Anne Hathaway on Working with Director Rebecca Miller 20 Years After First Auditioning for Her (Exclusive)

"Now I just get to be friends with her," Hathaway tells PEOPLE of working with director Miller on 'She Came to Me,' in theaters Friday

For Anne Hathaway, working with Rebecca Miller was a full-circle moment.

The actress stars alongside Peter Dinklage and Marisa Tomei in She Came to Me, a romantic dramedy directed by Miller (The Private Lives of Pippa Lee) that follows Dinklage's character Steven, an opera composer who has a breakdown before later finding inspiration — artistic and otherwise — in a tugboat captain (Tomei) while struggling with work and family life, including his relationship with wife Patricia (Hathaway).

In PEOPLE's interview with Hathaway and Miller about the film — which was granted a SAG-AFTRA Interim Agreement to allow promotion during the ongoing actors' strike — the Oscar winner, 40, discussed how "it was everything I hope it would be and more" to work with the filmmaker, whom she first auditioned for 20 years ago, for a different project.

"I'm very proud of my teenage self for having such exquisite taste that I recognized, in Rebecca, someone that I really aspired to be more like," Hathaway says. "And so the idea that we found each other at the right time with the right part, and now I just get to be friends with her."

"Rebecca brings so much to the table, and I've loved all of your movies, and this one is a really special addition to the canon of your work," she tells the director.

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Related: Anne Hathaway Encourages Peter Dinklage to 'Get Lost' in She Came to Me Clip (Exclusive)

Miller is known for films like Angela (1995), The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005) and Maggie's Plan (2015). She is also the daughter of late playwright Arthur Miller, and wife of retired actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

Recalling Hathaway's first audition for her, Miller, 61, tells PEOPLE, "When I first met her, I think she was just already a little too grown up for what I was looking for. ... And I needed somebody who was almost less formed."

"But now," says the award-winning filmmaker, "it's just been such a joy because Annie has a very complete way of looking at something."

"She's able to look at the whole story, but she's still very much inside her character and advocates for her character and really thinks it through in a really beautiful way, but she's very instinctive at the same time," Miller continues. "It's this combination you're always looking for in a partner."

Related: Anne Hathaway Hopes for Possible Reunion with The Devil Wears Prada Costar Meryl Streep: ‘I Wish. I Wish. I Wish.’

In She Came to Me, Hathaway's type-A character, Patricia, is a psychiatrist, and tells her uninspired husband Steven (Dinklage, 54) to go on a walk and "get lost" to kickstart his creativity.

But Patricia struggles with demons of her own, many of which eventually come to a head in an intense scene that Hathaway jokes to PEOPLE she prepared for "the same way you eat an elephant: one bite at a time."

"I just kind of imagined someone who really had built her life around taking care of other people and had, in a way, three full-time jobs, all going at the same time," she explains. "And the only way that she could make it work was that she just didn't need to ask herself specific questions. So it's not like she was ever not herself, but she was a version of herself — just never all at the same time."

As for Dinklage's casting, Miller says she "wanted to redefine, rethink, who would be a wonderful, super attractive male lead, but in a new way."

"And he's so real, on the one hand, on screen, but he has immense comic timing and he can express anxiety in the most hilarious and real way," she adds.

Asked what message she hopes viewers take from She Came to Me, Miller tells PEOPLE, "I think that 'Sometimes, you just have to get lost' is actually not a bad way to look at it."

"That sometimes we all think we know where we're going and we know who we are, and we've almost given up that we can redefine our narratives, and that actually there's no time that it's too late to reclaim maybe your truer self," she says.

Hathaway calls the movie, which also follows the relationship between Patricia's teenage son Julian (Evan Ellison) and his girlfriend Tereza (Harlow Jane), "a love story that throws open the doors and says, 'Everybody in.' "

"And my heart needs that right now. And the fact that it's a movie that feeds my brain as well, I'm thrilled about that," she says. "The first time I saw this movie — where my heart was at the end of it, it was so full of joy and it was exploding and full of laughter and emotion."

Hathaway adds, "I'm just really, really proud to be a part of putting something like that out into the world."

She Came to Me is in theaters Friday.

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