‘It’s Hard to Get Personal Films Made‘: Rebecca Miller Makes Her Movie Comeback With ‘She Came to Me,’ Eight Years After ‘Maggie’s Plan’

variety.com:

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International If you ask Rebecca Miller, it’s getting harder and harder to make movies about people in a room talking.

That particular brand of intimate, personal storytelling, the kind the director of “Maggie’s Plan” and “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” is known for, is a challenging prospect for financiers weighing up a Darwinian landscape for cinemagoing.

It’s why Miller’s latest, “She Came to Me,” which opens the Berlin Film Festival on Thursday, feels like a triumph for the American director, who marks her return to narrative features after an eight-year hiatus. “Making a movie like this is actually meaningful for independent cinema — it’s meaningful that we got it made,” said Miller. “Every time that happens, it’s a real victory, because it is very difficult … it’s hard to get personal films made.” People are still eager to see stories about other people and themselves, she said, “but they also want to be surprised.” And sometimes, Miller noted, it’s hard going getting a movie made where it may read on the page as a little unusual. “That’s difficult, even if it’s within a genre.” And there’s plenty that’s unusual in “She Came to Me” — albeit in all the best ways.

The romantic comedy-drama stars Peter Dinklage as Steven, a moody classical composer struggling with an oppressive writer’s block that prevents him from delivering his next opera.