In an era where female filmmakers are close to getting their due (there’s still a long, long way to go), one director who deserves more accolades and praise is Marielle Heller. The former actor has helmed three impressive features so far, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” (one of the best films of the decade), “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (which landed Melissa McCarthy and Ricard E. Grant Oscar nominations) and, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” which somehow survived the onslaught of “Frozen II” at the box office this past weekend. And if you’re looking for a respite from over-hyped blockbusters this holiday season, “Neighborhood” is one of your best options at the local multiplex.
READ MORE: Tom Hanks in “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” [Review]
Of course, “Neighborhood” isn’t just a Mr. Rogers movie. While the iconic American children’s television personality (played wonderfully by Tom Hanks) is a major part of the film, the storyline is primarily centered on the internal conflicts of Lloyd Vogel, a jaded magazine writer (Matthew Rhys) forced to interview Rogers for a feature story by an editor (Christine Lahti) who is losing patience with his unprofessional antics. Vogel’s assignment coincides with his estranged father (Chris Cooper) trying desperately to make amends with him. It’s partially based on the experiences of journalist Tom Junod who wrote about his experience interviewing Rogers for a 1998 Esquire profile. The script has some issues, but Heller’s inspired direction and Hanks’ performance find a way to transcend the bumps in the road. And, again, it somehow still feels like she’s not getting enough credit for it.
Heller jumped on the phone earlier this month to talk in detail about making “Neighborhood” and the reactions she got along the way.
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The Playlist: What made you want to jump down the road of taking this project?
Marielle Heller: It’s hard to pinpoint what it was exactly except for that when I read Noah [Harpster] and Micah [Fitzerman-Blue’s] script, which I just found to be so beautiful, and I cried through huge parts of it, I somehow felt like I had to make this movie. [That’s sort of the], I don’t know, the parameter I use for whatever movie I want to make: Does it feel like I have to make it? And this was one I felt like I had to make. I’m a mom, I have a little kid. I’ve been thinking a lot about how do we raise kind people in this world? How do we be the people we want to be, how do we reach for our better selves? And Mister Rogers just felt like this guiding force that I wanted to be surrounded by and wanted to try to understand.
Has your kid watched the old episodes of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”? Does it still hold up?
Definitely. There’s also a modern-day incarnation called “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” which the Fred Rogers Company makes based on the teachings of Fred Rogers, which is an animated story that has similar episodes. They use a lot of the same music that they change a little bit, but that was the first show I let my kid watch. It’s so sweet. It’s just the greatest show for kids, especially in the kind of like two to three-year-old range. And then so once we knew “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” we went back and started watching “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” We had many a snow day home from school where my kid was there while I was doing my research and watching episodes and then was on set with me a lot too, giving advice to Tom Hanks and stuff about what he should do with his Mister Rogers.
Going back and watching those episodes of “Mr. Rogers” as an adult was there anything that popped to you? That you realized you had to sort of bring to the forefront in the movie?
All of it spoke to me as an adult in a totally different way. I mean, I remember like many of us, I grew up watching a show and I also remember sort of outgrowing the show. I remember becoming too jaded for the show, or thinking it was for babies, or thinking it was somehow slow and boring, or not for me. And…
It wasn’t cool enough.
It wasn’t cool enough. And Fred knew that that happened. He knew that part of a kid’s relationship with the show was that they were going to reject it at a certain point. And he was okay with that. But I think seeing it as a parent through the eyes of being a parent is a totally different thing. Cause I recognize how rarely I feel like people actually listen to kids. How rarely when we talk to kids do we actually give them the time they need to answer. We tend to do this thing where we ask our kid a question, “How was school today? Was it fun? Did you have a good time? Where’d you eat lunch?” And we almost always start to answer the question for them before they’ve even had time to process. And I see people, grown-ups doing that to my kid constantly. Not giving him time to process what he wants to say or how he wants to respond. Fred just listened in a very intentional way and gave space and time for kids and the way their brains process, and it was so telling to me and so meaningful. And it’s a lesson we need in our daily lives with each other as adults as well. It’s not just what we need in order to how to connect to children, but how do we connect to each other? How do we be present in our lives? How do we listen in a real way? I mean it’s these concepts that Fred was so masterful at teaching to kids are things that a lot of us need as adults. How do we cope with really difficult things like death? How do we cope with fear? How do we cope with all of these things? I mean, these are not lessons that are just for kids. The more I got to learn and know about him, the more I felt like I was benefiting as a person.
The probably would not work without someone amazing as Mr. Rogers. I remember hearing very early on people saying, “Oh, Tom Hanks would have to play him.” Was he attached when you came on board?
No, he wasn’t.
Did it take convincing? Was it one of those things where he thought, “Hey, everyone thinks I think I should do this so maybe I shouldn’t?”
I think it was different for him, it was more about he didn’t know what the purpose of making the movie was based [on]. I’ve now told this story a bunch, but I’m friends with his son and we met at his grandkids’ birthday party, I believe, in the backyard. And it was one of those kinds of conversations where he was like, “Oh, what do you do?” and I was like, “I’m a director.” And he said, “Oh, well I was just reading this article in the New York Times about women directors” and I said, “Oh, yeah, I’m in that article.” And he went, “Oh, you are? Who are you? What did you direct?” And then I said, “Well, I made this movie called ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl.”‘ And he said, “Well, I should watch it.” And because Tom Hanks actually lives up to his word, he did. A week later I got a call that he wanted to have a meeting with me. So, we had developed a bit of a relationship and he kept up with me over the years as I made my second movie, we just kind of kept in touch looking for things we could possibly work together on. When I came to him with this movie, I came to him saying, “Listen, I’m not interested in a biopic. I don’t want to see you do an impression of Mister Rogers. For me, this is a character piece. It’s a real piece of cinema. I think it has a chance to be something that could mean a lot to a lot of people. You know, Fred is more than meets the eye. There’s something incredibly subversive about him. He really was ahead of his time. He was, you know, guiding the way when it came to kind of child psychology, and he was not afraid. We kind of can look back on him and think of him as sort of hokey or goody-two-shoes or something. And the truth is, he was not shying away from the darkest subject matters. He was going deep with kids and telling the truth.”
