Director Brad Silberling ("Casper", "City of Angels") talks about "Moonlight Mile", a new drama inspired by the murder of his girlfriend, actress Rebecca Schaeffer, in 1989.
Was this a film you felt you needed to make?
I'm fascinated by relationships that are honest and unusual, and behaviour that's sort of messy. With the experience I went through being the emotional underpinning of the screenplay, I felt this was something we had not seen before. I wanted to get it up there because I thought it would show people that from the most unexpected circumstance, you can find something hopeful.
So there was no sense of closing a chapter?
Dustin [Hoffman] often told people, "I think he's doing this because he's trying to figure something out." When it was done, I said to him, "What is that? Can you tell me what I figured out?" Admittedly, though, my experience with my first baby [Silberling is now married to actress Amy Brenneman] has been very informed by the loss, sometimes in a positive way, sometimes in a very tough way.听When the phone rings in the middle of the night, there's a switch that just goes.听I will always be somebody who lost somebody, so听I suppose that will听probably never quite go away.
Joe [Jake Gyllenhaal], whom you based on yourself,听finds a way to go on after meeting Bertie [Ellen Pompeo].听Is she based on Amy Brenneman?听
Bertie is the one true fantasy character in the piece; she's whom I wish I had met after the murder. I hadn't met Amy when I wrote the first draft, but when I showed Steven Spielberg听the film,听he came out of the screening room saying, "Bertie's Amy! Bertie's Amy!" So I think yeah, she is in a sense.
Death and grief are subjects that often scare off studios. Did you have to fight for your vision?
If I had verbally pitched the story and had a studio pay me to write it, I would have gone through some pretty horrible arguments and machinations. But Peter Schneider, who bought the film for Disney, wanted it made according to the screenplay, so I was spared having to add more sentimentality, a flashback of a murder, all the sort of Hollywood devices that you might expect to come into it.
