IN VIEW OF THE SKY
An Exclusive Interview with “Little Miss Sunshine”’s Alan Arkin
By Sandra Kraisirideja

After nearly 50 years as an actor, Alan Arkin, 72, finds himself playing the role of grandfather more often than not. Amazingly, he still finds ways to do something new with each portrayal.

Take Arkin’s Grandpa in “Little Miss Sunshine,” an audience favorite at this year’s Sundance that makes its way to San Diego theaters this month. In the film’s opening sequence, Grandpa pulls out a vial of powder, which turns out to be heroine, and proceeds to snort it up his nose with a roll of cash. Later in the film, Grandpa explains the reason for his habit in a monologue that is delivered not with remorse, but righteousness, and Arkin delivers the words with such conviction that it’s hard not to agree.

“It’s almost totally intuitive for me now at this point,” says Arkin, speaking by telephone from New York, when asked how he decided to approach his character.

“I used to spend a lot of time analyzing characters and working out their backgrounds, but I’ve been doing this for almost 50 years now and it’s mostly an intuitive process. It’s hard for me to even think about analyzing it. It’s literally painful to think about analyzing it.”

“Little Miss Sunshine” takes its name from a fictional beauty talent contest that sets the plot in motion. To get their daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin) to the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, Richard and Sheryl (Greg Kinnear and Toni Collette) pile in a VW bus with their son Dwayne, (Paul Dano), Sheryl’s brother Frank, (Steve Carell) and Grandpa (Arkin) to make the journey from New Mexico to California.

Each character is tortured in his or her own way, but their tragedies add to the film’s humor. “There was comedy while we were shooting, but nobody was playing the comedy. We played characters in serious jeopardy and the comedy comes out of the writer’s approach to them being in jeopardy,” Arkin says.

The antics in front of the camera didn’t continue off camera, however.
“A lot of people think that being on a movie set you’re doing nothing but playing basketball all day long,” Arkin says. “We worked very hard. There weren’t any anecdotes, there weren’t any jokes. We were engaged in a short schedule and doing very hard work trying to maintain the lines of our specific characters, which were very tenuous, so we could maintain the integrity of the emotional condition of these characters and make a movie out of it.”

Arkin appears in both independent and studio films. “I don’t enjoy doing a movie that doesn’t have enough to do what needs to be done in order for the film to work, but I don’t really care if it’s a big budget film or a small budget film as long as it’s got integrity and as long as everybody is on the same page,” Arkin says.

“I think it’s a little easier to handle a low-budget film, make sure everybody is on the same page because you have less of an army to control. You don’t need a megaphone and e-mail to get in touch with people, everything is right there. From that standpoint I guess I prefer low budget films.”

Arkin has performed in 86 movies over his long career, including roles in both drama and comedy. He’s even taken some time to direct, perform on Broadway, and write children’s novels.

Over the years Arkin has created memorable characters in films such as “Wait Until Dark,” “The In Laws,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” and “Slums of Beverly Hills.”

“I don’t want to play people that I don’t have some kind of feeling for, some kind of respect for. At this stage of the game I find it enormously painful and stultifying to do any character that I don’t have some regard for,” says Arkin.

When he’s not working Arkin enjoys taking long walks with his wife, Suzanne, playing guitar with friends, photography and cooking. “I make a pretty good Kasha Varnishkes,” he says.

After he finishes promoting “Little Miss Sunshine” Arkin plans to go back to writing his newest book, a self-help guide of sorts that promotes the virtues of acting and improvisation.

The books will show how theater and improvisation can be used in order to examine life more fully rather than the other way around. “Most actors use their life to make their acting better. I try to use acting to make my life better,” says Arkin, who is writing the book with a close friend and screenwriter.

As far as acting goes, one thing Arkin won’t be doing is theater. “It’s dark up there. I don’t want to be in the dark [without] windows. I want to be able to view the sky.”

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