In “Daddio,” the feature film debut of writer-director Christy Hall, nearly the entire story unfolds in a New York City yellow cab as it travels through the night from John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens to the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan.
That’s it.
A cab driver played by Sean Penn, a passenger played by Dakota Johnson, and a conversation that rises and falls over the course of slightly more than 90 minutes.
For the viewer it’s an intense, mesmerizing journey through the lives, loves, remembrances and regrets of Clark and Girlie, whose actual name is never revealed. Its appeal to Johnson, who’s also a producer on the film, and Penn, who she recruited as her costar, was equally powerful.
“As an actor, it’s a delicious meal,” Johnson says as she sits next to Penn in a suite at the Oceana Hotel in Santa Monica recently. “For it to be this sort of sweeping, soaring conversation in a contained space about subjects I find really interesting – the dynamics and power dynamics between men and women and family. It felt just like such a treat.
“So as an actor, a no-brainer for me,” she says. “And then as a producer, my partner and I really wanted to make this film because most of the projects that I want to make really have a very large and loud-beating heart in them. And this one did for me. So much.”
Penn, whose bare feet in the suite made Johnson seem a little overdressed in simple flats, said he was attracted to the film, which opens Friday, June 28, by the visual and emotional qualities of the screenplay.
“When I read a script, I really am sitting in the theater as an audience, and not looking at the character that I might do or not do,” he says. “So for me, it was like what you just did. You just saw the film.
“That was what reading the script was like in many ways,” he says. “Where I felt like, ‘OK, here’s something that, you know, lamentably is not approached often enough in film these days. Two people finding vulnerability in each other and a connection, and just such smart writing also where it’s hitting nerves of things whether it was part of your life or someone else that you know.”
Strangers in a cab
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For Hall, the seeds of “Daddio” were planted as a child when she slipped past her parents to watch a TV series entirely inappropriate for her age.
“Do you remember ‘Taxicab Confessions?’” she says of the hidden camera docuseries that ran on HBO from 1995 to 2006. “I have to bring it up because I used to sneak downstairs in my childhood home. I was too young to be watching but I would watch it and I was absolutely riveted.
“I grew up in the Midwest, so at that point in my life, New York didn’t feel like a real place,” she says. “It might as well have been Gotham City, you know what I mean? Like, it didn’t feel like an actual place, it felt like someplace in the movies but it wasn’t real. But when I watched ‘Taxicab Confessions,’ It gave me a feeling like, ‘Oh, New York is a real place with incredible people and characters and of all walks of life from all over the world.”
Hall moved to New York City in 2008 to pursue a career in theater, primarily working as a playwright.
“This story is a bit of a love letter to New York,” she says, describing it as a simple desire to write a story set in a yellow cab, an idea that arose alongside the rise of ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft.
“It made me a little nervous that experience might go the way of the dinosaur,” Hall says. “So I think this film is my way of just saying there’s something really special that happens when you get in the back of a cab, and I hope that we as a society decide that it should continue to exist.”
Honest conversation
In “Daddio,” when Clark picks up Girlie at JFK she’s just returned from several weeks at home in Oklahoma, away from her life in Manhattan as a coder. As Clark and Girlie converse, a verbal dance of increasing intimacy begins.
“I think that both these people, it just so happens that they’re both pretty mischievous and very curious,” Johnson says of the conversation that begins as Clark leaves JFK on the Van Wyck Expressway. “I’ve definitely had moments with strangers where you find a common ground and a common connection.
“So I think in the beginning, she’s guarded,” she says. “She lives in New York. She’s probably been hit on by many a cab driver. But there’s something that’s not that. At times, there’s the thing that’s igniting for her and inspiring for her and interesting for her.
“It goes through all these different dynamics. A brother-sister dynamic and a father-daughter dynamic. And is it sexual? Is it dangerous? Is it creepy? It never remains one thing for any time for very long.”
Girlie is returning to Manhattan after a life-changing moment in Oklahoma, where she confronts her past and the distance she always felt from her father, as well as her present with an older, married boyfriend who texts her periodically throughout the cab ride.
As Johnson talked about Girlie’s mix of vulnerability and bravery, Penn nodded his head in agreement.
“Too many victims telling us they’re victims these days,” he says. “And she wasn’t one. So to see a character finding that and owning that, that struck me. If film can be important, if a character in a film can be important, it’s not because they say, ‘Do this.’ It’s because they’re showing you that it’s who you are.”
For Hall, the goal of her story was to invite viewers into the cab to see “how these kinds of things can kind of flourish and open up like a flower,” she says. “But it requires a space of non-judgment. That she does not judge him, but he doesn’t judge her either. And I think they’re both surprised by it and forever changed by it.”
