It was nice to see the elusive Zoe Kazan at the Q&A following The Exploding Girl's Brooklyn premiere at BAMcinemaFest in late June. The film was a hit at its North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, garnering a Best Actress award for Kazan, but unfortunately, due to her duties shooting the Untitled Nancy Meyers Project, where Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin fight over Meryl Streep, Kazan didn't get to accept her award in person.

That said, there was no talk of awards following this Brooklyn screening. Rather, it's Kazan (who is also making inroads as a playwright) and director Bradley Rust Gray (looking schoolboyish in a black button-down shirt and tie) revealed some insights into the making of this delicate, quiet, and moving film. (We loved this film at Tribeca, and are happy to report that it holds up to multiple screenings.) A small week-in-the-life of epileptic college student Ivy, The Exploding Girl happened as a result of another movie's holdup. After spending time on Jack and Diane (a film with a popular IMDB description of "Jack and Diane, two teenage girls, meet in New York City and spend the night kissing ferociously"; click here for a more detailed and sensitive description), when the film was delayed, Gray said, "It was a bummer day, and it was the first time I was allowed to think about something else."

He turned to Kazan, who had impressed him in auditions for the held-up film, and they ended up collaborating on this new work. Kazan described her "yes" to a Gray film built around her presence simply: "I just really liked their script for their [previous] movie [Jack and Diane]. I wasn't doing anything so we took walks for three months. I just liked him."

Part of Kazan's process in embodying Ivy was to look at first-person recounts of living with epilepsy. "The stuff they talk about, the way smell changes. It's a manageable disease," she noted, "but in this week, she doesn't take care of herself. We looked up stuff online and I practiced in bed. My poor boyfriend [actor Paul Dano]—I'd be like, does this look right?"

Gray, whose master's in sound design certainly showed in Girl's carefully composed soundtrack, observed that much of the film was inspired by Japanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Café Lumière: "We stole three or four scenes from it. I was thinking about the way he was doing it." Another director that Gray admired, the Scotsman Bill Douglas, will be cited by Gray at an upcoming retrospective in Germany.

And after this quiet triumph of a film, Kazan and Gray's dance cards are filled. For the actress, "I'm about to do another really tiny movie next week, and then I'm taking the summer off," she said with relief, while Gray has again gotten funding for Jack and Diane. It's sure to be another sterling addition to his finely observed body of work.