Beach Town Blues

"I didn't get to go to Sundance,” AnnaSophia Robb is in the midst of explaining how it is that she has only seen the movie she stars in the night before our interview. Robb, who has graced screens previously in Tim Burton's remake of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Sean McNamara's Soul Surfer, and Gabor Csupo's Bridge To Terabithia, missed the film's premier at the festival but is still reeling from watching the final product.

“I think I would be a terrible editor, or director, because I would be so overwhelmed!” Robb jokes. “It felt just like the script, it transitioned so well and so beautifully. The film looks exactly like how I saw the script, and how it felt when we were filming it.”

The Way, Way Back marks the directorial debut of Jim Rash and Nat Faxon, the Academy Award-winning writers of 2011 film The Descendants who also co-wrote this beachside coming of age tale. Robb came on board a few years ago having fallen in love with the script, and after some notoriously difficult funding setbacks, found herself in enviable company.

“It took a couple of years and it was like, what's going on? Different things happened with the financing, and then I got a call and they said, 'We have Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Allison Janney, Sam Rockwell, all these people are attached, and we're filming now'. It was crazy, it's amazing how things work like that with a lot of time and energy put into it,” says Robb.

Her awed proclamation of an inability to direct is understandable; The Way, Way Back plays out like a vulnerable warts and all Brady Bunch for the broken family generation: on summer vacation adults recently separated or revealingly seductive frolic while forlorn teens are forced into new family formations, forgotten, left to navigate their 'awkward stage glory' – as Janney's character puts it – all own their own. Robb plays Susanna, a teen stuck with her outgoing mum for the summer, in the vacation house next door to protagonist Duncan, whose own mother has brought him to her boyfriend's holiday house alongside his significantly more popular step-sister to be.

“The both of them are in their shells, they're reclusive, moody,” explains Robb, “And I think because Duncan's character is so removed it ends up bringing Susanna out of her shell because she's forced to reach out in order to make a friend or in order to be a friend.”

Despite a chaotically short filming schedule, Robb can't understate how fun the time on set was in the beachside town, which, coupled with the comedic talents of her onscreen mum, made staying in character as a closed-off sullen teen tough. “It was so much fun; I'm supposed to play this surly teenager and I had the hardest time because I was trying to keep a straight face,” Robb laughs. “Every single take she would do something different; she would come up with a new line, or a new way of saying it, or something different and just really unexpected and entertaining and put so much energy forth. It was such a pleasure working with her and watching her.”