A Web cam interview, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel

Through a Web cam interview, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, the stars of the new romantic comedy, "(500) Days of Summer,' talk about their "charming romantic, young adult" characters, on-set stories and romantic comedy cliches.

Zooey Deschanel: Summer is pretty straightforward about her wants and needs and where she is; and then Tom has his own thing, so your feeling with it is sort of more of just an unfortunate event than anything.Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I know how it feels when you finally got to be with the girl that you've had a crush on for so long and it feels like. It just looks like someone may be smiling to themselves, walking down the street, but what it feels like . . .Deschanel: . . . is a dance number.

Gordon-Levitt: My favorite kinds of comedies are the ones where it's not necessarily from a punch line or from gags.Deschanel: Yeah, yeah, agreed. Yeah, my favorite movies are definitely more along the Woody Allen-Cameron Crowe lines than the gross-out comedies. And I had been sort of like waiting with bated breath for something like this to come along, and even better it was with Joe. It's like a dream come true.

Deschanel: He was so great at working with actors and is such a lovely genuine person that he just seemed like an actor's director. As soon as I was on set, I forgot about everything else.Gordon-Levitt: He was also really good at describing what [the film] was gonna be, and that's always a sign of a good director.Deschanel: And everyday Marc would play music--and we'd dance on our break. Everyday in the hair and makeup trailer, we'd have a dance party, after lunch, and whenever possible, basically.

Gordon-Levitt: That's an interesting wording of it because--a friend of mine says, "It's the easiest thing in the world to say what you're not. It's the hardest thing to say what you are." I think (500) Days of Summer doesn't so much avoid cliches as it kind of walks right up to them and has a conversation with them, and sort of follows some of them and deviates from other ones.Deschanel: If your goal is to not be something, that's too amorphous-- I think the main goal of working on a movie is you wanna actually be telling a story.

"(500) Days of Summer" is in theaters.