A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
Marielle Heller follows up the spiky Can You Ever Forgive Me? with a study in empathy, starring Tom Hanks. They tell Total Film about the importance of kindness and the ‘hell’ of filming in their Oscarworthy A Beautiful Day In The Neighbourhood…
Tom Hanks stretches himself playing America’s most likeable man.
There’s an awkward silence as the usually stoic Chris Cooper weeps, mid-interview, at the Toronto International Film Festival. Wiping aways tears, his voice cracks as he tries to describe the sometimes cruel father he plays in his latest film. That unease, as Total Film and his colleagues wait for him to finish his sentence, is not born of pity or fontrum. It’s that this sort of vulnerability and emotional connection is not something we, as a society – overloaded as it is with bullying
heads of state, trolls, a disgust for weakness and the hard edge of self-preservation – are comfortable with. And it’s that lack of empathy, humanity and kindness in today’s world that makes Cooper’s movie seem all the more necessary now.
Inspired by Esquire writer Tom Junod’s 1998 cover feature, ‘Can You Say… Hero?’ – a profile of Fred Rogers, the presenter of the 1968-2001 PBS kids’ show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, that also ended up being a treatise on modern masculinity, tapping into a jaded generation’s need for decency and wonder – screenwriters Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster began to look at adapting it for a film. Gaining the trust of Rogers’ family and co-workers, they uncovered thousands of emails that he and Junod had exchanged during the friendship that sprang from their first interview and lasted until the TV star died of stomach cancer in February 2003. Those emails provided the framework for a dramatised screenplay of events following a cynical investigative journalist, Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), as his interaction with Mister Rogers unlocks an existential quest that helps him find peace with his familial demons and understand his anxieties as a new parent.
Picked up and financed, casting the beloved Mister Rogers – a softly spoken, zen and unassumingly nice chap – was key. Hollywood’s nicest man, Tom Hanks, was offered the role but repeatedly passed on the project until Heller, coming off Can You Ever Forgive Me?, signed on to direct. He’d been a fan of Heller’s since her 2015 film The Diary Of A Teenage Girl, wanted to work with her and felt she was the key to circumnavigating the extreme pressure of playing a latter-day saint. “She very specifically came back to me with a perspective of the power of the force of Mister Rogers as opposed to the plot that goes on,” recalls Hanks when Total Film sits down with him in the swishy Hotel Fairmont Royal York in Toronto. “I just knew that she was coming at this with, ‘This is the red dot of what this movie is’… and that is the chosen power of empathy.”
That chosen power of empathy is what so connected with blubbing TIFF audiences on premiere night, and undid Cooper. Though Mister Rogers is a nostalgia hit for US viewers, he’s an unknown to most in Europe (unless you caught last year’s ace doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), but Heller and Hanks insist his message is universal. Though benign, non-judgemental and interested in all, Rogers told
Junod his compassion towards others was something to be practised, rather than a character default. In one scene in the movie, where Mister Rogers entreats Lloyd to complete a self-acceptance exercise of closing his eyes for a minute and thinking of “all the people who loved you into existence”, Hanks breaks the fourth wall, gazing down the lens to implore viewers to purposefully chose kindness and gratitude.
And though Hanks was not a fan as a child (“I was too busy watching Rocky & Bullwinkle”) he became an admirer of Rogers’ karmic creed through his research. He peers over clearframed glasses and leans forward, “I think cynicism has become the default position for so much daily structure and daily intercourse. Why? Because it’s easy, and there’s good money to be made out of it. But I think that when Fred Rogers first saw children’s programming, he saw something that was cynical. And why in the world would you put a pipeline to cynicism into the minds of a two or three-year-old kid? That you are not cool because you don’t have this toy? That it’s funny to see somebody being bopped on the head? That’s a cynical treatment of an audience, and we have become so inured to that that when we are met with as simple a message as, ‘Hey, do you know what? It’s a beautiful day in the neighbourhood,’ we get slapped a little bit. And we are allowed, I think, to start off feeling good.”
