The movie that caused Griffin Dunne to despair so greatly that “people around me thought I was dying”
Griffin Dunne made one of his earliest on-screen appearances as the victim of a vicious lycanthrope cursed to haunt his friend in a state of half-aliveness in An American Werewolf in London, a horror comedy that quickly became hugely influential.
Just a few years later, he led Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, which he also produced, and while Dunne might have been keen to star in leading roles, he also expressed an interest in filmmaking from early in his career, and as more acting jobs came, so did more roles as a producer and eventually, as a director, culminating in his 1996 directorial debut with the short film Duke of Groove, before moving into the arena of comedies and romance features.
From the Meg Ryan rom-com Addicted to Love to the beloved Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock fantasy film Practical Magic, Dunne’s tenure as a director might not have put him in the same arena as someone like Scorsese, but he found a decent amount of success behind the camera nonetheless; let’s just ignore the fact he was involved in the terrible Movie 43, because sometimes, things don’t go to plan.
I mean, he surely didn’t go into Movie 43 thinking it would be a massive flop, but these things happen, for filmmaking is an unpredictable art form, and you often find yourself facing failure and disappointment, just like when Dunne went to see a movie at his beloved Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, New York, and despaired over the fact that it had beat him to the post, because the band he was set on hiring to score his next film had already lent themselves to this one.
Of course, a band can score more than one film, but when he sat down to watch the tragicomedy Little Miss Sunshine, he instantly heard the recognisable notes of the indie group DeVotchKa, and was disappointed that he hadn’t got there first.
Perfectly capturing the film’s bittersweetness with its blend of hopefulness and nostalgia, the band’s score has become pretty popular in the years since Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ Little Miss Sunshine was released, which is one of the 2000s’ greatest comedies, following a family who travel across the country in a worn-down yellow campervan so that the youngest child, Olive, can compete in a beauty pageant.
Olive doesn’t fit the mould of a typical beauty queen, but her parents are desperate to fulfil her dream, even if they have to bring their mute teenage son, suicidal uncle, and drug-addicted grandfather with them.
“Not a happy memory: I had discovered a band called DeVotchKa and planned to hire them,” Dunne told Cultured, revealing how this plan soon crashed down in his face as he watched the tender film, adding, “While watching Little Miss Sunshine at Upstate, I heard the first bars of the same song I had planned to open my movie with and was so upset I released a sound of such despair that people around me thought I was dying.”
DeVotchKa adapted many of their pre-existing songs into tracks for the soundtrack, collaborating with composer Mychael Danna. Dunne clearly had the same idea as Faris and Dayton, who had even given all of the cast DeVotchKa albums to get them into the right headspace for the film, but sadly for him, he just wasn’t quick enough.
