"I think the key is for me to figure out what went wrong.  Do you ever do this? Go back and think about all the things you did together.  Everything that happened. Replay it over again in your mind, looking for the first sign of trouble."

Tom

This is a story of boy meets girl, begins the wry, probing narrator of 500 DAYS OF SUMMER, and with that the film takes off at breakneck speed into a funny, true-to-life and unique dissection of the unruly and unpredictable year-and-a-half of one young man's no-holds-barred love affair. 
Tom, the boy, still believes, even in this cynical modern world, in the notion of a transforming, cosmically destined, lightning-strikes-once kind of love.   Summer, the girl, doesn't.  Not at all.  But that doesn't stop Tom from going after her, again and again, like a modern Don Quixote, with all his might and courage. Suddenly, Tom is in love not just with a lovely, witty, intelligent woman - not that he minds any of that -- but with the very idea of Summer, the very idea of a love that still has the power to shock the heart and stop the world. 
The fuse is lit on Day 1 - when Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a would-be architect turned sappy greeting card writer encounters Summer (Zooey Deschanel), his boss's breezy, beautiful new secretary, fresh off the plane from Michigan.  Though seemingly out of his league, Tom soon discovers he shares plenty in common with Summer.  After all, they both love The Smiths.  They both have a thing for the surrealist artist Magritte. Tom once lived in Jersey and Summer has a cat named Bruce.  As Tom muses, "we're compatible like crazy." 
By Day 31, things are moving ahead, albeit "casually."  By Day 32, Tom is irreparably smitten, living in a giddy, fantastical world of Summer on his mind.  By Day 185, things are in serious limbo -- but not without hope.  And as the story winds backwards and forwards through Tom and Summer's on-again, off-again, sometimes blissful, often tumultuous dalliance it covers the whole dizzying territory from infatuation, dating and sex to separation, recrimination and redemption in a whirl of time jumps, split screens, karaoke numbers and cinematic verve - all of which adds up to a kaleidoscopic portrait of why, and how, we still struggle so laughably, cringingly hard to make sense of love . . . and to hopefully make it real. 
It marks the feature directorial debut of Marc Webb from a script written by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber (PINK PANTHER 2). 

And Now For a Comment From Director Marc Webb
Before I read 500 DAYS OF SUMMER, I'd completely lost interest in the romantic comedy genre.  Somewhere between puberty and when I started paying taxes, I stopped believing in the world these rosy cheeked girls in cute winter knit caps kept promising me.  What did it have to do with me?
When I sat down to read the Xeroxed pages that had already been dog-eared from about three weeks of neglect in my backpack I wasn't really looking forward to it.  It was the title that finally got me.  Needless to say, something clicked.  The writers, Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber -- without descending into some oddball high concept --conjured up a relationship that felt both artful and truthful.  Metaphorical and literal.
We all know Summer because Summer isn't just a girl.  She's an event.  I met my first Summer when I was 17.  She got me to skip class so she could read me Catcher in the Rye at the Vilas Park Zoo back in Madison, Wisconsin. (How cool is that?)  At the time, I believed that love was the magic pill that would connect my soul to the universe and provide unending, effortless bliss.
I won't go into the sordid details but suffice it to say pretty girls with rebel hearts are in high demand.  Some people end up with their Summer.  I did not.  We broke up and I entered into this weird limbo - I couldn't shake that feeling that something had gone horribly, painfully wrong with the universe.  The reality I expected and the reality I experienced were suddenly very different. The ironic thing is - the one thing that made me feel alone is probably the very thing that so many people from different walks of life can connect to: we all know heartbreak.  Whether we're 17 or 70.  
In many ways, making this movie - my first feature film - has been the happy ending that I didn't have with Summer.  It's got a whiff of the uncynical kid from the Vilas Park Zoo in it.  Because under the humor and the whimsy of 500 DAYS OF SUMMER, there's a fundamental truth at play:  yes, love can be cruel, harsh and difficult but it's also, by far, the best thing life has to offer. 

