[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. On a quiet block in Brooklyn Heights inside an elegant townhouse, there's an emotional storm brewing. A creatively blocked composer is anxious. His high-strung therapist wife is likely cleaning something, and a wise teenage boy is in the thralls of his first love. Add to the mix, a chance encounter with a formidable and sensual tugboat operator named Katrina, and you have the makings of a romance, laced with comedy, or a comedy that is romantic. It's the latest film from writer and director, Rebecca Miller, and it's called She Came to Me.

It stars Peter Dinklage as the opera-challenged writer, Anne Hathaway plays his former shrink now wife, and Marisa Tomei charms as the rugged on the outside, tender on the inside seafair, who admits to having an addiction to romance, as in she's been to rehab for the addiction. She helps the composer unlock his creativity, but this leads to complications in his family life, which is already really complicated. Complicated like Steven's biracial stepson is experiencing his first love with the daughter of their housekeeper, who is married to a power-hungry civil war enthusiast, who is hellbent on making life difficult for the young lovers.

The New York Times described the film as full of "expert performances of it's all in ensemble." Now we can add to that some modern opera from Bryce Dessner of the National and an original song from Bruce Springsteen. It's an eclectic movie experience in the best way. She Came to Me open the Berlin Film Festival in February of this year and is now in theaters and Rebecca Miller joins us today. Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca Miller: Hello.

Alison Stewart: This started out of one of your short stories, correct?

Rebecca Miller: Yes. She Came to Me is a short story in a collection called Total, which I came out with recently, but I wrote the story quite some time ago when I was living in Ireland. It was a novelist originally and then I turned him into an opera composer because I'd started doing more opera with my kid, my son was interested in opera, and I became really interested in opera. Then I just thought it's more interesting to see somebody creating an opera than typing.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Two-part question. What interests you as a writer about opera, and then what just interests you as someone who enjoys music about opera?

Rebecca Miller: Opera is just-- I think I got interested in it because it's so emotionally free and also formally free and you're not really confined by various requirements of normal storytelling. You can really let go and go straight for the emotion, straight for the jugular. I love that. Also visually, it's so interesting sometimes. It can be design-wise really fascinating. I thought, "Oh my God, how great to have operas in my film?" Then we ended up with two operas in the film, two original operas.

Alison Stewart: I'd love it. Also, I believe Alicia Hall Moran a friend of the show is in the movie as well, singing one of the final operas. That was pretty exciting.

Rebecca Miller: Oh, my God. She has more charisma than really everybody combined in the whole world. She's an amazing performer.

Alison Stewart: I know we're not going to give anything away. We're going to do our best, but so many of the storylines here intersect. As a writer, how did you keep track of who meets who, when, how do they meet? Was that all already in your mind or did you have to work that through?

Rebecca Miller: No, that was the hard part. I always knew that the two kids in their romance was always somewhere in my mind. What Julian says to Teresa, which is like, "We could break up, which would be normal for first-love people, but all my life, I'm going to wonder where you are. No matter what I'm doing, I'm going to remember where you are." I just thought, "That's a beautiful thing to say" and I backed into that in a way. That was even way before I wrote She Came to Me.

I had that story strand and I had She Came to Me story stranded, the blocked person being revolutionized by another person internally. Then I started to think, "How can I create this braided structure?" The third part of the braid was the Patricia character who's a psychiatrist who has this secret metaphysical desires and that character really, I don't know where she came from. I am personally very interested in modern-day mystics and anything that goes against our cultural grain because I feel like the movie, in various ways, is a little against what our culture generally is. She felt very counter-cultural to me.

Alison Stewart: We meet Steven, Peter Dinklage's character at a moment in his life when he's blocked creatively, but he also seems really indecisive in this moment. Why is he so stymied by everything?

Rebecca Miller: I definitely have known some men like this probably more earlier in my life, but still are really close friends who can't decide anything. I remember actually, there was one other inspiration, which the cartoonist Saul Steinberg, whom I knew when I was a little girl, used to talk about how he would leave the house and he would look left and think that if he went down the block that way, he could be hit on the head by a brick. If then he looked to the right and think, "If I go that way, maybe a crane's going to fall over" [laughs] because he was such a pessimist. That was part of the inspiration for him standing there not knowing which way to go and asking the dog.

Alison Stewart: Oh, well, let's play actually this clip. This is a great clip where we see the dynamic between Peter Dinklage's character Steven, the blocked composer, and his very precise therapist wife. She just is like, "You have to get out of the house. You have to leave." Let's take a listen. This is from She Came to Me.

Patricia: Do you know what you need?

Steven: A librettist.

Patricia: You need to take a walk.

Steven: Doc, I walked around 15 minutes.

Patricia: I don't mean around the block. You need to get lost, Steven.

Steven: I hate getting lost.

Patricia: Okay, well, I don't mean get lost. I mean meander. You need to jolt your brain out of its little rut pattern. Interact with a stranger. All right?

Steven: I don't like strangers.

