How She Came to Me, Starring Peter Dinklage, Got Bruce Springsteen to Write a Song: “It Never Hurts to Ask”

Liz Shannon Miller
·7 min read
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The post How She Came to Me, Starring Peter Dinklage, Got Bruce Springsteen to Write a Song: “It Never Hurts to Ask” appeared first on Consequence.

Rebecca Miller’s She Came to Me isn’t just a movie about how a struggling composer of operas (Peter Dinklage) is transformed after meeting the mysterious Katrina (Marisa Tomei), who is a tugboat captain. It’s a film about the creative process and how it’s fueled by unexpected surprises in life… like, say, meeting a tugboat captain, or getting to collaborate with Bruce Springsteen on the song for the end of a film.

“I always feel like it never hurts to ask,” Miller tells Consequence. “You know, people want to do interesting work. What’s the worst thing that can happen? They say no?”

As composer Bryce Dessner of The National explains during a joint Zoom interview, Springsteen came to mind as an idea for the end of She Came to Me, while he and Miller were considering “the kind of folksy universal feeling of this film, especially in the character of Katrina, played by Marisa Tomei… Basically, I immediately just heard his voice.”

Of course, Dessner’s a fan: “I met Bruce many years ago, and of course, my band — he’s like our absolute hero. So I said it to Rebecca and she’s like, ‘Hmm.'”

Getting the acclaimed singer/songwriter to write “Addicted to Romance” for the closing credits of their collaboration wasn’t something that felt immediately attainable. However, Dessner says that Miller is a lot more optimistic than he is: “What would immediately seem insurmountable to me, she’s like, ‘Well, huh, I wonder if we can get to him.’ We just started talking about it and it ended up happening and what was already an incredible collaboration just went off the charts bonkers. It was amazing to get to work with him — there was like a period of time where I was on the phone with Bruce Springsteen, like regularly, which was so fun. ”

Prior to She Came to Me, Miller had connected with Springsteen’s representatives to use the song “Dancing in the Dark” in her 2015 film Maggie’s Plan. While she had no qualms about reaching out and asking him to consider doing a song, she was nervous about sending him the completed film for his consideration. “But Bryce did say, ‘I think he’d really like it.’ And Bryce saying it from the point of view of somebody who’s already also a huge rock person made me think, well, that’s a perspective that makes me have more faith.”

Fortunately, once she did send him the film, “he and Patty [Scialfa] both loved it, and he was inspired to write the song. I mean, there was no guarantee he’d write the song — it was just because he was inspired by the character of Katrina and the story. So it was almost a doubling of what happens to Steven [Dinklage’s character] in the film, because he was talking about how he hadn’t really been writing much for almost a year. So it was just a wonderful circle.”

Getting a song from Bruce was far from the full extent of Miller and Dessner’s collaboration, because as soon as Miller finished her original script, she knew that she would need to seek out someone who could handle both the film’s score as well as the original opera numbers featured in the film. That’s a lot for one composer to handle, but “Bryce is unique in the sense of the breadth of what he’s able to do,” Miller says.

The key collaborator on the music turns out to be pianist Katia Labeque, as she was the mutual friend who initially connected Miller and Dessner. The set-up began with Labeque “strongly suggesting” that Miller listen to Dessner’s music when she began working on the film; Labeque is one of Dessner’s main collaborators, who’s featured prominently on the film’s score.

Says Dessner, “Rebecca is basically family to Katia and Katia’s one of my closest friends, and so it felt immediately very intimate. And then to be invited into such a special project — it’s really not like what a normal film scoring situation would be at all. It’s a much deeper kind of collaboration.”

Dessner came in during the pre-production process, because, he says, “we needed to work at the music pretty far ahead of time. When you have onscreen music, especially onscreen music that is sung on screen by opera singers, you really have to have it fully.” It helped that “Rebecca had really thought it through, as the librettist of the operas — she had written both scenes and sent them to me as part of the full script.”

So Dessner started by writing the opera scenes, especially as their musical development would be threaded throughout the plot. “We hear elements of it as [Peter Dinklage’s] character’s getting inspired, and then it goes into a scene of that opera being rehearsed, and then it comes back later into the actual opera that’s being staged for the premiere. So it’s really a very interesting peek behind the curtain of the creative process, in a way where you feel this composer unlocking what will become his work. He’s inspired by these events in his life, and then he creates this piece of art.”

Dessner and Dinklage worked together less on She Came to Me than they did on their previous collaboration, 2021’s Cyrano — simply because Dinklage doesn’t sing in the film. “There’s a moment where he plays like three notes that I wrote for him to play on the piano,” Dessner says. “But he’s very musical and his brother is a violinist, and he’s very aware of my compositions.”

Set in New York City, She Came to Me also captures something that Miller appreciates about the town — how “you do encounter people that you didn’t mean to run into. In a city like L.A., you drive from where you intended to be to where you intended to go — that’s mostly true of places where you have to drive everywhere. But when you’re walking with the possibility of just getting lost in some part of the city, it does happen.”

This is reflected not just in the chance encounter between Dinklage and Tomei’s characters that instigates so much of what happens, but in Miller’s other characters, who all occupy their own unique worlds of religious devotion or Civil War reenacting or tugboat captaining. “I wanted to have almost a layer cake of American life. All these different subcultures, I wanted each of them to be believable.”

The opera world, she adds, “was maybe the hardest to get right, because of all the many components.” However, it comes together thanks to Dinklage’s performance. Says Miller, “The thing about Peter is that you really believe him as a composer. And I think some of it has to do with his own musicality. Some of it maybe has to do with his brother and knowing what musicians are like, but sometimes it’s hard to believe that actors are really the artists that they’re meant to be portraying. Maybe some of it had to do with his comfort with and friendship with Bryce, I’m not sure. But I thought it was a very important component.”

This was one of the reasons why Miller wanted to work with a composer like Dessner, “somebody who wrote concert music and really understood that. I wanted the character to be believable. You’re inside his head as he begins to crack the ice that’s formed over his creative mind, and the music starts to penetrate him as he’s stimulated by his life. That was very exciting creatively, for both of us.”

She Came to Me is in theaters now.

How She Came to Me, Starring Peter Dinklage, Got Bruce Springsteen to Write a Song: “It Never Hurts to Ask”
Liz Shannon Miller

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