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. “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.
“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. As Johnson talked about Girlie’s mix of vulnerability and bravery, Penn nodded his head in agreement.
“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.’” “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.
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.
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