Patricia: [whistles] Come on. Come on, boy. I know what I'm doing. All right.

Steven: Well, how about I wait and then you can come listen.

Patricia: Good boy. Oh, if I come, I'll make all the decisions. Good boy. If you feel like turning left, you can turn left. If you feel like turning right, you turn right. I will be here with my phone on in case if an emergency and it's good. You need this. Have fun. [unintelligible 00:07:03] He wants to go. Go on. Go on. Good boy. Good boy. There you go. Okay. Bye.

Alison Stewart: That's from She Came to Me. My guest is writer and director Rebecca Miller. There's so many things that we can find. There's so many layers to that. The first is he calls her doc and it's just dropped in there that he has married his former psychiatrist. What does this detail tell us about them?

Rebecca Miller: Well, yes.

Alison Stewart: Then he calls her doc still.

Rebecca Miller: [laughs] Yes. That was actually Peter's contribution I have to say. They fell in love while he was recovering from the nervous breakdown that came upon him after his last opera. He's a very sensitive guy. He's fragile and they did the thing that you're not supposed to do, which is fall in love with each other actually and create a romance, and start again. Although people sometimes do do that. There is troublesome-- She's always taking care of him in relationship and she's also managing him all the time and controlling him to a degree as well. She messes up because she controls him and tells him to get lost and he does get lost. Part of the theme of the whole movie, of course, is that sometimes people need to get lost and we don't do that enough.

Alison Stewart: The other thing which people can't see is as she's handing the dog leash, she clearly loves the dog, but she's holding the dog leash with Kleenex. She does not want to touch the dog leash. Cleanliness is next to, or perhaps godliness for her as we discover in this film. Why is the cleanliness part of this so important to this character, Patricia?

Rebecca Miller: Like she said, it's like more than just neatness, it's spiritual cleanliness. I think she's looking for a deeper cleanliness. She's looking to clean her soul out, but the best she can do is using various very holistic cleaning products all over the house. I think sometimes we live in such a secular world, a lot of us, and there are those who have spiritual yearnings but they have nowhere to go. I think that there are refracted into various activities, including cleaning for her, which is her way-- She says at one point, she's a therapist, "Well, sometimes with my patients, I'm imagining getting into their heads with a big bottle of disinfectant and really scrubbing them down." Cleaning is very big for her.

Alison Stewart: Sometimes it's almost comically so, this obsession. She Keeps the house clean yet she has this very competent house cleaner and they start to connect the spirituality with the cleaning. Let's listen to this clip where this character, Patricia refers to this connection. This is from, She Came to Me.

Patricia: My mother was Catholic, my father was Jewish. I was confirmed and I went to Catholic boarding school. I used to love peeking into the sister's cells. Talk about no clutter. It's funny. For me, the whole no-clutter thing, it's more than just neatness. It's like a spiritual cleanliness. Cleanliness is close to godliness so I love cleaning. Sometimes when my patients are talking, I imagine getting inside their heads with a really big bottle of disinfectant and just scrubbing them down. Can I leave this here for you?

Magdalena: Yes.

Patricia: All right. I have a patient. Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Oh, she had to cancel. Let's clean together.

[music]

Alison Stewart: That's what she's so joyous about, let's clean together. What is something that Anne Hathaway brought to this character?

Rebecca Miller: Oh, so much. Partly, she was younger than I had originally written the character so I rewrote it so that she got pregnant in medical school which was interesting because there's all sorts of things that follow with that. It actually was great for her character because somebody who would get pregnant and have a baby and still stay in medical school and get through it all is somebody who's intensely organized, but really up for a lot of pain exhaustion. It really intensified that idea that she's somebody who's trying to get everything right for herself but mostly for everybody else.

She had all sorts of things. The idea of the Kleenex folding the dog leash was Anne's idea. She had a little cleaning coat. My grandmother actually used to cook with a lab coat on because she had been a scientist. I told that to Anne and she comes, "Oh, that's such a great idea." She had this white cleaning coat with magnets to be able to come on and off quickly. She had all sorts of thoughts and ideas, very detailed. She's very detailed and very physical actor actually.

Alison Stewart: The other thing that happened in the clip before when Patricia's talking to Steven is says, "You might run into somebody," and he says, "I don't want to talk to strangers." That is exactly what happens and it's this encounter that truly changes his life. He runs into this lady who's a tugboat captain, played by Marissa Tomei. What does she give him that he didn't know he needed?

Rebecca Miller: It's interesting because I think she gives him freedom from this life that he is leading to some degree. Not just to do with Patricia, but to do with the very fancy openings and fundraisers and the life of a so-called successful artist which is really killing him. She introduces him into this atmosphere which is completely different from his own world. She is a person who actually does something concretely useful. I think that that's a very important part of the equation. As she points out, whatever you touch has been probably on a barge and has been pushed by a tugboat.