And a Further Comment From Co-Writer Scott Neustadter
On 22 July 2001, a Sunday if I'm not mistaken (and I'm not), sometime between the hours of 7 and 9 (Eastern Standard Time), a monumental, cataclysmic, earth-shattering event took place at a restaurant called "Serendipity" in New York - I got dumped… hard.  We'd only been dating a couple months and yet, as often happens in the wake of such things, I was flooded by some powerful emotions: hopelessness, crippling inadequacy, the world ending, that sort of thing.  I stayed in a lot during those days - listening to the Smiths on a constant loop, watching old French films and lamenting my not being alive in an era that would appreciate me.  In short, I was an asshole.
Now at this time, my friend Weber and I had written one screenplay together, an outlandish and rather inane comedy solely designed to make us both laugh. A few people read it and thought it was funny but nothing ever happened and that was that. We kept writing but rarely finished anything we started. And then, after a few aborted attempts to write something big and commercial, my frustration level, coupled with my already gloomy mental state, convinced me that I needed to do something nuts. So I did. I impulsively quit my job of 4 years, said goodbye to my friends and family, and flew off to London for an indefinite period of time (to "study," as I told all those concerned).
An amazing thing happened next. Almost instantly upon my arrival, I met someone new. She was smart. She was pretty. She was perfect. Six months later, she dumped me. 500 DAYS OF SUMMER is the story of those relationships. Or, at least, how I remembered them afterwards. (Ok, fine - how I chose to remember them.) Weber and I always dreamed of writing a romantic comedy like our heroes Cameron Crowe and Woody Allen - one that was relatable and identifiable, where the comedy came from a real place rather than some squirrel attack in the woods.  Our aim was simple - tell the story of a relationship, make it real, make it funny, try to make it not suck.  
This is the result. An anatomy of a romance. Equal parts autobiography and fantasy.  A pop song in movie form.  500 DAYS is a lot of things - funny (hopefully), sad (definitely), peculiar (for sure). There's music and dancing, split screens, narrators and a cartoon bird. The one thing there isn't is irony. But today, looking back on the experience, I can indeed find something wholly ironic - that an idea born from the pain of two bad relationships has directly led to some of the best in my life, with a great director, amazing producers, and practically everyone else involved in the project. 