Casting coincidences
A connection between Hall and producer Ro Donnelly, with whom Hall had worked as co-creator and writer on the Netflix series “I Am Not Okay With This,” was the key to landing Johnson in the lead role.
After that series ended, Donnelly, who with Johnson had formed TeaTime Pictures to develop projects together, asked Hall whatever happened with her “Daddio” script. When she learned it was in early development, Donnelly asked Hall what she thought of Johnson as the lead.
“I was like, ‘I would be so lucky! Are you kidding me?’ Do you think she would read it?’” Hall says. “She said, ‘Yeah, I’ll slip it to her.’”
Johnson took the on-screen role as Girlie and the behind-the-camera one as a producer with Donnelly and Emma Tillinger Koskoff, a three-time nominee for the Best Picture Oscar for “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “The Irishman,” and “Joker.” She also stepped in as a sort of informal casting director, Hall says.
“She said, ‘What do you think about my dear old friend Mr. Sean Penn?’” Hall says of Johnson’s suggestion that they approach her neighbor, the one with two Best Actor Oscars. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ Again, I said we would be so lucky.”
Penn read the script and within 48 hours was on a Zoom with Hall to say he would do the part. Soon, she and Johnson were at Penn’s house, doing what she’d always done in the theater, doing table reads, allowing the two actors to ask questions about their roles and dialogue, making clear how the story would unfold.
“After we did table work, we got it up on its feet,” Hall says. “Sean took a handheld mirror and duct-taped, I think to a broom and chair. Because if you think about it, they’re never actually really looking at each other. They can connect by way of the rearview, so I think he wanted to get a sense of what is that even going to feel like.”
Life in the cab
For the actors, filming almost the entire movie on a soundstage, with Penn behind the steering wheel of a cab, and Johnson in the back seat, was an exciting challenge.
“I think it added so much tension and mystery to when you’re working with someone and you can only see their eyes in the mirror,” Johnson says. “It gives so much to your own performance and to your own experience in that scene.
“It just felt different and magical,” she says “It felt like a very quiet – like physically quiet but emotionally loud experience,” she says.
“I like when I can talk to people without worrying about whether I have something between my teeth,” Penn says, grinning with perfectly clean teeth. “So it was good.”
Hall had considered shooting the cab scenes in an old-school way, with cameras fixed inside and outside as it was pulled by a trailer through the city, but the vagaries of traffic, weather and time – the shoot was only 16 days – ruled that out. Using green or blue screens to create the scenes outside the cab would have been far beyond the indie film’s modest budget.
So she and director of photography Phedon Papamichael adapted the technology used on “The Mandalorian” for their earthbound drama, encircling the cab on the soundstage with panels of LED screens onto which the world outside could be seen in real-time as the cab and its passengers moved through the city.
“I never went up to the front of the cab except for when I leaned up in the movie,” Johnson said of her two weeks in the backseat of the cab. “It felt like Sean’s space and my space. I loved it. Every day to go into work and like sneak behind the screens and just pop into our positions and have our own little worlds? It was great.”
Penn was equally happy with his domain behind the wheel; he only shifted during a section midway through the film when an accident on the highway forced the cab to stop until it was cleared.
“I communicate better at home, and the cab is my home,” he says, laughing. “Somebody comes into my home is how I’m feeling about it. And I had just a delightful guest.”
Forever changes
As the cab slips through the Midtown Tunnel from Queens into Manhattan, the conversation deepens. Clark pushes Girlie to confront difficult aspects of her life. She, in turn, demands the same from him.
As they near her Hell’s Kitchen home, Girlie admits her deepest secret, an event that occurred on her visit with her half-sister in Oklahoma, which she has barely even admitted to herself. Both she and Clark reach the destination with more vulnerability and honesty than when they’d pulled away from the terminal at JFK.
“I think it affects her profoundly,” Johnson says. “I think her life changes after that cab ride. Maybe not immediately. I don’t know what she chooses. You know, people are interesting. But I think the discoveries and the realizations that Girlie has, she can’t unknow them after that. Even the discoveries that Clark has, he can’t unknow them.
“It felt like she has more compassion for herself in her life from getting into the cab to getting out of the cab,” she says. “And that is something that I think is a profound gift.”
And for Clark? “Well, I think I don’t want to tell you,” Penn says with a smile when asked how his character is changed that night. “It was so interesting listening to it and I was going through that. I think an audience will have their own version of that.”
But would he agree that Clark is changed?
“I think he really hopes so,” Penn says, and smiles again.
