In between Elf and this spring’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, actress Zooey Deschanel virtually disappeared in the black comedy Eulogy, new this week on DVD.

Zooey Deschanel is one of those actresses you instantly recognize, but for some reason whose name you never remember. Her piercing blue eyes seem to capture all of the feeling of each film she appears in, and yet they also tend to shame you for looking so closely into her soul. Especially if you’re sitting across from her at a table, trying to pry loose a few choice details about her life and/or work.

But with the release of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy only a few months away, the 24-year-old daughter of acclaimed cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Passion of the Christ) will need to get used to prying and sometimes awkward reporters. Her days of quietly promoting a film like Eulogy, an ensemble comedy that arrives this week on DVD, will soon be a thing of the past.

When it was released in theaters last fall, Eulogy barely made a dent. Limited to less than two dozen theaters nationwide, the black comedy managed a domestic box office gross of under $100,000. But one of the most successful elements in the film, one that will no doubt play much better on the small screen, is its decidedly boisterous approach to potentially morbid material.

Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Michael Clancy, Eulogy is the irreverent tale of a family that convenes to pay what little respect they have left for the family paterfamilias Edmund (Rip Torn). Deschanel stars as Kate, his granddaughter and the sole island of sanity amidst a sea of nut jobs, played by Debra Winger, Ray Romano, Kelly Preston and Hank Azaria.

With such a gifted cast of comedians on hand, the first question when FilmStew sat down with Deschanel was naturally to ask who was the biggest goofball on set. “You mean, who wasn’t the goofball?” she retorts. “A lot of it was in the script already; I think everything’s obviously a combination of the way that the actors interact and what’s there to begin with.”

“There was some improvising going on, but I can’t remember what was in the script and what was not,” she continues. “I didn’t usually go off the script, [but] sometimes Hank [Azaria] or Ray [Romano] would add a few little things, especially like the scene where they’re all in the basement,” she says in reference to one especially pungent exchange between the four supposedly-mourning siblings.

“I know there were a few things that were different than the script, [but] actually most of the stuff I think was in the script to begin with.”

When it came to cultivating a relationship with her on-screen pop Hank Azaria, who plays a ne’er-do-well actor who can’t seem to land a legitimate gig, Deschanel says that they didn’t delve too deeply into the background of their bond. “We rehearsed a lot and we got along pretty well, but we didn’t like go to a father-daughter dance or anything together,” she says, indicating that the nature of the ensemble material made it tough to enjoy much quality time with any one or two of the other actors.

“It’s a lot harder to do an ensemble, because your energy is going in so many different places and you have to cover everybody,” she continues. “You have to sort of split your attention, so in a way you appreciate the smaller scenes with fewer people in them, like if you have a scene with a lot of people. It’s really a lot more work than a scene with two people, just logistically.”

Some of the scenes that she says took the longest to coordinate were the aforementioned basement scene - which she does not appear in - as well as a number of other “group” scenes. “A lot of the ones where everyone’s in the kitchen and people are coming in and out and like just the big dining room table scene,” she recalls. “All of the ones where the full cast was there; the scene outside by the lake.”

“But I think mostly the hardest parts are when people are coming in and out of different doors and you’re trying to establish different characters at the same time,” she maintains. “I think probably the scene where everybody arrives at the house was a lot of work.”

In terms of that lakeside scene, in which a casket is obliterated, she says there weren’t a lot of takes because the explosives were too tough to reset for multiple shots. “I think with that sort of thing, explosives, you only have one or two takes because it takes forever to set it up again, so they have to cover it with a bunch of cameras,” she recalls. “I remember Debra Winger brought her 3-year old son and he got scared when the boat blew up.”

Winger has been out of the acting game for a while now, at least as a regular, but Deschanel says the esteemed actress fell into an easy groove once shooting started. “It was great,” she says. “I love Debra Winger. She has two kids and she raises them and she’s a really good mom and she’s such a smart lady. She produces films herself and her husband’s an actor and director, and I think she just works when she wants to work and she’s totally brilliant.”

Winger’s career has been dotted by few similar roles; when asked how it is that she seems to have found her way into so many movies about dysfunctional families, Deschanel says that she sees those roles in terms of a the larger context of the movie. “It’s character by character,” she insists. “But Mumford and Almost Famous were like my first two movies and I was just like excited to be in a movie.”

“I’m definitely attracted to that because I’m attracted to character-driven pieces, which is why I haven’t done a lot of big budget movies,” she adds. “I like sort of small movies about people and their relationships.”

Deschanel says her work in the upcoming Hitchhiker’s Guide differs dramatically from previous roles, not simply because it takes place in outer space. “It was different,” she says. “We had a lot more time and it was a different type of comedy, for sure, from Eulogy. And [Kate] is very different from Trillian, who’s like a genius. It was fun to play that.”

In the meantime, Deschanel hopes that Eulogy’s appeal on DVD will lie in its multi-ethnic appeal. “Every family has problems,” she suggests. “If you blow them up, you can kind of see how it relates to something like the family in Eulogy.”

And for her part, it was especially refreshing to play the sane member of a kooky clan, since she’s done so infrequently in all of those other previous dysfunctional family films. “I was interested to play someone who was sort of normal because I hadn’t done that before,” she explains. “I thought it would be fun to play the non-dysfunctional one.”

“I mean, I like playing crazy characters too,” she continues with a laugh. “[But] I’m always trying to do stuff I haven’t done before or challenge myself so I’m not resting on my laurels all of the time.”