Xtreme Vogue London Desk: Sarah Marshal
If you ask Rebecca Miller, it’s getting harder and harder to make movies about people in a room talking
That particular brand of intimate, personal storytelling, the kind the director of ‘Maggie’s Plan’ and ‘The Private Lives of Pippa Lee’ is known for, is a challenging prospect for financiers weighing up a Darwinian landscape for cinemagoing.
It’s why Miller’s latest, ‘She Came To Me’, which opens the Berlin Film Festival on Thursday, feels like a triumph for the American director (who’s also the playwright Arthur Miller’s daughter), who marks her return to narrative features after an eight-year hiatus,
“Making a movie like this is actually meaningful for independent cinema — it’s meaningful that we got it made,” Miller said, “Every time that happens, it’s a real victory, because it is very difficult … it’s hard to get personal films made.”
There’s plenty that’s unusual in ‘She Came To Me’ — albeit in all the best ways. The romantic comedy-drama stars Peter Dinklage as Steven, a moody classical composer struggling with an oppressive writer’s block that prevents him from delivering his next opera.
Despite endless encouragement from his evangelical therapist wife (Anne Hathaway), it takes a bizarre and slightly traumatic encounter with an eccentric tugboat captain (Marisa Tomei) to snap him out of his creative torpor. But just as Steven makes his long-awaited comeback, his personal life implodes’.
The project is Miller’s seventh directorial effort, and follows her 2017 documentary ‘Arthur Miller: Writer’, about her late father, the ‘Death of a Salesman’ playwright.
Her last narrative feature was 2015’s ‘Maggie’s Plan’, a cute rom-com-gone-wrong in which Greta Gerwig’s “other woman” tries to return her lover (Ethan Hawke) to his ex-wife (Julianne Moore).
