by Jeremy Arnold

Set in the '70s, Moonlight Mile is the story of the aftermath of a young woman's sudden, senseless murder.

Her surviving fiancé, Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal), lives in her house with her parents, Ben and JoJo (Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon), as together, they struggle with her loss and attempt to move on with their lives. In the meantime, Joe, who harbors a secret about his relationship that he feels too guilty to reveal, finds himself falling for a young local woman, Bertie (Ellen Pompeo). Holly Hunter rounds out the cast as a prosecuting attorney working on the murder case.

"Rebecca was buried up in Oregon," Silberling recalled, "and I did go up to be with her family for a few weeks. I was living in her bedroom, and we were perceived as a family unit even though we didn't know each other very well. There was such a weird intimacy about it, and I remember thinking at the time, 'if you blink, you could be frozen here three years from now.' I could completely imagine that I wouldn't leave that house. And all this was going on while we were trying to find a way to grieve."

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At the time, he had been directing episodic television for five years and had yet to make his feature debut. Fate was soon knocking on his door, however, in the form of Steven Spielberg, who had seen an episode of Brooklyn Bridge that Silberling directed. Impressed with Silberling's visual storytelling ("Steven said he could see I was trying to make a movie, but I only had a half hour to do it and didn't have all the resources") Spielberg called him in for a meeting and offered to produce his first feature, which eventually ended up being Casper (1995).

Following the huge success of both Casper and his next film, City of Angels (1998), Silberling's name was firmly entrenched on the Hollywood map, and offers poured in for his next feature. But he had only Moonlight Mile on his mind, and he dusted it off to write another draft. "I turned down everything under the sun," Silberling recalled. "I told my agent, it's time, I have to make this film. And not just for catharsis, but because it will be the strongest piece of work that I've done. It will represent what I can do." Little did Silberling know it would take three more years until he found a home for his film, at Disney. "The fact that there was a death prior to the film, and that the film was going to take off from that point, definitely scared people," Silberling said.

So did other elements of the script's realism. "Everything that's truthful about the experience [of grieving] is everything that's not the cliché," he explained. "Behavior and details are unexpected, and they can seem crazy but they're real. I didn't want to turn it around to be what everyone expects the experience to be. The fact is, for example, there's almost an excitement in the immediate aftermath [of a death]. Things need to get planned, details have to happen — it's all there to not leave you alone with what's happened."

Humor, too, is in abundant supply throughout the film, especially in the first several minutes, which depict a funeral and a wake in which well-meaning guests say the worst possible things and the family dog experiences digestive problems.

"I knew going in that I had to give the audience permission to laugh right away," Silberling said. "If the laughs had come at the end of the second reel, I don't think the audience would feel like they were allowed to join in. They'd feel it wasn't appropriate. I think for anybody who's gone through any kind of loss there is a perception as to how you are supposed to grieve. Sometimes people think of it as a flu that is supposed to pass, and people say, 'So are you over that? How's it going?' If you're not careful, you can actually start fulfilling the role of the bereaved."

By letting the audience laugh early, Silberling also allowed for stunning shifts in tone later in the picture. Just as the characters put up their own defense mechanisms, only to have grief eventually knock them down quite powerfully, so too does the audience get a sense of the emotional roller coaster — early humor and "excitement" give way to moments of deep, poignant sorrow. That contrast, aside from being realistic, makes the sorrow even more powerful for the audience. "I do constantly think of being in that audience," Silberling said. "'Are we clear? Do we have enough information so they can now surmise?' But I don't struggle with it. I go to movies all the time, and I feel I'm a really good audience member. If I'm getting it, I trust that other people are getting it, too."

Creating even more tension is that these sequences also contain significant moments of silence, as do other scenes of characters alone. Such moments are golden to Silberling. "By the time somebody processes an emotion and it's spoken," he said, "it's usually been veiled or guarded, or perhaps it's a fib. Often what's not spoken is much more honest. And small pieces of behavior — private moments when somebody doesn't think they are being watched — tell you so much and help you get invested in the characters."

To cite one small example, Silberling staged a scene in which Hoffman and Gyllenhaal sit next to each other on a bench so that Hoffman's feet are swinging and don't quite touch the ground. "He's a guy who's constantly deferred being an adult," Silberling said, "and has always had an excuse: it wasn't his fault, or everyone's failed him, and that's why he hasn't been successful in business."

Subtle moments like these are why production is Silberling's favorite part of the directing process. "I do love editing because you don't have 150 people on your back, but the real thrill for me is the satisfaction of creating images and capturing performances, of being out there and knowing you just got it. It's hard to beat."

Another choice was occasionally to let his actors move in and out of the plane of focus. "It's a way of letting the film plane express emotion," he said. "If you use it selectively, it's really wonderful."

