The cast of Little Miss Sunshine is looking back at the 2006 road trip comedy — and the surprisingly loose safety protocols that went into filming the indie hit. At Sundance earlier this year, actors Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, and Abigail Breslin spoke with People magazine about the film’s 20th anniversary, reminiscing about shooting scenes as a fictional family crammed into a beat-up van. It also starred Steve Carell and the late Alan Arkin.
“I like the idea that this was the most dangerous film ever made,” joked Breslin, who was just 10 years old when she starred in the movie. Professional films nowadays usually shoot driving scenes by towing a car or mounting it on a platform driven by another person — all to keep actors safe. Not so for Little Miss Sunshine. Nobody was wearing seatbelts, Kinnear later recalled, and they didn’t have proper clearance on the highway.
In another risky situation on set, Dano revealed that Kinnear broke a traffic law during rehearsals — all for the sake of pulling a prank on Arkin. “I remember the second the van took off from the production office — with Greg driving — Alan said, ‘I have to pee,’” Dano, 42, recalled. “And Greg refused to pull over.” Dano added that Kinnear drove through “a full red light,” he said, or “close to a red light if not one.”
Kinnear previously opened up about the risks on set during a 2022 appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “You can count every Michael Bay movie ever made, this is the most dangerous film ever made,” he joked on the talk show, referencing the iconic action movie director. He emphasized that nobody wore seatbelts and they didn’t have highway clearance to drive with “billions of dollars of cargo,” jokingly referencing his co-stars.
