Pairing Billy Bob Thornton and Virginia Madsen may not appear, at first blush, to be an inspired or even wise casting choice. Thornton seems to require an actress of equal volatility to balance out the equation. But Madsen has a genius for making sense out of her leading men. As she did with Paul Giamatti in "Sideways" Madsen generates chemistry that gives the couple substance, and when she and Thornton came to Seattle to promote "The Astronaut Farmer" you could tell they were happy with the result.

"Virginia and I didn't know each other before this movie" said Thornton "but when we first met it was like we had known each other forever." Madsen agreed, "The first scene that we filmed together ... I thought "Oh my god, this is really going to work in this movie!"

Both had been reading family-drama scripts looking for something that would breathe a little intelligence into the genre. "You don't see family films anymore that don't have a talking dog in them" Said Thornton, "I was looking for a movie that had the feeling of an independent film but yet was a big 'Hoosiers', 'Field of Dreams' kind of movie".

"I too had been looking for a family film for years" said Madsen "(but) there wasn't a realistic family. Mothers and children were always in the background with not a lot to say. That's just not so with families. Families are a team."

In "The Astronaut Farmer" they found a script that fleshed out the stylized fable that usually inhabits the center of family drama with the messy dignity and charm of real family life. "The character reminded me of me" said Madsen, "There were a lot of things about it that were very much like my own life."

Key to the on-screen family were cousins Jasper and Logan Polish, daughters of Director Michael Polish and his brother, screenwriter Mark Polish. The two girls gave sweet, believable performances as the couple's daughters.

With the girls' fathers working behind the camera, Thornton and Madsen found that creating the illusion of family often required the real work of parenting. "One of them would poke the other's pancake with a fork...and make her cry" said Thornton "(We would) be like 'honey don't do that we're about to roll.' So we were actually parenting them on the set and then they would start rolling and the scene would be about what we were just doing in real life with them."

Every once in a while you stumble across a family film like "The Astronaut Farmer" that gets all the pieces to come together. "You knew reading that script" said Thornton, "that if you get the right people this is going to be great."