ELLEN PAGE AND JASON REITMAN: Happy couple

FOR a salty comedy about a pregnant teen, “Juno” enjoyed a painless birth.

“It was a perfect shoot,” says director Jason Reitman in a room at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, still buzzing with energy from the Oscar nominees’ luncheon he’d just attended downstairs. “We needed snow to shoot winter, and out of nowhere -- this never happens in Vancouver in the middle of March -- it just dumped snow for a day. This is a film that has just been blessed from moment one all the way until now. We’re sitting in a hotel, having received all of these Oscar nominations -- we’ve just been very, very fortunate.”

Reitman and his star, Ellen Page, two formally dressed nominees, get cozy on the couch. Page clings to his arm affectionately when not threatening to put gum in his hair. It’s a love fest from the start, Page declaring, “He’s naturally funny, but he also has an enormous heart. I had some of the best moments I’ve ever had with a director with this guy.”

When the two met, though, neither had the job for “Juno” and Page was emaciated from playing a torture victim in the as-yet-unreleased “An American Crime.” Yet from seeing her in the disturbing thriller “Hard Candy,” Reitman was convinced she was the one.

“The trick to doing smart comedy is the ability to turn on a dime,” he says. “Comedy requires agility. And ‘Hard Candy’ was just as rough as it was funny. I thought, ‘Wow! This girl’s amazing!’ Everyone who sees that movie notices how brilliant she is.”

Page rolls her eyes, then says after seeing Reitman’s first film, “Thank You for Smoking,” she wanted to meet him, unrelated to “Juno,” which she had read and loved.

Shortly after the meeting was set up, she learned Reitman was onboard to direct “Juno,” she says, “and I was like, ‘Omigod, omigod, omigod -- the stars are aligning!’ ” she says, making them both laugh.

Director and star clearly bonded during the project but perhaps their link went beyond the normal . . . into the paranormal?

“We’d do a take and I’d go, ‘You know what would be great, is if Ellen on the next one instead did it this way.’ And I wouldn’t say anything to Ellen, and then she would do it, I swear to God,” Reitman says. “Either we were connected telepathically, or she was just so good. . . . Freaky.”

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-- Michael Ordona