Zooey Deschanel with Jake Gyllenhaal, at Sundance Film Festival - Awards Rehearsals, 2004.
Zooey Deschanel with Ace Norton in the Making of "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here".
Source: www.self.com
Zooey Deschanel posing in GQ photoshoot, August 2009, Feature by Ellen von Unwerth.
"Less a love story and more a meditation on love and how to go about surviving it, (500) Days of Summer tells the story of the romance between Tom and Summer, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Tom, a hopelessly romantic greeting-card writer, falls for wide-eyed Summer, the new girl in the office who happens to love his favorite Smiths' songs.
Spectacle Week 11: She & Him, Jenny Lewis, Jakob Dylan: Indie folk duo She & Him, featuring Zooey Deschanel and M.Ward, light up the stage with Jenny Lewis and Jakob Dylan. Together they discuss their experiences growing up in musical families and join Elvis in a rare performance of one of his notable tunes.
Deschanel's band, She & Him, a collaboration with singer/songwriter M. Ward, covers a Smiths' track, too. We sat down to talk with her about (500) Days of Summer and how she balances her two careers.ESQUIRE: How did you get started recording music with M. Ward?
ZOOEY DESCHANEL: Well, he had done music for a film that I was in [The Go-Getter]. The director wanted us to do a duet for the soundtrack for the end of the film. So we got together and recorded it, and we had such a great time, and we had a little extra recording time, and we recorded another song. He kept asking to hear my songs that I had written, because I had been writing songs for a long time and kind of hiding them away. Finally I sent him maybe like six songs to see what he thought, and he e-mailed me back and was like, "I love 'em, let's make a record."
ESQ: When you're on stage, is it a similar experience to performing in front of the camera?ZD: No, not at all, because I write music. I don't just write the lyrics, I write all the music. It's very much a piece of myself when I write a song. I don't mean to say it's very personal, like the lyrics mean something personal to me. When I write a song, that's my taste in music — my taste in chord progressions and melodies. And when I'm in the studio, I'm collaborating with Matt — it's really only a couple of people I'm collaborating with.
In a film, you have writers and a director and a lot of people in the crew, a lot of other actors — you're collaborating with a hundred people. And there's already a story before I get there. I get there and do my job, but the spectrum of creativity that I display in a film is a lot narrower. The music's just a lot more like an actual piece of me.
ESQ: In (500) Days of Summer, did the director ever tell you during the filming, "This is a song that's going to play in the background right now?"
ZD: He did. We pretty much knew what was going to be playing, which was helpful, because you don't always know that. Sometimes music is so specific that it can definitely change how you're going to play something.
ESQ: Do you have any tricks of the trade to be a convincing lip-syncer?ZD: I'm really not sure that I'm that good at it — at lip-synching. I don't think I am.
ESQ: What bands are you excited about currently?
ZD: Do you know the band Lavender Diamond? They're great. They sound like... they're sort of like folk-pop, kind of. Really great. But it's also poppy. It's not just like folk. It was one of my favorite records that came out last year.
ESQ: Aside from the Smiths song that you covered for the soundtrack, is there one song that makes you think, "Damn, I wish I wrote that song?"ZD: Oh my god, there are so many songs I wish I had written. "Waters of March," I wish I had written "My Baby Just Cares for Me," I wish I had written "This Will Be Our Year," I mean, there's millions of them. "Wouldn't It Be Nice?"
Source: www.esquire.com