The feature debut from writer-director Christy Hall, her ‘love letter to New York,’ takes place almost entirely inside a cab from JFK Airport to midtown Manhattan.
Dakota Johnson as Girlie in writer-director Christy Hart’s “Daddio.” 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.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.
“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. Hall moved to New York City in 2008 to pursue a career in theater, primarily working as a playwright.
“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. “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.”
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.
“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. 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.
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