Steve Carell’s latest film, Evan Almighty, may be a grand-scale misfire of sorts, but the actor is feeling good about his upcoming slate of projects, including this fall’s Dan in Real Life.

“I thought the script for [the movie] was great and Peter Hedges is a very thoughtful filmmaker,” says Carell at a recent press day. “Pieces of April I thought was fantastic, and he wrote About a Boy and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, so he’s a really accomplished person, and I thought, ‘That’s somebody that I’d love to work with.’ It wasn’t so much, ‘Oh, I want to do a romantic comedy with Juliette Binoche,’ it was more like, ‘Wow, I think that could be good, and really interesting, and I think the script will be really good.'”

“The movie involves a guy who was fairly recently widowed, three or four years before,” continues Carell. “And he’s been raising these three daughters on his own. And they’re reaching a point in their young adult lives, at least two of them, where he doesn’t know what to do. He still has one that’s kind of a baby girl that he can manage, but… one of the themes of the movie is that he kind of doesn’t take his own advice, and kind of lets things get away from him in terms of his own kids.”

“So did I take my own personal experience [into the film]? I don’t know. I don’t know that I even have a personal take or mental manual on how I’m raising kids,” says Carell, himself a father of two. “I think with everyone it’s just day-to-day, and you try to deal with each situation as it comes.” For Carell’s thoughts on Get Smart, meanwhile, click here.