Latest in Marielle Heller

EXCLUSIVE: Marielle Heller and Big Beach, the respective director and producers of last year’s Mister Rogers pic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, are reteaming for a limited series about a serial sexual harasser and his female employees. Heller will direct Five Women, which is based on an episode of the National…

When composer Nate Heller was asked to score A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, he says he felt "equal parts joy, excitement and terror," knowing that the music he'd create would have to stand up to the legacy of Fred Rogers. "He was an extremely musical person. He wrote all the original songs for the show, which…

Director Marielle Heller describes convincing Tom Hanks to play Fred Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood "the biggest miracle I’ve ever performed. I’ll never perform another miracle that good again!" She explained recently at Deadline’s annual The Contenders New York how the casting coup came about. "I know…

Marielle Heller, an actor-turned-director, has been behind the camera so far on only three films: Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), Can You Ever Forgive Me?  (2018) and now this year’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. In each case there has been awards recognition, critical acclaim and Rotten Tomatoes scores all in…

On Marielle Heller's A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, production designer Jade Healy was tasked with recreating the iconic set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, engaging in a complicated process of detective work to get each small detail of it right. "Even though it seems really easy to think, 'Oh, we're just going…

The Oscar show this year will be led by two women with strong producing credentials, sending us this message: There's a new generation of self-styled “badass” women filmmakers out there, ready to leave their mark on the film culture. The arrival of awards season, however, may carry a different portent: The possibility…

Marielle Heller's new film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, about the mild-mannered TV host Mister Rogers, seems set to receive awards recognition for its sensitive portrayal of a national hero and the real-life connection he formed with a journalist who interviewed him. Appearing at Deadline's The Contenders…

A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood director Marielle Heller has signed a first-look overall TV deal with Big Beach, the film’s producer, via her new production shingle Defiant By Nature. Under the pact, Heller will develop and produce new series and specials for television, some of which she may direct, while also…

Rather than being a full-on biopic, Sony’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood takes us into Mr. Rogers life through the eyes of a 1998 Esquire journalist played by The Americans Primetime Emmy winner Matthew Rhys in the Sony film. Rhys plays Lloyd Vogel, an investigative journalist who is given a small profile…

Director Marielle Heller is surprisingly calm. Having locked her highly-anticipated third feature A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood six weeks prior to TIFF, she is now waiting for the film—about the friendship between cynical journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) and the iconic master of nice, Fred Rogers (Tom…

While Jeff Whitty would write the first four drafts of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, summoning a screenplay from a memoir, he wasn’t anticipating the assignment. A Tony Award winner known at that point for Avenue Q—a raunchy and witty puppet musical, which has had a long run, on and off Broadway—the aptly named Whitty was…

It was a natural for Fox Searchlight to bring its Oscar-buzzed drama Can You Ever Forgive Me? to Deadline’s first-ever The Contenders New York all-day event at the  DGA Theater. If ever there was a film in which New York City is also a key character it is this one, a true story about a down-on-her-luck author of…