‘Everything Must Go’ director gets in under the wire

There is a turning point in the life of any independent movie when the filmmaker realizes it actually might get made. For “Everything Must Go,” writer-director Dan Rush’s first feature, that moment came when Will Ferrell said yes.

“I love the role, but it was more about the story,” the marquee comic actor said via e-mail a few days before the movie’s Friday premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. “I love the fact that the world, being the character’s front lawn, was contained.”

In the movie, inspired by a very short Raymond Carver story, Ferrell plays a man whose luck essentially has run out all on a single day. Fired from his lucrative sales job, giving in to his alcoholism, already facing a divorce he doesn’t want, he comes home to find his wife has locked him out and piled all of his belongings outside.

This is not quite “Death of a Salesman” dark, but it’s not the typical Will Ferrell project either.

“The first time we met, we had the same questions about how to approach the film,” Rush said a couple of weeks before the premiere, when he was still making final tweaks in a Burbank editing room. “Is this a comedy with dramatic moments, or a drama with comedic moments?”

They both agreed the answer was drama, and the result is a much more introspective Ferrell than the one who populates a string of comic goofs, anchored by 2004’s “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” which solidified his star power, to “The Other Guys,” the buddy-cop comedy still kicking around local theaters.

“We decided to play every moment as if it was real,” said Rush, who exudes a quiet calm that seems a good counterpoint for Ferrell’s energy. “If it played funny, great; if it’s sad or dramatic, great. But we weren’t going to go in to any scene saying ‘This is when we want to get laughs.’ ”

The film also stars Rebecca Hall, Laura Dern, Stephen Root and the very winning 13-year-old Christopher Wallace, son of the late rapper Biggie Smalls, who made his film debut last year playing a young Biggie in the biopic “Notorious.”

Before “Everything,” Rush, 40, was a commercial director with clients like Sony, Major League Baseball and Dell Computers. He had first read Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance” while at Dartmouth, where he studied printmaking and photography, and in April 2008 he started shaping the handful of images that Carver had conjured up into a script.

There was little in the 1,500-word story beyond random memories that a girl has of an afternoon and a man tending a yard sale with the detritus of his life priced to move, she and her boyfriend looking through the stuff, and an impromptu slow dance before they leave.

Rush gave the man a name, Nick, and a detailed back story. He gave him neighbors — a lovely and lonely pregnant new one in Hall’s Samantha, and a longtime one in Root. The filmmaker created an old flame in Dern, and a new friend in an awkward kid named Kenny, played by Wallace. Finally, he made Nick an alcoholic and gave him a sponsor in Michael Peña.

The director said he liked playing around with the idea of using Nick to answer the question, “What do you do if everything in your life is stripped away? You’re at this crossroads when all you’re left with is who you are.” What he didn’t know as he was writing was just how common that experience would be by the time he started filming.

The nearly no-budget film was shot in Arizona during 24 days last year. Ferrell said he liked how Rush handled the pressure, the way he kept it at bay. There is a particularly emotional scene deep in the movie when Nick discovers something about his wife that completely unnerves him, and it turned out to be the most difficult one for the actor.

“It was tough, not just from an emotional standpoint, but tough because that was either the second or third day of shooting,” Ferrell recalled. “So here we are in front of a crew that barely knows each other and I have to go from zero to 60 in a type of scene that I’m not used to doing as an actor. But Dan took the pressure off by letting me know that whatever emotional level I could hit would be appropriate as long as it was real.”

Rush has a clear sense of how lucky he is to have gotten the film made and with such a high-profile cast. “In the course of making this movie, I’ve watched the walls come tumbling down around the independent film world — it’s getting harder and harder to get a movie like this made,” he said. “But what’s special about Hollywood is when actors love a piece of material, what they are willing to sacrifice.”

Now, of course, comes the Toronto test. Will audiences who love the “Anchorman” brand embrace a darker Ferrell, who spends his time sorting out his belongings — and his life — with a little help from his friends, the best of whom turns out to be the biking, budding entrepreneur Kenny? And will Rush find a buyer for his film?

He’s OK with all the anxiety and the uncertainty while he waits to see how the marketplace answers. Just having the film picked for the festival is almost enough — the last time Rush was in Toronto he was shooting a TV spot for Dell.

betsy.sharkey@latimes.com