When Amy Elliott and Elizabeth Donius set out to make World’s Largest, a captivating and very funny documentary about small towns across America that claim to have the world’s largest item (like the world’s largest pecan, for example, in Missouri), they were driven to make the film because of their mutual love for kitschy roadside attractions.

Usually displayed on the sides of major highways, “world’s largest” structures proudly tout a town’s claim to fame – World’s Largest features footage of the world’s largest African killer bee, lemon and buffalo statues, just to name a few. But as the filmmakers, who have been friends since middle school, started interviewing small-town mayors and proud Chamber of Commerce members, they realized a common thread among small towns across America: the nagging sense that small-town life is vanishing and that the idyllic life most small towns used to be able to brag about is eroding.

As they crisscrossed America, off and on, for six years, they came across Soap Lake, Washington, where one unrelenting resident decided the town should host the world’s largest lava lamp in downtown Soap Lake; the filmmakers managed to capture that alternately delightful and frustrating process as the town struggles with its identity and whether the world’s largest lava lamp is something anyone would ever travel to Soap Lake to see.

Elliott and Donius have stopped traveling for now, as they get ready to screen the film at SXSW. They answered a few of our questions recently.

SXSW: First of all, how did this idea even occur to you all?

Elliott: I’m a freelance photographer and I’ve always been a roadside attraction fan. During assignments across the country, we were brainstorming for our next project and we thought about how it would be great to stay longer in these places and see what’s really going on.

src="/sites/sxsw.com/files/worldslargest1.jpg" width="270" alt="worldslargest1.jpg" />Donius: I think the movie evolved over time, too – when we started, we didn’t have a really strong picture of what the movie was going to be. We were taking this thing we liked to do and finding the movie as we went along.

SXSW: How did you all split up the directing duties?

Donius: Amy’s our cinematographer because she’s a great shooter and she edited the whole movie. When we shoot, Amy’s shooting and I handle the hand shaking and the nodding with the people we’re interviewing. Amy’s got that camera glued to her face and we stick close together so we can keep everything moving. We’ve always worked as a two-person team that way

Elliott: We’ve been friends since middle school and it was really like we went on a road trip – one that lasted years and years. But we were invited by a lot of these mayors and Chamber of Commerce reps and we let it grow organically. It was a real adventure.

Donius: We’d shoot the first day and then we’d talk about the shoot – about what we got, about what we didn’t get, about what was eating at us – and the old friend thing worked there too because we would go back to the hotel and talk late into the night and we would crack the nut of each place and then on the way home, we’d talk about how it fit in with the other towns.

SXSW: Are you all from small towns originally?

Elliott: Nope, we’re from suburban New York.

SXSW: The movie is really funny, but the point you’re making is pretty serious, that America’s small towns are in trouble and vanishing. How did you get interested in that topic?

Elliott: That evolved over the course of the shoot. People were all saying the same things about their peril and their fears of the future and it really happened for us going there. It was not what we started with.

Donius: We weren’t small town people. Vaguely, we knew [vanishing small towns] was a reality but we would kind of know what they were going to say when we arrived, because the parallels were all there.

Elliott: They all had a similar thing to say – “we built our community around this thing, this economic engine that sustained us, and now we have this tribute to it, this statue, and we’re trying to figure out what’s next” – and it was what they all had in common.

Donius: We wanted to present what we found, in first-person accounts with an open eye. For the most part, [the statues] aren’t helping them economically so we really wanted to present what we found and present it as critically as we found it when we went. So if somebody said something we didn’t 100% buy, we allow the audience to interpret it. We didn’t want [the film] to be a booster for tourism because the issue is deeper. And the people in the film see a lot of humor in their statues, at the very least.

SXSW: What was the production like – you must have been traveling forever. Did you shoot all the different locations?

Elliott: Six years, but who’s counting. It was a long time. It was a lot of travel. The whole point was not to take a photo of the statue and just leave. The Soap Lake story took four years to cover. And the editing took a really long time because we had so much footage.

SXSW: It seems like Minnesota has a lot of small towns that have the world’s largest something or other…

Elliott: Over a third of the statues are in Minnesota. We’d done a lot of research before we went but we would show up in a town, and they would say, “Did you know about the statue” in some other town. It was almost like every town has one.

Donius: Everyone had a lot of theories: Everybody’s inside all winter and they want to come outside and build and some people said it’s a Plains state so they need something big to notice on the Plains.

Elliott: Nothing really explains it!

Donius: North Dakota had a lot too.

SXSW: What’s next for you all?

Elliott: We went to a Catholic all girls school – that’s where we met – so we have a new project tentatively titled American Nun, about working nuns in this country.

Donius: We like working together; we know what the other one’s thinking.

Interview by Claiborne Smith