Trivia / Little Miss Sunshine

• California Doubling: Slight example. While the scenes where they were in California were still shot in California, the scenes that were supposed to take place in Redondo Beach were filmed in Ventura, Afton, Santa Clarita, and Los Angeles proper.
• Cast the Expert: The girls at the pageant are real life pageant competitors (wearing their actual costumes). Ew.
• Dawson Casting: Dwayne is 15 but was played by 21-year-old Paul Dano.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • During the Corruption of a Minor scene, Alan Arkin deliberately told Abigail Breslin to tune up the volume of her CD player so she won't hear the Cluster F Bombs and Precision F Strikes.
  • The directors also had the main cast actually drive around in an old VW bus for a while, so they would understand what it was like being stuck with one another.
• Fake American: As usual for her roles, Toni Collette is Australian but played the American Sheryl.
• In Memoriam: The film was dedicated to Rebecca Annitto, the 14-year-old niece of producer Peter Saraf, who was killed in a traffic accident in 2005. She appeared as an extra in scenes at Pann's Restaurant and the convenience store.
• Inspiration for the Work: The catalyst for the movie was a comment by Arnold Schwarzenegger that the people he hates most in the world are losers. The screenwriter Michael Arndt took offense to this comment, believing that everyone is a loser in some way, but that doesn't make them a bad person. He wrote the screenplay to refute that kind of black-and-white thinking.
• Playing Against Type: Steve Carell was mostly known for his work in comedies like Anchorman and The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
• Real-Life Relative: The four customers seated behind Sheryl and Richard during the diner scene are the parents of directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.
• Star-Making Role: For Abigail Breslin. Paul Dano's film profile also started snowballing from here.
• Those Two Actors: Overlapping with Retroactive Recognition, future Breaking Bad cast mates Bryan Cranston and Dean Norris have minor roles in the film.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Thomas Haden Church was offered the role of Richard but turned it down. He later regretted this decision. Alec Baldwin and David Duchovny were also considered.
  • Bill Murray was the original choice to play Frank, the second being Robin Williams.
  • Donald Sutherland almost had the role of Grandpa Edwin Hoover before Alan Arkin was cast.
  • Dwayne was originally supposed to have a Mohawk.
• Word of God: Dwayne is Sheryl's son from a previous marriage, making him Olive's half-brother and Richard's step-son. Downplayed in that this is actually mentioned in the film, but only in a couple of scenes where there's a lot of rapid dialogue, so many viewers either missed the lines altogether or missed the significance of them.^note When catching Frank up on her family's news, Sheryl explains that Dwayne was staying with his dad over the summer, which is what gave her the time to drive Olive around to compete in her first pageant; later, an extremely distressed Dwayne hits Sheryl with a mention of her divorce when listing off what he sees as each family member's biggest failure.

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