After The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, The Ballad of Jack and Rose or yet again Maggie’s Plan, director and writer Rebecca Miller’s latest movie, She Came To Me, once again dives into a unique, inventive, touching and humorous story about creativity, love, dreams and self-fulfillment. Starring Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei, She Came To Me tells the story of Steven, an opera composer who struggles with writer’s block, and finally gets his inspiration back after having an affair.
In her films, Rebecca Miller likes mixing tones, and She Came to Me does that brilliantly as well: It insn’t just a rom com, and it isn’t just a drama: It gets very serious when it has to be, and you’ll find yourself laughing out loud two seconds after that. While speaking with Rebecca Miller, the director shared with me where the inspiration behind her new movie came from, and what attracts her to writing such nuanced, mixed-tone stories, with characters we most likely have never seen before: ‘’Comedy is really hard. And I do also love drama, and even melodrama, but there’s something about comedy that is difficult. Sometimes, there are more poignant things in life if you look at them in a comic lens, and you can go quite deep. And I loved working with these actors who are so adapted to this tone, which is a very special tone, it’s not flat out comedy, there’s also pathos as well (…) I think I am interested in rhythm, and actually this whole movie is a musical piece, in a way.”
As mentioned before, when watching She Came to Me, you’ll find yourself laughing one second, and feeling deeply anxious and worried about certain characters the very next scene, even wondering if the story is about to take a very dark turn. ‘’When it was serious, it got really serious” said Rebecca Miller. “There’s a movie with Billy Wilder called The Apartment, and when it’s funny, it is funny, but then when it is sad, like, Shirley McLaine’s scenes when she is upset, she is really upset, and it’s really serious what she’s going through. So it was the idea to fully embrace the more serious part of it, and the more comedic part of it, and then to just go for it and trust we can carry it. It’s definitely a high risk to bent tone in that way, but I had done it before, in different films, even in films like The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, which is more of a melodrama, but still, there are those kind of more comical moments. And it takes really great actors too!’’
It does take great actors indeed, and the many performances in this film are remarkable. Anne Hathaway’s character, Patricia, goes through so much unadmitted internal conflicts, that will eventually lead her to a pivotal scene, which is very revealing of how suffocated she was feeling thus far. Throughout the movie, we don’t know what she is repressing exactly, and we always feel like she might explode at any moment, so when she does, it feels as good for her as it is incredibly relieving to watch as a spectator. In She Came To Me, every character is layered, realistic and complex. It really isn’t hard to sympathize and to relate to all of them, and the final shot of the movie really makes you realize that you were actually rooting for every single of one them all along. Sometimes, it just feels great to watch characters achieve their goals and become the person they so desperately wanted to be. A genuinely realistic ‘’happily ever after’’ is sometimes all we need in a movie, when it is crafted as well as Rebecca Miller does it. ‘’Everybody is sort of recapturing their essential life, perhaps even their younger or more pure version of themselves’’ declared the director.
Rebecca Miller comes from a very diverse creative background: She is a painter, a sculpter, a visual artist, a writer and filmmaker. While she mentioned that she probably gets the most fulfilled as a storyteller through filmmaking and writing, Miller also said that just like Steven in She Came To Me, she also once suffered from writer s block: ‘’I once had a terrible writer s block, in the 90s, and I got out of it, by volunteering at a women’s shelter, and sort of forgetting about myself for a while. I was spending so much time thinking ‘What am I thinking ?’ that I just couldn’t think of anything. It was before I had kids and all, I didn’t have much going on, apart from the idea of coming up with stuff. There is something about that in the film as well, it really takes his encounter with someone else and then taking care of someone else, to get him out of it. ‘’
Rebecca Miller said she volunteered at the women shelter for a few months, and ended up writing the first short story of her book ‘’Personal Velocity’’, which ended up becoming a feature film she directed in 2002. ‘’I had left filmmaking at that point, I had decided to just write stories and become a writer, because it was so hard to make money, and it brought me back. So in a funny way, writer s block kind of brought me back to filmmaking, in a strange way.’’
There a multiple love stories in She Came To Me, and one of them include two teenagers who decide to get married, which -without spoiling the movie- is the only realistic way they could stay together. Miller wrote about this relationship in a very tender and yet very practical way. Here, the parents don’t disregard their kid’s feelings, and the two young people seem even braver than their parents, unafraid of going after what will make them happy and safe. Miller said: ‘’I think that’s very true that often times, kids are discounted and actually, it should be the opposite, we should be listening more. I think that young people are every wise and they have an innocence but also a wisdom that you loose a little bit in life, because life makes you understand and learn hypocrisy, and the need for a certain amount of hypocrisy. But these kids are just pure, in a certain way.”
Not only She Came To Me got a star-studded cast, but it even has an original song from Bruce Springsteen himself, called ‘’Addicted to Romance”. Rebecca Miller shared how the song and this collaboration came to life: ‘’It’s actually a beautiful story, I was talking to Bryce Dessner, who composed the incredible score at the opera, and we were thinking of who could write a song, as we didn’t have one. I said ‘It has to be somebody who is ‘Americana’, that would go with Katrina’s character, something timeless. And we said ‘Bruce Springsteen is such a perfect choice for that, but obviously it’s unlikely that he’s gonna write a new song. ‘’
Miller continued: “But I had gotten a song from him, for Maggie’s Plan, he and his wife Patti, had allowed me to use Dancing in the Dark, and I knew him a little bit, and I have a friendship with him. So I just contacted his manager, and I said ‘Look. if I send it, they don’t have to watch it, but if they watch it, and they love it, you never know.’ So I sent it, and they watched it and really loved it, and Bruce and Patti called and said how moved they were about it. And he said ‘Let me see what comes to me’. And then 3 days later, Bruce sent it, he wrote it in bed, like he was just playing his guitar, and he sent this wonderful demo. And Bryce Dessner produced it with him. So the song came to him, a little bit like Steven with his music. It sort of miraculously happened and he was inspired by the film. It feels like a classic, I think it just sort of fell out of him, like it was there, waiting to come out. And I still can’t believe it, I am still pinching myself.”
She Came To Me is now out in theaters.
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