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It was, truth be told, a miserable day in the neighborhood: gray skies, sheets of rain. But the director Marielle Heller was willing to go out. Like Fred Rogers, the subject of her new film, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” starring Tom Hanks, she wore a comfy sweater, although she made no ceremony of changing into her outdoor shoes. The neighborhood was Carroll Gardens, where Heller lives in a brownstone with her husband, the comedian and director Jorma Taccone, and their five-year-old, Wylie. “Everyone’s, like, ‘How many kids do you have?’ ” Heller said, gesturing to the avalanche of toys around the fireplace. “I’m, like, ‘Just one.’ ”
To prep for the film, Heller watched hours of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” with Wylie. “He likes the parts when Mister Rogers is in his house, and he didn’t like when he goes to the Land of Make-Believe, which is how I remember feeling. I was scared of some of the puppets—Lady Elaine particularly.” She put on a trolley-print raincoat, a gift from the producers. Heller, who is forty, with a copper-colored pixie cut, met Hanks several years ago, at a birthday party in Los Angeles for one of his grandchildren. (She’s friends with his son Colin.) Hanks promised to check out her first film, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” A few days later, he sent her an e-mail that wound up in her spam folder. Hanks had declined the “Beautiful Day” screenplay several times, but when Heller became attached to direct he changed his mind. “I thought I would only make movies about women,” she said on the sidewalk, but Rogers “represents a totally different kind of masculinity that we don’t get to see onscreen.”
On Court Street, she sat in a seventy-year-old coffee shop and ordered an omelette. “There’s usually a group of people here who call themselves the Leftovers—the people from before the neighborhood gentrified, who come and hold court,” she said. Heller has a knack for malcontents; her previous film, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” starred Melissa McCarthy as a grouchy literary forger. “Beautiful Day” views Fred Rogers through the eyes of a cynical journalist assigned to profile him for Esquire. “It’s two halves of myself,” Heller explained. “If you met my parents, you’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s my mom and my dad.’ ” She was raised in the Bay Area, by her mother, a sweet-natured grade-school art teacher, and her father, a chiropractor and “sarcastic New York Jew.” “For most of my life, I’ve been more like my dad. But there’s a lot of me that’s also similar to Fred, I’ve discovered.”
Had living with Mister Rogers in her head made her nicer? “It’s not just being nice,” she clarified. “It’s being honest. There’s this idea that he’s just kind and nice no matter what, but he was challenging to the people around him, almost aggressively intimate.” When Wylie was three, Heller showed him a 1970 episode in which Rogers buries his pet goldfish and explains death, sharing a story about losing his childhood dog. “Wylie looked at me, like, ‘Dogs don’t die!’ ” Heller recalled. “And I was thinking about Mister Rogers—you tell kids the truth, but you let them lead it. And I said, ‘Well, dogs do die. And cats die.’ And he went, ‘What? Cats die? But we have great cats!’ ” She showed him a photo of a previous cat she had buried in the back yard. “I said, ‘I like to believe that if I miss him I can go visit him.’ He kept watching the show, and then a few minutes later he turned to me, with tears growing in his eyes, and said, ‘Do walruses die?’ ”
It wasn’t until bedtime that night that Wylie asked whether people die, and when Heller told him the truth he was inconsolable. At the time, she was going through a cancer scare and had just had thyroid surgery. “A few weeks later, we went to Pittsburgh for the first time”—Mister Rogers’s real-life neighborhood—“and he asked me about my surgery in ways he had never asked me before. He asked if they had taken my head off. He had been thinking about that for a month. It was obviously what Mister Rogers knew could happen, but he also knew what was important was for us to be present with our kids and their dark feelings.”
She sipped her coffee. That morning, Heller had walked Wylie to school and then checked her messages—the Golden Globe nominations were just out, and her publicist had texted the news: “All men for director again.” “I was, like, Yeah, that’s what I expected,” Heller said. “I think the unconscious bias is strong. I don’t look like a director to people.” Her phone buzzed with a commiserating text from Greta Gerwig, who had also been left out, for “Little Women.” “Hollywood is the Land of Make-Believe for me,” Heller said, and added, under her breath, “The Land of Bullshit and Make-Believe.” ♦
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December 16, 2019 at 06:00PM
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Marielle Heller’s Land of Make-Believe - The New Yorker
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