She is both a practical person but there's ways in which she also has a magic quality about her even though she's very real. Like the way that it's shot in the movie, you can't see her in the beginning. She doesn't seem to be there at all and then she appears. Of course, she could have also just been in the corner lurking but on the other hand, there's also a way in which he almost conjures her. She's a little bit of a magical figure in a sense. She ushers you into the tugboat in which everything is subtly handheld and that also gives you this feeling of looseness and potential.

Alison Stewart: Also New Yorkers will love this film. We get to see a lot of New York City. What is the challenge of shooting an indie film in New York City?

Rebecca Miller: The challenges are tremendous because just moving a company in New York is very hard. We had a great assistant director who scheduled everything so beautifully which is very important. I think one great challenge was actually shooting inside tugboats, which are tiny. This was a working tugboat. We had a certain amount of time and that was it and then they had to go and actually push something or pull something. We also had-- It was COVID time, so people were getting COVID left and right including our cast, including our crew.

It was very hard but it was also very wonderful because really I think the film map set is almost miraculous places where you show how human beings could actually work together and attempt and achieve the impossible. When I saw what we were doing on open water in that tugboat and then on the opera stages, I just thought, "Wow, for me, that's very optimistic to look at that and see how it works."

Alison Stewart: My guest is Rebecca Miller, she's the writer and director of She Came to Me. The film is now in theaters. Bryce Dessner from the National came aboard this project, how did you connect with him? Why was he the right person to help write the music?

Rebecca Miller: [unintelligible 00:15:29] who's an iconic pianist based in France. He was a friend of mine. My husband said, she said, "Of all people, I think Bryce Dessner is the person to work on this," because he had already composed some piano concertos for her and his sister to do. He had also done opera. Of course, he had done film scores and he was in the National.

It was like this very unique talent that he has and this very unique connection to real classical music because I wanted it not to be a fake or a pastiche. I wanted it to be the real thing so that you really believe. I think that even if we don't know the actual art that much, we don't actually know much about contemporary opera, you can feel it when somebody is doing an imitation, I think. This is the real thing.

Alison Stewart: I love that there's a Bruce Springsteen song in this. What I love about [unintelligible 00:16:16] Bruce Springsteen's song is that it's hopeful what you did, you just asked.

Rebecca Miller: I feel like that should be the motto of our whole company is it doesn't hurt to ask. I always ask. The worst thing that can happen is they say no and the truth is that people, no matter how fancy they are, they want to do good work, and they want to have interesting opportunities.

Alison Stewart: In the film, there is a teen romance, and in many ways, they're the most mature romance in the film. [laughs] These two, what grounds them? What keeps-- They seem like the grounded pair.

Rebecca Miller: Part of it is that they're really very invested in finding practical solutions to human problems like engine design, green energy. They're really very involved with how to save the world really through engineering. They're very practical people in a way. They're deeply in love with each other and we're really at the beginnings of their romance of sorts, but they are wiser than the adults and more mature in a lot of ways.

Also, their innocence is really what gets them through because look, what happens to us all is that we see too many relationships fail and we get to know ourselves as mess-ups and then after a while, we start to become hypocrites a little bit and we just become realistic. There's that moment where she says to him that she's worried that they're going to change, that they're going to forget who they are which for me is one of my favorite moments in the film. He says, "We have to keep reminding each other." For me, they're the real hope of the film and there's a beautiful glow about them.

Alison Stewart: Like I said, the film's very funny as well. There's a good deal of sight humor and a good deal of-- There's some sight humor. There's this one moment when Peter Dinklage sinks down into a life preserver as Marissa Tomei's coming onto him. What is key when shooting sight humor? What is something that you've learned or that you do to make sure it lands and isn't cartoony?

Rebecca Miller: The most important ingredient really there is that you cast the right actors who understand sight humor, understand the physicality of humor, and have really good taste inherently in them. Then you give yourself options for shooting it so that very often humor functions well wide, but sometimes you could see their whole bodies but then sometimes just isolating some-- Like him sinking like a little turtle into his life preserver was so funny and he was aware of it.

You really have to collaborate with the actors I think. It's like a dance. You're the choreographer but they're the ones who have to perform the gag in a way. It was a great pleasure to work with people who have such amazing instincts in that way.

Alison Stewart: We're not going to spoil the end but I'll ask you a big-picture essay question. What does the film want to say about family and chosen family?

Rebecca Miller: I think we're all creating each other every day. Whether it's friends, whether it's somebody who works for you. Might be your cleaner that ends up being one of the most important people in your life, your lover, your husband, and so-called family is this thing that's churning all the time that's changing especially in our world. The main thing is that we can't be inspired alone. That doesn't just go for artists, it's for everybody.

Sometimes "getting lost" which people who live such busy lives and are so into like, "Here's my schedule. This is what I'm doing today, and I'm not going to meet any strangers and I'm not going to have any surprises," we're missing a lot. Sometimes getting lost is the best solution to everything.

Alison Stewart: The name of the film is She Came to Me. It is in theaters now. My guest has been its writer and director, Rebecca Miller. Rebecca, thanks for the time today.

Rebecca Miller: Thank you so much. Thank you.

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