The Beginnings of Summer: Penning a Postmodern Love Story
500 DAYS OF SUMMER began in angst.  It was sparked by two young screenwriters - one single and recovering from a badly bruised heart, the other in a long-term relationship -- reminiscing over romances that could have been, that maybe should have been, but somehow just . . . weren't.  Almost everyone has had one and, in an age when everything seems to happen faster and more intensely, they seem to be ever more common.  So how, wondered Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber, does a young romantic survive such a reality?   And how could today's version of romantic idealism be portrayed on the screen in a way it's never really been seen before? 
"There are certain topics that romantic comedies always hint around and never really tackle directly," says Neustadter.  "Questions such as: is there really such a thing as 'the one?' And, if there is, what happens if you lose her?  What do you do now?  Can you still believe in love?  Do your beliefs about love change?  These were the questions Weber and I wanted to write about even though we don't quite have the answers." 
Thus was born the character of Tom Hansen, a guy who believes madly, passionately, even unreasonably in the mystery and power of love, and the woman who doesn't - Tom's romantic muse, total obsession and the frustratingly non-committal, destiny-denying bane of his existence:  Summer.  But it wasn't just Tom that the screenwriters were interested in; it was the inner workings of his memory, as he looks back on just what really happened between him and Summer. 
"The idea we had for the screenplay was sort of a romantic comedy meets MEMENTO.  We wanted to follow a guy sifting through the memories of a relationship, moving backwards and forwards through time as he starts to see things he might not have seen while he was going through it," explains Neustadter.  "You watch him gaining perspective and learning something about himself and about love.  Tom realizes he is someone who is in love with the idea of love and that's why his story becomes a very hopeful one. He sees something about the nature of love.   It's not your conventional romantic comedy, but it is a very romantic story." 
From the beginning Neustadter and Weber chafed against the perennially cutesy, sentimental and unexamined conventions of romantic comedies  -- and searched for a truer way to tell Tom's story of the romance that put his heart through a mix-master, only to leave him with an even stronger, if more mature, belief in love.  "We threw away all the rules and looked at alternative structures," explains Neustadter.  "We followed every single idea no matter how crazy it seemed, from the way people are transported by a song to how they drown their sorrows in a movie.  Anything that was in Tom's mind and memory was fair game." 
Continues Weber:  "Writing this movie became an incredibly creative experience, because we gave ourselves so much freedom and we were constantly exploring how people's emotions and relationships are tied up in the culture all around us - in the songs, movies, books, television and art by which we define our identities." 
Neustadter and Weber also freely played with time, moving ahead and then back-pedaling through Tom and Summer's relationship at will.  "Jumbling the chronology of the movie was a lot of fun for us," continues Weber, "but there was also a method to our madness.  By pulling out certain moments on their way up and on their way down, you see things you might not otherwise notice and from a new persepective.  And, if you think about it, that's how memory really works, where something will trigger your mind to think of an amazing, wonderful moment and then that will trigger the memory of a bad moment and then comes a revelation of how they were all connected." 
Most of all, the priority was on keeping the whole process as emotionally honest as the two men could possibly withstand.  "We've all been in the trenches of love, we've all gone through the highs and lows, so Scott and I felt that the only way to tell this story was to come at it from a completely real place," says Weber.  "It was pretty interesting for us because Scott was just going through a break-up and I was in a long-term, stable relationship, so we each brought a totally opposite perspective, living it and not living it, and I think that tension helped to bring out more of the comedy." 
Ultimately it was that thread of emotional honesty that drew a diverse team of talent to 500 DAYS OF SUMMER.  Says producer Mason Novick, who also produced last year's unconventional and widely acclaimed hit comedy JUNO:  "This is a story that doesn't fit directly into any genre or label.  It's not your typical romantic comedy and it's not your typical drama - it's an intriguing, funny, fresh perspective on what modern relationships are really like.  And it attracted just the right group of people to pull it all together." 
Novick was amazed to learn just how much of the playful, fast-paced screenplay was pulled straight from real life.  "Of course, truth is often stranger than fiction," he says.  "Some of the scenes I thought had to have been imagined the writers told me, 'no, no, that really happened.' They were able to bring that quality of reality and put it together with their very unique view of the world and of becoming part of a couple." 
Adds producer Jessica Tuchinsky, who is partnered with producer Mark Waters (director of such films as FREAKY FRIDAY, MEAN GIRLS and THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES) in Watermark Pictures:  "The two writers, Scott and Michael, are basically two Toms.  They've grown up on the same songs, the same movies and they've felt the same fireworks when they've fallen in love as Tom in the movie and they put all of that into the script in a very clever way structurally."
Producer Steven Wolfe (who brought the iconoclastic Polish Brothers to the fore with their directorial debut, TWIN FALLS, IDAHO) notes that everyone who read the script realized it would need a very special touch:  "It uses a multitude of storytelling devices, and it's very complex in how it flashes backwards and forwards and uses these total fantasy moments and pulls all these different pieces together into a puzzle," he says.  "We knew it would need a director who could plan everything right down to the most minute detail." 
The search for a director with a vision that could stand up to the screenplay's creativity led the filmmaking team to newcomer Marc Webb, who had cut his teeth on music videos and commercials and was in search of his first feature film.  He quickly gave his own heart to 500 DAYS OF SUMMER.  "When I first read the script, it was like Tom seeing Summer for the first time," muses Webb.  "Something clicked and I just knew this was the one."
Like any man infatuated, it was a sense of mystery that drew him deeper in.  "The first time I read it, I remember feeling something I couldn't define," Webb recalls.  "When I went back and read it again, I realized there is a theme in the movie that is implicit, it's not ever explicitly stated, but it's that Tom finally is hit with the idea that happiness is found within. He sees that it isn't in the big blue of eyes of the girl in the cubicle down the hall, even though she can be very beguiling and gets him thinking that she is what will bring him happiness.  The truth is that you have to realize who you are and understand your own potential before you can really find true love.  At the end of the day I felt this story was a very fun way to say something that had some meaning for me." 
Webb was also excited about the daring style of 500 DAYS OF SUMMER - and the writers were equally excited about him.  "We didn't know anything about Marc at first, but we had the most remarkable marriage of ideas with him," says Neustadter.  "All three of us very much wanted to make the same movie and that was exciting." 
Adds producer Novick:  "Marc is that rare director who doesn't sacrifice substance for style.  He's stylish but all of his choices are specific, deliberate and used to forge a point of view." 
Webb was, he says, highly energized by the challenge. "I came from a world were there are very few rules, where you're not as obligated to a strict narrative sensibility, and so you can break away from standard conventions. So I loved the idea of diving into a comedy that allowed itself to be non-linear and a little fantastical.  The challenge for me was, within that, to find a way to keep the characters real enough that they engage people on a deep emotional level.  You could say I wanted to find a line in this movie right between reality and magic." 