For me, this movie was never going to be a cradle to grave biopic. In fact, Mister Rogers isn’t even the protagonist. He’s actually the antagonist. And so Tom went and read the script sort of with that all in mind and signed on right away. But the truth is, you know, you still don’t know that it will work. Even if everyone says like, “ah, Tom Hanks is a pretty good Mister Rogers,” I mean it’s still pretty scary. It’s like you have to buy into a lot. We knew that when it’s somebody who’s as well known and well-loved as Tom Hanks, it can be hard for them to disappear into a character for people. So, it was really important that the performance felt incredibly effortless and present, and that you weren’t watching the work being done. And that that effortlessness takes a lot of effort, actually.
One of the things I love about it is the pacing is very true to the show itself, it’s not rushed.
Yeah, I mean Fred had his own specific concept for his show, which was that he only did two cuts per minute because that’s what children’s brains could handle. He didn’t totally stick with it but was pretty consistent. And we looked at that a lot in terms of how we wanted to shoot the movie and that a lot of the pacing of the movie was about listening and sitting in silence and letting moments hang in the air. And part of what Fred did so famously was he would, you know, be getting interviewed by somebody and he would kind of deftly turn the interview around on the other person and suddenly they were talking about their childhood and crying. But the way he did that often was sort of using silence, asking questions and then just sitting and waiting for you to respond however long it took. And that sort of became our guiding force for how we were going to make the movie, which was, we were going to try to capture this really potent silence between these people. And that meant rehearsing the scenes a lot between the actors and getting a real specific rhythm between them so that we could let shots sit and be really strategic about the way we filmed things.
So, to that point, you also have to recreate the show itself and in a way that doesn’t seem too referential, but also like you want to be as referential as you can. Is it a reach to think it even was hard?
It was incredibly hard, actually. I mean, not only did we have to build the set meticulously exactly as they did, which meant finding out of print fabrics that haven’t been in existence for years, and all of those things, which just took months and months to recreate meticulously, but then we started testing early on whether we could recreate the video look of the show digitally or whether we were going to need to use the exact cameras they used to film the original program. We figured out pretty quickly that we couldn’t fake it, that trying to take an Alexa and film it the way we would now and then use the VFX team to turn it into that kind of video? It was never going to feel right. And so Jody Lee Lipes, our cinematographer, and I became convinced that we had to get these Ikegami tube cameras and film it the way they filmed the original show, with these big pedestal cameras. The original cameras from the show were donated to a high school in Pittsburgh. It turned out that high school had been demolished and the cameras had been demolished along with the school.
Oh, no.
The only working cameras we could find were in England. We brought them out to Pittsburgh along with a team of people who knew how to operate them. They were technically pretty problematic, but worth it. We filmed the original show on these tube cameras, and there’s a feel and a look to it that you just can’t fake. It makes your heart leap out into your throat, you know, when you see it. Cause it makes you feel like you’ve gone back in time to your childhood. It just feels real.
When you said they were problematic was it just because they were so old they’d stop working in the middle of a shot or something?
Oh, yeah. We were also doing live feeds. A lot of the way we would end up filming the neighborhood is we would have these real old pedestal Ikegamis, which were filming the show and then we would be piping it into the monitors and we would have the actors sitting in watching playback as it was being filmed. We were trying to do that all practical and live. So, not only did we need the cameras to work and be capturing what they were seeing, we then would have our Alexas pulled back, recording people watching those cameras recording it and watching it being played back into monitors if that makes sense. So we had multiple formats happening all at the same time.
When your friends and family heard that you were making a movie about Mister Rogers what was their reaction?
The number one reaction I got from everyone was, “Oh God, is there something terrible? Tell me. Oh no, I don’t want to know.” [Laughs.] So, that line that Susan Kelechi Watson‘s character has in the movie where she goes, “Oh God, please don’t ruin my childhood”? We were like, “We have to have this line in the movie.” Because it’s what everybody is saying to us. That was just the overwhelming sentiment. And I felt like I needed to have a tee-shirt made that said, “I’m making a movie about Mister Rogers. Don’t worry, he was good.” Even when we went to England recently with the movie, they don’t really know Mister Rogers there, and there were a lot of people who were like, as the movie started, were still thinking it was going to somehow reveal some deep, dark, horrible secret about Mister Rogers. And people were totally freaked out about it.
Like did they not see the poster? It’s like, it’s not a…
I know. I know.
Did the success of the documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” which I came out the summer while you must’ve been prepping for this, did that give you any sort of sense of like, “O.K., we are making something that people aren’t going to care about.” Did that give you confidence at all?
There were a few moments when we realized we were on a path that people cared about. There was a moment when the documentary came out and it did so well. And we were like, “Whoa, O.K.” And then there was a moment when we released the picture of Tom as Fred Rogers and it like, broke the internet a little bit, for the day. And we went, “Oh man, people are actually really excited about this.” And then you try to tune that out. Cause if you worry too much about that, how do you do your work and try to make a good movie? You can’t worry about pleasing people, you know?
“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is now playing nationwide.