Streisand, Rogen take a 'Guilt Trip' in a Chevy Aveo

You'd think that with all the automakers falling over directors to cast their cars in their movies, picking out the perfect model would be easy.

Not so. Anne Fletcher, director of the Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen road-trip movie The Guilt Trip, was able to winnow down the choices right from the start: She knew she wanted an American car ("I'm an American girl from Detroit") so she started scouting for a possible car.

"I saw hundreds of them," she says.

But she soon discovered the problem with using a car in Hollywood movies is that they generally come with strings attached.

The complication involved the jokes that were planned for the movie about the car's navigation system.

Ford, for instance, wanted Fletcher to promote its new GPS navigation system, not make jokes about it. Besides, the built-in unit just wasn't going to work for the movie.

"The joke for us was that it was the rental GPS. It sits on the dash, it can fall off, it can mess up," says Fletcher. "That's what we wanted. But Ford wanted us to highlight their new system. We needed to have a little bit more freedom."

Rival Chevrolet presented a good possibility. The new Chevy Sonic offered the comic prospects of having Rogen and Streisand stuck in a tiny car for road trip.

"I thought, 'That is our car'. We started taking pictures," says Fletcher. "We called Chevy. They said the Sonic is not out yet. You you can have the Aveo."

The Aveo is almost as small, but it was being discontinued to make way for Sonic. That fact that Aveo was on its way to demise gave Fletcher total artistic freedom, since GM executives figured they didn't have anything to lose. In the movie, Streisand and Rogen's characters even manage to squeeze a hitchhiker in the back.

"They said, 'Do whatever you want with it,' " says Fletcher. "Normally, there was stipulations. They were like, 'Have fun with it'. That, to me, was a gift."