Peter Dinklage cheats on Anne Hathaway with Marisa Tomei in the trailer for She Came to Me

What do opera, therapy, Peter Dinklage, and Bruce Springsteen have in common?

That would be Rebecca Miller's new film She Came to Me. As seen in the exclusive trailer above, the movie — which has opened both the Berlin and Hudson Film Festivals this year and hits theaters Sept. 29 — follows opera composer Steven Lauddem (Dinklage), who is facing a major creative block just weeks before the deadline for his latest commission. With the support of his therapist wife, Patricia (Anne Hathaway, also a producer), who is in the midst of a crisis of her own, he pursues inspiration and finds it in an unlikely place: Brooklyn-based tugboat captain Katrina (Marisa Tomei).

Miller, who wrote and directed the film, has had ties to creative pursuits all her life — first, via her father, playwright Arthur Miller, and then, in her own right as an actor, writer, director, and novelist. But opera was never her milieu.

"My youngest son is studying to be a composer and we discovered opera together," Miller tells EW. "To be honest, I had never liked opera much but we went to the Met and started with La Bohème, which is a great first opera — so emotional, with gorgeous music — and I was converted right there. Then we started going to more challenging operas, and newer operas. And I started wondering what it was like to be a composer of new operas."

To make She Came to Me, her seventh directorial effort, Miller had to immerse herself in this new world, seeking advice from her son's teacher, composer Daniel Felsenfeld, Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb — "he spoke to me at length about the rehearsal process and let me watch a new great opera, L'Amour de Loin, being filmed" — and Paul Cremo, who workshops new operas for the Met, in addition to observing Philharmonic concert rehearsals.

"As a director, I was obsessed with the idea that the character Steven Lauddem's behavior in the film be authentic," she continues. "And that real composers could watch the film and believe it, even as much of the film has an absurd quality. I find that when you burrow deep into real life, you come back with some crazy gems, because life is inherently absurd."

Miller is also no stranger to the concept of the creative block. "The Block is the great fear, right under death itself, for people who harvest their imaginations for a living," she confesses. "I myself was totally blocked for about a year, and the feeling was a like claustrophobia, a kind of existential panic. I volunteered at a women's shelter in Ireland and somehow that unblocked me and led to Personal Velocity. Maybe because I was paying attention to other people and not staring inside my own head. I also remember my father going through the agonies of trying to find a subject or a character and getting inside it — 'Waiting for the lighting to strike,' as he called it."

Protagonist Pictures Peter Dinklage in 'She Came to Me'

She drew from her own solutions to the challenge to craft a narrative for Steven. "I find that making your mind blank or doing mundane tasks or concentrating on other people is the secret," she says. "The imagination likes to bloom in dark corners. If you shine a flashlight on it constantly it dries up. That's true in the film as well."

Despite this dedication to immersing herself in opera and probing the familiar obstacle of creative block, Miller turned to an unlikely source for an original song for the film — the Boss. "When the composer of the film, Bryce Dessner, and I were talking about who could write a song for the movie, I said I wanted a song that was purely American, and timeless," she explains. "And Bryce said, 'Well, there is one person for that, and it's Bruce Springsteen.' But it seemed unattainable."

Miller did have a relationship with Springsteen already; he had signed off on her using "Dancing in the Dark" for her 2015 film Maggie's Plan. "But asking him to write an original song seemed beyond the pale," she adds.

At the behest of Dessner, Miller worked up the courage to reach out to Springsteen's manager, who then replied with a note from Springsteen's wife, Patti Scialfa, to send the movie along for consideration. "They watched it, and they loved it!" says Miller. "I will never forget that phone call. Bruce and Patti were just over the moon about the movie. Bruce said to give him some time to see if anything came to him."

Three days later, Miller received a new song, "Addicted to Romance," which borrows a line from the film. "It's a song that seems like it could have existed forever, right out of the American Songbook," she reflects. "And the really extraordinary thing is, Bruce told me he hadn't written in over a year, but the film inspired him to do so, parallel to the way Steven is unblocked in the movie. Again, the mysteries of creativity, and how we are all creating each other, day by day."

Watch the trailer above for more.

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