Director Marielle Heller wants us all to be better people, just like Fred Rogers

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The conflict at the centre of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, also known as the Tom Hanks Mister Rogers movie, may not be the most volcanic one in the history of cinema. But it’s the one that its director, Marielle Heller, cares about more than anything: “It’s about a decent person struggling to become better,” she says. And that may be exactly the story we need right now.

Based on a 1998 Esquire piece by Tom Junod, the film focuses on Lloyd (Matthew Rhys), a cynical journalist struggling with three relationships: his deadbeat dad (Chris Cooper), his new baby and his assignment to interview beloved children’s TV host Fred Rogers (Hanks). If you’ve seen even a single minute of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, you will know that the latter relationship leads to a transformation of the former two.

Heller was a new mother when she read the script – her son Wylie was born in December, 2014 – and it made her weep. “Parenthood forces you to confront who you are, who you want to be, and how you are going to guide another little soul into becoming a human,” she says in an interview during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival. “But for some people, the complex pain of that is too much to bear. Lloyd has to ask himself, ‘Am I going to run away from this? Or am I going to become my better self?’ That’s a drama real people face every day, and it’s compelling to me.”

Heller, 40, is a vivid, vivacious presence. She wears a sharp-shouldered, olive-coloured boiler suit, and her hair, which used to be long and red, is now short and black, slicked back off her forehead and tucked behind her ears. Her two previous films also featured prickly, real-life writers facing decisions about how to be. In The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), it’s Minnie (Bel Powley), a 15-year-old aspiring graphic novelist who lurches into an affair with her mother’s boyfriend; in Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), it’s Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), a journalist who reacts to her shrinking career by forging letters from famous wits.

Coming into A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Heller was nervous. Hanks is a cultural icon, while she is a relatively new director, and a woman. That’s not inconsequential: On every one of her sets, including Neighborhood, someone has mistaken her for a production assistant. When she and her husband, the director and comedian Jorma Taccone (one of the Lonely Island trio), arrived at the premiere of Diary of a Teenage Girl, photographers yelled, “Is this the director and his wife?” Scouting a library for Can You Ever Forgive Me?, she spoke to one librarian multiple times about what she would need and where the camera would go – and yet, on shoot day, the librarian was looking around for the director. Heller waved and said, “That’s me!”

“She turned beet red,” Heller recalls, “and said, ‘Oh, I expected you would have a hat.’”

Heller has a sense of humour about it – “I know I’m in charge,” she says, laughing. “I’ve always felt very comfortable being in charge, as my parents would attest.” Growing up in Northern California, Heller was forever “organizing the neighbourhood children into doing plays and telling everyone what to do.” Though she studied theatre at UCLA and London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began her career as an actor, when she started directing, “It was a feeling of coming home,” she says. “My boss-ness finally made sense.”

She loves “getting into the dirt” with her actors and finding the emotional arcs and intentions with them. She tries to create “a really safe and calm space where people can do deep work and not feel the stress that is inevitably going on in the background.”

Hanks turned out to be an ideal collaborator, always ready to do one more take, or take himself to dinner at the Chinese restaurant where he’d be shooting a few days later, just to make it feel that little bit more real. From day one, he called Heller “Boss.”

“Which was important, because the role is tricky,” she says. “Neither of us wanted to do anything that felt like a parody or impersonation. It had to feel connected emotionally.” Often, she asked Hanks to slow down his delivery, to picture his grandchild on the other side of the lens.

“It was all about simpler, less,” she says. “Really trying to get him to a place of raw vulnerability. Constantly reminding him to be wide open. That’s a scary place to live as an actor. It’s a lot easier to be funny and charming and cute.”

She needed his vulnerability, to nudge us toward our own. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood asks why cynicism is our default position, and why we don’t trust goodness. Like Rogers himself, it shows us that goodness is the riskier, braver choice, and urges us to ponder how the world could be if we made that choice more often.

“We’ve made it into this thing to be cool, and that means we can’t live in goodness, and I don’t know why we’ve done that,” Heller says. In the aftermath of this film, she’s vowed to keep more Rogers-ness in her life. On drizzly mornings in Brooklyn, where she lives, she and her son walk to school dancing and belting out Singing in the Rain. Though many people enjoy it, “I can also feel some people sneering at us. But I’m trying to let myself live in that place more. I think it’s a choice we have to make.”

She’s not alone in that. “I’m hearing such a resounding hunger for Fred’s message of kindness and patience, and I think that speaks to what we’re lacking in our current political climate,” Heller sums up. “Politics are toxic right now, worldwide. Hate is fuelling the conversation, and I think we’re all affected by that, consciously or not. It’s disheartening and scary. But making a movie about Fred Rogers felt like an answer to that call.”

It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood opens Nov. 22

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