But in some ways, it is remarkable that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood got made at all. He wasn’t just nice.”Ī Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood has received some awards action, with Hanks up for best supporting actor at the Baftas and Oscars – although not for Heller, who has been passed over by both organisations in one of the more egregious examples of this year’s ignored female directors. “I talked to people who said he would go to a dinner party and he would ask really political questions,” says Heller, “and he would just sit and watch everybody just freak out. Mister Rogers (Tom Hanks) meets the journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys). It was a philosophy he applied to children and adults. He was someone who tackled difficult subjects – when Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968, he devoted an entire programme to it – insisted on honesty, and was devoted to the idea that anything mentionable is manageable. He emerges as more than a nostalgic memory, or a saintly, remote figure.
Rogers remains, however, the enigmatic heart of the story. “And as his cynicism gets chipped away, so does ours,” says Heller. I think a lot of us come from a place of cynicism and neuroses, and thinking things can’t be as good as they seem.” Junod’s profound suspicion allows us a deceptively easy entry into Rogers’ world. “I think it’s hard to come in cold to Mr Rogers right now. “He’s our stand-in in many ways,” says Heller. The protagonist is actually the magazine writer Lloyd (Matthew Rhys), a character loosely based on the journalist Tom Junod, whose 1998 profile of Rogers provided the inspiration for the screenplay. “It was almost like it was a martial art,” says Heller, “genuinely slowing his heart rate down, slowing his energy down.” The idea of one beloved national treasure playing another may have seemed like obvious casting, but Hanks doesn’t look anything like Rogers, nor does he naturally inhabit the man’s essential, almost tortoise-like stillness. But after he had seen Heller’s 2015 debut, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, he was keen to work with her. When he first met her at a children’s birthday party – she has a six-year-old, Wylie – he had already turned the role down more than once. Heller, 40, was instrumental in getting Hanks involved in the first place. We did 22 takes, the most takes I think I’ve ever done of any scene in my life.”
#Mr rogers neighborhood childhood nostalgia movie#
“We made him sing live, which you don’t usually make movie stars do, but it’s what Fred did so it’s what we wanted to do,” says Heller.
Tom Hanks stars as Mister Rogers in the opening sequence of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. And you are struck, watching Hanks perform it now, by what a high-wire act this little piece of choreography always was, artfully constructed to look effortless and everyday. If you grew up with Mr Rogers, it’s pretty eerie.
#Mr rogers neighborhood childhood nostalgia tv#
The opening of the film recreates the beginning of every episode of the TV show, when Mr Rogers walked through his front door, took off his jacket, pulled on a zip-up cardigan and swapped his shoes for sneakers, all while singing his opening theme. I don’t want to see it.’”įor Americans, the bigger fear is that Hanks’s portrayal might not do justice to the real Fred Rogers, who died in 2003. “They were asked: ‘Why did you leave?’ And they said: ‘I know it’s going somewhere terrible. Heller tells me that a few people walked out of the London film festival screening almost as soon as it started. “The only baggage I hope British audiences can shed is the Jimmy Savile stuff.”Īh yes: Lovely Children’s TV Presenter Turns Out to be Exactly What He Seems is not a particularly resonant narrative on these islands.
The film is calibrated to take the weight of such expectations and concerns, but how will a British audience react to a story about an icon they have never heard of? “I think in some ways it’s kind of cleaner when you go in without any of that,” says Heller. Fred Rogers, of the children’s TV show Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood.
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