Heller agrees, pointing to Rogers’ attempts to give children greater emotional vocabulary. “I did grow up watching Mister Rogers,” she says. “But I think I’ve realised the profound impact of his message more, becoming a parent. He actually had some beautiful, radical ideas about childhood: the idea that everybody deserves love just as they are, but also that we need to come up with ways to allow children to feel their feelings, and that feelings matter and are valid, particularly when raising young boys. What he did was subtle, and it’s easy to overlook it. But it was really profound.”
For Cooper, playing Lloyd’s estranged father, Jerry, that articulation is clearly personally powerful. Just thinking about the lessons his character learns from Rogers is what sends him reaching for the Kleenex. “I have to admit that I completely missed the whole era of Fred Rogers, but I thought my character could have
‘This movie was a living hell… A living hell, I tell you. A living hell!’ Tom Hanks
used a couple of hundred episodes, you know? A very, very irresponsible father, very insecure. He deserted a family with a dying wife. And through these moments he and Fred Rogers share… he finds a brighter ending.”
One of a kind
Hanks is aware that Rogers’ shtick won’t be for everyone – “The thing about Fred is he’s instantaneously, to almost every adult in America, one of two things: a saint or a fraud” – but he and Heller were determined to approach the project without guile. And that meant building Rogers’ sets to his exact specifications (even finding original rare Ikegami
HK 323 cameras), filming in Rogers’ hometown of Pittsburgh, hand-knitting those cosy cardigans and, for Hanks, learning to do Rogers’ trademark entrance in one take. Seemingly simple, the segment following Rogers as he came through a door singing the title song, popped his jacket in the closet, donned a cardi and swapped outdoor shoes for comfy sneakers was deceptively difficult. “Twenty-two takes,” Heller admits. “There were some sweater snafus!”
Hanks sighs. “Here’s the thing. You think you’ll have a lot of time in that song. You try to come in. Take a jacket off. Hang it up. Close the door. Take one pair of shoes off. Put a pair of shoes on. And at the same time? Twenty-two takes, baby. Twenty-two takes…” He shakes his head.
“Can I make a confession that I’ve never told you?” Heller asks Hanks. “I realised I made it harder for you than it ever was for Fred. He had the first knot of the shoes done, and we had you do that and the two rabbit ears. I’m really sorry.”
Hanks waits a well-timed beat. “This movie was a living hell,” he intones darkly.
And it wasn’t just shoelaces that he struggled with. Rogers puppeted a series of creatures from spaces he had to uncomfortably pretzel his body into and, on that superauthentic set, Hanks had to do the same – while talking in cutesy voices and singing live on each take. “We made him do it the real way, with all that difficulty,” Heller laughs.
Hanks looks dark. “A living hell, I tell you. A living hell!”
Magic moments
There’s talk, of course, that Hanks’ performance could net him awards nominations, surely the aim given the film’s release in the middle of the awards corridor. But for Hanks and Heller, their reward for this project is not necessarily a shiny gold one. Heller is thrilled that the night before we meet she’d received an email from Rogers’ widow, Joanne, saying she thought her husband would be “really proud of this film”. And Hanks jokes that his characterisation of Rogers has helped him throw journalists: “Now my interview with anybody is going to be me in a bathrobe!” [see boxout, left] But they both admit that making the film has made them think about their actions a little more.
“Honestly, I think we’re all kind of actually trying to say, ‘Let’s be present here in this moment, and enjoy it,’ because that’s Fred’s influence,” Heller smiles. “We can be honest and open and emotional here in this moment. That’s the harder choice.” And she hopes that that’s a takeaway for audiences too. “Maybe we come into this movie thinking, ‘Meh, I don’t know if I’m going to buy into this.’ And in the way that we get to watch Lloyd chip away at his cynicism through Fred, we get to have that cathartic moment for ourselves, I hope – where we get to let our cynicism go.”
A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OPENS ON 6 DECEMBER.