Compassion Project

Marielle Heller follows up the spiky Can You Ever Forgive Me? with a study in empathy, starring Tom Hanks. They tell Total Film about the importance of kindness and the ‘hell’ of filming in their Oscar worthy A Beautiful Day In The Neighbourhood…

- Jane Crowther

There’s an awkward silence as the usually stoic Chris Cooper weeps, mid-interview, at the Toronto International Film Festival. Wiping aways tears, his voice cracks as he tries to describe the sometimes cruel father he plays in his latest film. That unease, as Total Film and his colleagues wait for him to finish his sentence, is not born of pity or fontrum. It’s that this sort of vulnerability and emotional connection is not something we, as a society – overloaded as it is with bullying heads of state, trolls, a disgust for weakness and the hard edge of self-preservation – are comfortable with. And it’s that lack of empathy, humanity and kindness in today’s world that makes Cooper’s movie seem all the more necessary now.

Inspired by Esquire writer Tom Junod’s 1998 cover feature, ‘Can You Say… Hero?’ – a profile of Fred Rogers, the presenter of the 1968-2001 PBS kids’ show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, that also ended up being a treatise on modern masculinity, tapping into a jaded generation’s need for decency and wonder – screenwriters Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster began to look at adapting it for a film. Gaining the trust of Rogers’ family and co-workers, they uncovered thousands of emails that he and Junod had exchanged during the friendship that sprang from their first interview and lasted until the TV star died of stomach cancer in February 2003. Those emails provided the framework for a dramatised screenplay of events following a cynical investigative journalist, Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), as his interaction with Mister Rogers unlocks an existential quest that helps him find peace with his familial demons and understand his anxieties as a new parent.

Picked up and financed, casting the beloved Mister Rogers – a softly spoken, zen and unassumingly