SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) ā says he hadnāt felt joy making a movie in 15 years.
At the time, the actor couldnāt quite put his finger on why, but he at one point became so disillusioned that he resigned himself to the reality that his love for the craft may never return.
āIād felt misery in making movies,ā the two-time winner recalled during a recent interview. āAt first youāre putting it off to, āWell, this script is a problem, and this director is a problem.ā But then I caught myself a few times working on great things with great people and just as miserable.ā
That is until his neighbor, , knocked on his door with a script and an invitation to be her co-star. āNo reservations at all. I felt like you would feel getting your first movie,ā Penn recalled of his initial response to reading āDaddio,ā which hits theaters nationwide Friday.
But the film that re-enchanted Penn with the art of making movies is by no means a typical Hollywood flick. Instead, āDaddioā is an austere portrait of an ephemeral, serendipitous human connection that feels rare nowadays, if not nearly extinct.
Part of what Penn appreciated about the script was its charactersā unfiltered frankness, something he thinks is missing in a lot of contemporary art and broader societal conversations.
āI think weāre stripping whole generations of diversity of behavior and diversity of personality,ā he said, conceding that he understands concerns about sensitivity, but only to a point. āChanging oneās vocabulary or altering it in certain circumstances becomes the full-time job and reflective thought is left behind.ā
āDaddioā follows Girlie (Johnson), a woman who is returning to New York after a trip out of state. The film begins with her getting in a cab at JFK airport and ends with her getting dropped off at home. The 90 minutes in between are filled with ostensibly mundane but revealing conversations between Girlie and her cab driver, Clark (Penn).
āDaddioā is the feature debut of writer-director Christy Hall, who, perhaps unsurprisingly given that the film is driven by dialogue, has a background in theater. Hall began working on the script in 2014, inspired in part by her nostalgia for the reality series, āTaxicab Confessions.ā
Penn, like he does in many of his roles, brings a masculine energy that gives life to a brash and foul-mouthed cabbie, but one who ultimately proves to have a tenderness. Similarly, Johnsonās Girlie is a savvy, successful software engineer who appears to have it all together, but whose relationship with her father ā or lack thereof ā ultimately leads her to seek that love elsewhere.
āThis movie is about the human condition, that thereās two sides to all of us. Weāre always contending with our greater angels and our darkest demons. And Iām interested in characters that are always contending with both, because thatās actually the truth,ā Hall said.
āDaddioā will undoubtedly test some viewers' attention spans, but others will find themselves drawn in by the candid and compelling conversation between these strangers about sex, daddy issues and being the āother woman.ā
Penn and Johnson have more in common than their neighborhood. Both are vocal about their frustrations with Hollywood and said this project was, coincidentally, a kind of epiphany for each of them.
āI just want to be really in love with what Iām working on and inspired,ā Johnson said.
Itās only been a few months since she came off her press tour for which was a critical and commercial flop. Shortly after the filmās debut, Johnson affirmed criticism of the movie, saying she doesnāt anticipate doing another one like it.
āThis notion of executives, not necessarily creative people, deciding what is going to work in an artistic sense doesnāt actually make sense to me at all,ā she said. āI think that a lot of the studios, well streaming platforms mostly, are run by people who donāt even really like movies or watch them.ā
Johnson said she āattackedā the script for āDaddioā when she first read it because she loved it so much, and spent years through TeaTime, her production company, working with Hall to get the film financed. After years in limbo and studio execs asking why people would find a movie so devoid of action and drama entertaining, it was eventually picked up by Sony Pictures Classics.
Johnson hopes to savor the joy she feels coming off of this film, and to remember it the next time sheās fighting for a project.
āI think that humans are craving human connection,ā Johnson said. āMaybe itās because of social media or what we have been sort of dealt in terms of entertainment in the last 5, 10 years. I think algorithms have really (expletive) us in that way. It doesnāt give us the content that I think we subconsciously crave.ā
Krysta Fauria, The Associated Press
