The writer and filmmaker talks about parenting with Daniel Day-Lewis, directing Peter Dinklage and Anne Hathaway in her surreal new romcom, and gathering material in a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting
What do you do with a storyline requiring two US states with different marriage laws, reachable in a single journey without resort to roads? The obvious answer, for a writer as versatile as Rebecca Miller, would be to work it into a novel or short story. But no, it was a film she wanted to make. “I realised that I needed two states on a river where they had different laws. It was like a crazy puzzle that I was trying to figure out,” she says. Her solution was a tugboat which could chug between New York and Delaware. This led to a riot of further possibilities: what if one of the characters was an eccentric female tugboat captain suffering from erotomania, who fixates on a creatively blocked opera composer with a therapist wife who would really rather be a nun?
The result, She Came to Me, which premieres in Berlin on 16 February, is one of the wackiest romcoms ever to lay claim on the genre: an intergenerational story of love overcoming every obstacle that modern domestic life can throw in its path. “When I read it I thought it was a creatively risky, golden-hearted script full of incredibly drawn, nuanced characters – a somewhat rare find. I felt very clearly how much I wanted the film to exist,” says Anne Hathaway, who plays the cleanfreak therapist.
