Paper Heart: Charlyne Yi and director Nick Jasenovec

Comedian and actress Charlyne Yi (Knocked Up) and director Nick Jasenovec are real-life friends who teamed up to make a comedy about love, combining elements of documentary with traditional storytelling. With Michael Cera playing Charlyne’s fictional boyfriend and an actor playing Nick onscreen, the lines between fact and fiction get very blurry indeed.

LOVEFiLM: How did you come up with the idea for Paper Heart and working together?

Charlyne Yi: We met through a mutual friend and we were going to make a video together but that fell through so we started playing basketball together…

Nick Jasenovec: Then we shot a film that Judd Apatow produced. It was a short film that Michael (Cera) was in too. So we’d all worked together before.

LF: How do you describe the film to people? Because there are parts of actual documentary but there are also parts which have been scripted.

CY: When they ask, I just tell them it’s a hybrid of both. All the stuff with Jake Johnson, who plays Nick, and Michael is all fictional, and all the interviews are real.

LF: Have you had a lot of people come up to you asking questions about Michael, thinking that you’re dating in real life?

CY: I have had a lot of that, people coming up to me and saying, ‘I’m sorry about the break-up,’ and I’m like, ‘what break-up?’ Sometimes I correct them, sometimes I play along and go, ‘yeah, it hurt.’

LF: What reactions have people had about the film?

NJ: There’s been a variety of reactions. There’s tons of people who are convinced it’s all documentary until the credits roll. I think only the savviest audience members can really pick up on when things are fake or scripted.

LF: Where did the idea of mixing a scripted story line with documentary come from?

CY: Originally it was just going to be a documentary and then Nick suggested I should be in front of the camera because I had an opinion about love. There’s no true answer of what love is but for my character to work I would have to learn firsthand. Because of lack of time and because I didn’t feel comfortable filming my personal life, we decided to mix a documentary with a scripted story.

LF: Why did you use puppetry to tell the stories of people you interviewed?

CY: I’ve used puppets in my other short films, and in my live performances I integrate video and puppets. I noticed that in most documentaries there’s either a nodding head or old photos to tell a story, and we wanted to avoid that.

LF: What are your backgrounds in acting? Nick why did you choose to have an actor play you onscreen?

NJ: I’m not an actor, I’m just really bad. It was a pretty easy decision to cast somebody as me.

CY: I’ve done some high school drama projects but I was absolutely terrible. I’m not a great actor at the moment; I have very limited range (laughs). I perform on stage but it’s so different. I’ve never really acted on camera except in Knocked Up which was very scary and I thought I was going to get fired because I was so bad and stilted with the lines.

NJ: This entire film is improvised from a five page outline, and part of that is because we wanted it to feel as realistic and natural as possible but it was also the perfect environment for Charlyne because she didn’t have to worry about lines.

LF: Have you thought about stretching your search for love around the world, as your next project perhaps?

NJ: I don’t know if we’d ever make another movie like this. We ended up with 300 hours of footage, so 299 of them didn’t get used. I think we created much more work for ourselves than if we’d just written a script.

LF: How did you find the people you interview about love?

NJ: We had a casting director who did some preliminary work in Los Angeles and then travelled along the same path we were going to be travelling three weeks ahead of us. She arranged to meet up with some and she also just planted herself at a coffee shop or diner and start talking to people. We’d given her an extensive list of the types of people we were interested in talking to.

LF: In retrospect, did the film turn out how you expected?

NJ: We had to improvise in terms of the story constantly. The biggest example was having Charlyne being in front of the cameras, as that wasn’t meant to be a big part of the film but it just naturally happened; it just made sense. But everyday there were changes; we’d just be driving on the highway and see a particularly interesting location and just pull over and create a scene on the spot.

LF: It looks like you had a lot of fun.

CY: It was! We got to meet a bunch of people and hang out with them. It was an adventure with so many highs and so many lows.

Tegan Kniveton

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