Interview: Director Christy Hall Talks Daddio to Celebrate Digital Release

ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Daddio director Christy Hall about the drama movie, which stars Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn. The playwright-turned-director discussed her directorial debut ‘s script, her two stars, and more. It is now available to own and rent on digital.

“New York City. JFK airport. A young woman jumps into the backseat of a yellow taxi, the cabbie throws the vehicle into drive as the two head out into the night toward Manhattan, striking up the most unexpected conversation resulting in a single epic remarkable journey,” reads the official synopsis for the film.

Check out an exclusive Daddio clip below and then read our interview with Christy Hall below:

Tyler Treese: One aspect that really impressed me about the film is 95% of it is just a car ride with two people in it, but it stays compelling throughout. What was the biggest challenge in just making it visually interesting throughout so it kept people’s attention?

Christy Hall : Well, thank you so much. Yeah. It was difficult. I think probably the most challenging thing was to try to be a little restrained in all the ways that one might use bells and whistles in order to keep a cab interesting. When I talk about restraint, I just mean there could have been other angles, there could have been other things, but every time when Phedon Papamichael, our incredible DP, and anytime we talked about where we were gonna place the camera and why we wanted it to have a real emotional impact, we wanted to feel organic. We didn’t want it to feel manipulative. We never wanted the audience to feel like we were showing off. That every single decision, whether it be in the edit or whether it was our framing or any of it.

We just wanted it to feel emotionally grounded and inspired. Because sure, if you think about it, there were probably a lot of other ways we could have explored the cab, but I just never wanted the audience to feel like, “Oh, this is a filmmaker that’s not confident. That’s just trying to do these cool angles for no reason.” So, yeah, issuing restraint even through the score, just trying to be extremely thoughtful and just making it really feel like you could just kind of give yourself over to it and go on the emotional ride, and the visuals just sort of wash over you and you actually stop thinking about them too much. At least, that was the goal.

The conversation flows around life and love throughout, but there are also these little off-topic tangents that really add a human element to it. So how was it kind of inserting these very human side conversations into the dialogue rather than it all being about love and such?

It was a really incredible and challenging exercise of how do people get to know each other and how do you allow it to have a thematic that is foundational, but also when you have a conversation with someone, it does have these little tangents and it kind of flutters over here and flutters over there. But it kind of comes back to the central theme of topic. So thank you so much. I am so proud primarily of these incredible performers. They are word perfect in this movie. I come from the theater world, where the intention is to deliver every word that’s on the page, and I know that that’s not how it always is in Hollywood. But I, I really am so grateful to Dakota and Sean for really, I think, masterfully delivering every single word, which is really hard to do in a movie where the camera is really just a few inches from their nose.

A lot of people think that they’re improv-ing because their reactions just feel so natural and surprising. And to their credit, that’s them just acting their faces off and really making every word feel very organic as if it were for the first time. So, yeah, you know, that, that was just the structure of the piece is how do people, just constantly asking myself, how do people get to know each other? What do they talk about? And, but then obviously wanting us to come back to the meat of the matter and so that it does have a narrative spine, but having fun with the little flourishes just by nature of conversation.

You talked about those two powerhouse performances you got from your leads, and Sean Penn’s been very open about saying how this really cracked open that love of acting for him, that it had laid a bit dormant. What does that mean to you when such an incredible actor is finding such value in your work and you reigniting that spark for him? Because I can’t think of a bigger compliment.

It’s incredible. I have to say with humility when I wrote Daddio, I thought it might be the very last thing that I might ever write. I was being produced in different parts of the country as a playwright, but playwriting, it’s very modest in its compensation. You can work on something for years and finally get a really definitive production. I was really struggling to pay my rent. I didn’t have healthcare. It just started to not feel very sustainable. Art is really hard and it takes a really long time. So when I wrote this piece, I thought, you know what? I’ll continue to nurture everything that I’ve written up to this point, but I don’t know if I can keep doing this. So I just went for it and put it all out on the page with the hope that I might be able to get it maybe in an off-Broadway theater in the East Village somewhere, maybe.

Deep in my heart, I saw it in my mind as a film because it’s so visual and it’s so cinematic, and you could really allow the cab to be claustrophobic and really get in there. You can eavesdrop on the phone and all of that. So, the fact that I wrote this little play that never got produced as a play or a piece of theater, but slowly but surely, it actually is what introduced me to the town. It’s what introduced me into the Hollywood conversation. I then adapted it into a screenplay, which I’m so excited because I think that’s where the story was always meant to live.

Then, yes, to have a legend like Sean Penn be so complimentary and it feels like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants that have come before me that are now endorsing what I do. I do not take it for granted. I do not take it lightly. It just made me get up every day and decide that I wasn’t gonna let them down. Even now, as I look towards what’s next in my career, I still have that feeling of I don’t wanna let anyone down that ever believed in me. I want to continue to honor their support by continuing to do work that I’m proud of.

I really enjoyed the texting exchanges in the movie. I love that the married man clearly did not have any game. It was very funny how he’s just like, “Show pink.”

Well, he’s older too. We never meet him, so I wanted him to feel like a character in his own right, and he’s older. He is of a different generation. He wasn’t born with a computer in his pocket, so I even wanted those exchanges to feel like you were seeing it through a multi-generational lens, so I really like that you like that. I mean, he’s not using the editing on his iPhone. He’s just quickly correcting himself. Like I wanted it to feel like he’s of a different generation, and I wanted that to be really clear. I think if he had too much perfect game, I don’t know if it would feel authentic.

Thanks to Christy Hall for taking the time to discuss Daddio .

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