A beautiful experience
Surprising no one, Heller says Hanks was an absolute pleasure to direct
Wouldn’t it be perversely, even perfectly, ironic if the set of A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood had been a seething mass of resentment, anger from the crew, and histrionics by the cast?
Sure, but it’d also be a lie. When I caught up with director Marielle Heller at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the Fred Rogers biopic had its world première, she confirmed the open secret that has long swirled about in Hollywood circles. Tom Hanks, who plays the children’s entertainer from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, is wonderful to work with.
“I didn’t know if he’d want to be directed,” says the 40-year-old actor-turned-director, who made 2015’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl and last year’s hit Can You Ever Forgive Me?
“He and Chris Cooper both, I thought: How are these Academy Award-winning veteran actors going to deal with ... this young woman walking on set on my third movie?”
No worries. “They were the most generous, respectful actors who wanted more than anything for me to direct them,” she recalls. “They both loved it.”
Hanks in particular: “He called me Boss from Day 1, like ‘I’m here for your vision, tell me what to do.’ And he loves the director-actor relationship, as do I — it’s my favourite part of directing. And he loves the work. He’s the first person, if you say I think we should do one more take, he’ll say” — she slaps her hands enthusiastically — “‘great, let’s go again, I’d love to do another.’”
Directing one famously nice guy to play another turns out to be an exercise in the smallest adjustments. “We would watch episodes of the show together,” Heller says. “It was all about the simplicity and the honest openness with which Fred interacted with everybody. And so it was mostly just giving Tom reminders in every moment. Slow down. Be here. Open up.”
And aside from wardrobe — that famous red sweater, recreated for the film — there was little trickery to turn him into Rogers. “I have a hard time with prosthetics or too much stuff on a face that feels like it creates a barrier between the audience and the actor,” she says. “The one exception was the eyebrows.” Hanks sports bushy grey brows to mimic those of Rogers’.
I ask Heller about a remarkable scene in the film in which Mr. Rogers asks for, and receives, a minute of silence — a full minute, 60 seconds, an eternity on the screen. At the TIFF screening in the Elgin theatre, the audience sat spellbound, and even an ambulance siren — the theatre sits across the street from St. Michael’s Hospital — waited until the minute had passed before cranking up its wail.
“That was the first scene that I knew how I was going to film it,” Heller says. The script called for no more than a brief pause. “And I thought: No. This is the moment for the audience to become an active participant in this movie.”
Cast and crew were affected too, even those who saw the scene many times during production. “We would be in sound mix, just working through the movie,” she recalls. “That would start, and I would look around the room and see everyone doing it; people were thinking, and taking a moment. It was powerful.”
It’s also a risky move in a movie. “That’s why I didn’t go to film school,” Heller says with a smile. “So I didn’t learn all the things that they told us not to do. Because I break all of those rules, apparently. My first movie had voice-over, was a period piece, had 49 set locations, and everyone said: ‘You did everything they told us in film school not to do with your first movie.’ And I was like: ‘Well, I’m glad I didn’t go to film school.’”
She also never met Rogers, who died in 2003. But his widow, Joanne, was a big part of the production. “I got a very touching email last night from Joanne Rogers, saying that she wished I had (met him) and that she thinks he and I would have had a lot of good conversations. And that he would be really pleased.”