The Many Moods of Summer: Casting The Film
In 500 DAYS OF SUMMER, the typical "he said, she said" POV of romantic comedies is abandoned entirely in favor of the "he said" approach.  Everything that is seen on screen comes straight from the love-addled, mood-clouded mind of Tom Hansen, a man who writes pithy romantic sayings for others yet can't seem to communicate the overpowering depth of his own feelings to the only women who matters to him:  the elusive Summer. Read more

The Sounds of Summer:  About the Music
Nothing can capture the slap-happiness of infatuation or the agony of heartbreak in a matter of minutes like a pop song - and music was always key to the vision for 500 DAYS OF SUMMER.  Read more

The Look of Summer: Designing Tom's Worlds, Real and Fantasized
The imagery of 500 DAYS OF SUMMER streams directly out of Tom's inner experience of falling in love and fighting to stay in love when the going gets tough - and it runs the cinematic gamut from dream sequences to musical numbers to cartoon birds to odes to the melancholy of French films.  As Marc Webb relates: "The idea was to create a complete world for Tom with its own space and time. We used a lot of different filmmaking tools and techniques, but we tried to avoid superficial gimmicks.  The most important thing was always the emotional flow of the story."  Read more

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

MARC WEBB (Director) directs stuff.  Short films, videos, commercials, drinking games. Whatever. He has won several MTV VMAs™ including 2006 Best Rock Video for AFI's "Miss Murder" and Best Group Video for The All-American Rejects' "Move Along." The Music Video Production Association honored him in 2006 as the Director of the Year for his work with Weezer, AAR and My Chemical Romance. 500 DAYS OF SUMMER is Webb's first feature.
He likes penne pasta and hates to be called "chief" or "buddy."
His short film SEASCAPE premiered at the Aspen Comedy Festival, which is funny, because he didn't think it was funny. So, to ensure he wouldn't make another comedy, he went to Baghdad to direct a documentary on the first day of school in post-war Iraq. But people laughed at him there too.
Webb studied at Colorado College, NYU for a semester and Art Center for a few months.  He received a Newberry Fellowship and spoke at his graduation.  The person next to him told him to shut up.
His dad is a mathematician and his mother is a biologist.  His brother just had another baby.  Her name is Isabelle.  Marc has pictures if you want to see.

SCOTT NEUSTADTER & MICHAEL H. WEBER (Writers) met in 1999 when Weber applied for an internship and Neustadter hired him for the job. Since selling their first pitch in 2005, they have written projects for Sony, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, and Fox Searchlight, including two upcoming feature films -- the semi-autobiographical 500 DAYS OF SUMMER and the not-at-all autobiographical PINK PANTHER 2.
Neustadter hails from Margate, NJ and currently lives in Los Angeles. He loves sad British pop music and the movie, THE GRADUATE. Weber was born in Manhattan and refuses to leave. Ever. They were recently named "10 Writers to Watch" in Variety.

THE ART OF ORIGINAL FILMMAKING

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