Fresh off its world premiere at the Berlinale in February and its North American premiere at the Hudson Film Festival earlier this month, Rebecca Miller‘s “She Came To Me” arrives in theaters in September. And for Miller’s first narrative feature in eight years, she crafts a tale about every artist’s worst nightmare: a creative block and the unlikely sources one needs to disentangle from it.
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“She Came To Me” stars Peter Dinklage as opera composer Steven Lauddem, who suffers the first major writer’s block of his career just weeks before the deadline of his latest commission, a big comeback opera. As his therapist wife Patricia, played by Anne Hathaway, deals with her own crisis, he finds inspiration in an unlikely source: Marisa Tomei‘s Brooklyn-based tugboat captain. Joanna Kulig, Brian d’Arcy James, Harlow Jane, and Evan Ellison also star.
Miller used her personal experience with creative blocks as she wrote the screenplay for “She Came To Me.” “The Block is the great fear, right under death itself, for people who harvest their imaginations for a living,” she told EW. “I myself was totally blocked for about a year, and the feeling was a like claustrophobia, a kind of existential panic. I volunteered at a women’s shelter in Ireland and somehow that unblocked me and led to “Personal Velocity” [Miller’s 2002 film]. Maybe because I was paying attention to other people and not staring inside my own head. I also remember my father [playwright Arthur Miller] going through the agonies of trying to find a subject or a character and getting inside it — ‘Waiting for the lighting to strike,’ as he called it.”
And Miller’s father wasn’t the only family member she used as inspiration for her new film. She also cites her son’s musical ambitions for Dinklage’s character. “My youngest son is studying to be a composer and we discovered opera together,” Miller said. “To be honest, I had never liked opera much but we went to the Met and started with “La Bohème,” which is a great first opera — so emotional, with gorgeous music — and I was converted right there. Then we started going to more challenging operas, and newer operas. And I started wondering what it was like to be a composer of new operas.” But Miller also wanted Dinklage’s Lauddem to act like a real composer, too. “As a director, I was obsessed with the idea that the character Steven Lauddem’s behavior in the film be authentic,” the director continued. “And that real composers could watch the film and believe it, even as much of the film has an absurd quality.”
Another interesting tidbit: “She Came To Me” features a new original song from Bruce Springsteen. Miller, who got permission from Springsteen to use the musician’s “Dancing In The Dark” for her 2015 film, “Maggie’s Plan,” sent him a copy of her latest film to see if he’d comply. Springsteen and his wife watched it, and loved the film so much he agreed to write his first song in a long time. “It’s a song that seems like it could have existed forever, right out of the American Songbook,” Miller said about the original song, “Addicted To Romance.” “And the really extraordinary thing is, Bruce told me he hadn’t written in over a year, but the film inspired him to do so, parallel to the way Steven is unblocked in the movie. Again, the mysteries of creativity, and how we are all creating each other, day by day.”
So will audiences connect with those creative mysteries like Springsteen did when “She Came To Me” hits theaters? Find out when Miller’s latest arrives in theaters everywhere on September 29. Watch a trailer for the film below.
