is not at all like her character. She’s full of these high-energy comic creations on Saturday Night Live, but she is a person who is very mellow, very centered, very calm, very thoughtful and an incredibly earthy and sweet person. So that’s what I go on. I was very interested in them both playing against perceived notions of who they were, but that’s not why I cast them. I cast them because they were Burt and Verona. The luck I had is that they loved each other, got on like a house on fire and made each other laugh and sort of bounced ideas off each other the whole time so to get that energy that was going on behind the camera and put it in front of the camera wasn’t so difficult.

Some of my favorite scenes were the ones with the kids.

Yes! [laughs] What about the little chubby kid? He’s a genius, he’s our mini Chris Farley. We all did impersonations [of the scene] afterward.

After having worked with so many young kids in this film, how do you feel about the old saying “Never work with children or animals”?

Actually I would be the first to have said that, but they didn’t give me any… well, the baby in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s first scene would not stop crying. All we would do was wait for her to stop crying, wait for the baby to take a deep breath and try to get a line in. But other than that they were great.

What was it like on set with so many different comedic voices?

Maya Rudolph has been around every great comedian of the last twenty years at Saturday Night Live, John Krasinski works with Steve Carrell on a daily basis – none of them could keep a straight face with Catherine O’Hara so she’s different from everybody else. The joy of a road movie is it’s episodic, with each new episode there’s a new set of characters and each new set of characters brings an explosion of comic energy or energy. Because filmmaking is such a marathon, it keeps you going.

I read that this is your first time directing an original screenplay since American Beauty. What are the differences between doing an original screenplay as opposed to an adapted?

The big pleasure is that there are no expectations, in that nobody knows the story, and I think that’s one of the big pleasures of this movie is that you go in and even if you’ve seen the trailer I don’t think you can tell from the trailer what this movie is about really, not really about. You can tell it’s funny and it’s got some jokes and stuff like that, but you can’t think… I think when you’ve gotten to the end of this movie, it’s crept up on you and reveals itself to be about more things than you initially think it’s going to be about. So that’s a big pleasure, that people don’t know anything.