Yahoo News Director Marielle Heller on why Mr Rogers was "too good" to be the protagonist of his own movie
A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood is Marielle Heller's second Oscar-nominated biopic. In 2019 Can You Ever Forgive Me?, the story of Lee Israel starring Melissa McCarthy and Richard E Grant, was up for thee awards including Best Picture.
So when the Mr Rogers biopic was announced, seeing Heller's name as director was cause for a big sigh of relief. She knows what she's doing when it comes to telling real-life stories (and fictitious ones) in unexpectedly moving and entertaining ways.
Despite it being, ostensibly, about Mr Rogers, Heller told Digital Spy,"It was very clear, Mr Rogers could not be the protagonist of a movie. There was never a moment where he was, I don't know, some crazy drug addict and then decided to become Mr Rogers."
"That's the type of evolution that we need to have for our protagonists, we need to have a major catalytic change that happens. We figured out very early on, he doesn't make a good protagonist. It just wouldn't work. He's too good."
"But he does make a great antagonist," she added.
Mr Rogers' ubiquity in North America posed a different challenge to Heller than her work on Lee Israel's story in Can You Ever Forgive Me? "There was all the pressure of everybody already knowing Mr Rogers," Heller admitted.
So she chose an equally ubiquitous actor. "Tom Hanks is one of the only actors in the world who we feel so warmly about, who we feel like we know him in this deep way. He makes people feel seen.
"So very few actors had that ability and that kind of warmth and we have that association with him." But as we said, Hanks' Mr Rogers is not the protagonist.
The movie is told through Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), loosely based on Esquire journalist Tom Junod, whose profile on Mr Rogers is the foundation of the film. But A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood takes some surrealist left turns, and by design.
Heller revealed that "meticulous, careful work on the script" is what makes those decisions work. And, besides, it's in the source material: "Sometimes Mr Rogers was a little bit trippy," Heller added with an almost surreptitious laugh.
Knowing Mr Rogers could never be the lens through which we learn about, well, him, Heller opted to make it Lloyd. He's the one going through the catalytic change, as she called it.
"When you're watching somebody go through a big, emotional shift in their lives... What does it feel like to be inside of that? Why do we have to be so safe with our filmmaking and only show things and literal ways?"
Heller's answer is, we don't: "We can show things in emotionally true ways that may seem literally untrue."
In the case of A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, that emotional truth is nightmarish, but Heller's risk pays off – we gave it five stars, as did many other outlets worldwide. Despite this, and the movie's Oscar nomination, Heller has once again been snubbed by for the Best Director award.
"I really wasn't surprised. And I mean, that's maybe the sad truth. I really wasn't surprised," she said. Though this comment was about the Golden Globes at the time, her resigned disappointment is certainly applicable to the Oscars.
She added: "I don't think any of us should get to a point in this business where we're expecting things like that. That's not why we make these movies. I think that's a weird fallacy and it's an ego-based contest in so many ways. But you know, it is what it is."
Heller's philosophy on the industry comes from the play What The Constitution Means To Me by Heidi Schreck in which progress is described: "like a woman walking with a dog on the beach, and the dog is running forward and running backwards. If you look at the dog, you think he's not getting anywhere because he's running forward and running backwards, running forward and running backwards.
But if you watch the woman, she's slowly progressing forward. And I do think that's the progress that we're making right Hollywood right now." That's an outlook we think Mr Rogers would be totally on board with.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood is out in UK cinemas on January 31
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