Smile was an interesting film for Robert Salerno, a legendary producer whose work encompasses some of the most distinct and bold cinema of this century so far (We Need to Talk About Kevin, A Single Man, Nocturnal Animals, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, 21 Grams, Arbitrage). Unlike the acclaimed directors behind those films (Irritu, Kaufman, Ford, Ramsay, Jarecki), Parker Finn's Smile was his feature directorial debut.