Before the film found its winning co-leads, there were apparently several actresses who were eyeing the project, but each of them wanted to drastically alter the film, according to Neustader. “For a while, there were a lot of actresses who were circling it, who would always say, if you flipped the perspectives and you made it a female—you made Tom a woman, basically—then they would be more inclined to dive in,” he told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year. “That was not something any of us wanted to do, so the script was sort of languishing.”
However, once Webb met Gordon-Levitt in a meeting, the actor made a suggestion that set the film in motion. “I asked him who he thought Summer was, and without missing a beat he said Zooey [Deschanel],” the director told the magazine. (The two actors had previously worked together in 2001’s Manic.) “And we ended up hiring Zooey first and then very quickly thereafter hiring Joe. There’s something about both of them that feels real. I thought that was important to make the film accessible. I really believe you can’t just cast a person; especially in a situation like this, you have to cast a chemistry, you have to cast a dynamic, you have to cast two people that work well together.”