In one such scene, Sarandon finally succumbs to her own grief and, exhausted, is helped onto a couch by Gyllenhaal. As he watches her lying there, "he just feels like a fraud, responsible for everything, so that when he finally leaves his close-up and heads up the stairs, he's like a ghost. It's as if he doesn't even deserve to hold focus. And so he doesn't. He just floats away, weightless."

Though the film has a history of several titles, it's appropriate that Moonlight Mile was ultimately named for a Rolling Stones' song. Of the film's $21 million budget, a full $3 million was devoted to music, illustrating just how important it was to Silberling as a storytelling device. The soundtrack is not only a memorable mix of first-rate songs of the period (by such artists as Van Morrison, Robert Plant, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Jethro Tull, Sly Stone and Jefferson Airplane), but the songs directly comment on the action — and in some cases the action was literally shot to the music.

From the very beginning of Silberling's creative process, music played a role. "When I write, I'm aided by music," he said. "And some of my most productive time is in my car with the CD player on 'repeat' while I just dream of the pictures that go with the song. I really think it comes from making Super 8mm films as a kid with a camera that had no sound head — music was my dialogue, and that never changed."

On the set, Silberling had playback running constantly as a way to keep the cast and crew in the mood of the story. "People worry that it will turn the set into a party atmosphere, but usually it doesn't. You can be productive when you're rhythmic; people get into a groove. There's almost a sense of choreography that everybody has, and I'm convinced it gets in the film somehow."

A key, mostly wordless sequence of the film was shot to the entire length of Van Morrison's "I'll Be Your Lover, Too." In the sequence, Gyllenhaal sneaks out of his bedroom window, makes his way by foot into town to meet Pompeo, and returns home to climb back through the window. In other words, the sequence traverses much time and space. Nonetheless, Silberling was able to direct each shot to the appropriate few seconds of the song, and when he and editor Lisa Churgin met to edit the sequence, they found themselves happily shocked.

"We agreed to start by just cutting the pictures in the rhythm that we felt was appropriate, without listening to the music," Silberling said. "And when we then ran it to the music, we found that it delivered itself up perfectly, and we never touched it again."

Silberling even went to the trouble of running dailies with music on a separate track. "I am not always the most trusting of people's abilities to watch dailies," he said. "I think music helps them actually see a movie and not just isolated pieces of film." The actors responded enthusiastically to the use of so much music. "Every morning," Silberling recalled, "Dustin would come over to me at the sound cart and say, 'What's today? Come on, let me hear!'"

"I never met anybody more respectful of the script," said Silberling. "Dustin's very rhythmically sensitive, and he wanted to hear my rhythm as a starting point for his own interpretation. I'm loathe to even come close to line readings, but Dustin said, 'No, trust me. When I did Death of a Salesman, I made Arthur Miller read the whole part to me. I wanted to hear what his original intent was.'"

Sarandon and Hoffman had never worked together before, but any questions about their chemistry were answered at their first reading. "It was eerie," Silberling recalled. "They felt like they'd been married for 30 years."

Gyllenhaal, said Silberling, "had the hardest job in the movie. The classic screenwriting no-no is to create a passive character, and the character of Joe is passive in that he can't divulge truth, and as a result can't take action. He's constantly trying to figure out what he should or should not be saying. So with Jake it was about discussing what the components were in his head at any given moment and trying to lend specificity to them."

Bertie was the most difficult role to cast. "I didn't want the distraction of [a known actress]. I wanted the audience to meet Bertie like a breath of fresh air." Silberling remembered meeting with "every young actress you can think of," literally for years, until, finally, casting director Avy Kauffman came across Ellen Pompeo, a relative newcomer whose chemistry with Gyllenhaal is one of the film's true pleasures. In her first major role, the actress was understandably nervous, and the challenge for Silberling here was to "bolster her confidence and relaxation, and make sure her scenes connected — because we didn't have the time or budget to be able to come back. It was a matter of reminding her she was there for a reason, that she was the one who got the job after I was meeting people for years."

This meant not just a lot of organized rehearsal time with the actress but also something as simple as Silberling's hand on Pompeo's shoulder right before a take. Since Moonlight Mile, Pompeo has been cast in the upcoming Catch Me If You Can and Daredevil, prompting Silberling to joke that soon he "won't be able to get her on the phone!"

Silberling would be the first to admit that he owes a lot to his 1st AD, Michele Panelli-Venetis, with whom he first worked on Casper. "Because we know each other really well and she knows my taste, it allows me to empower her with a degree of storytelling. She can invest herself in the way I'm trying to tell a story. And when it comes to background, Michele is wonderful at giving the extras very specific actions and behaviors. She knows I smell false behavior very quickly."

Furthermore, Silberling said, a good 1st AD should be a deft politician. A case in point on Moonlight Mile came when the production lost a day of shooting a mere three days into the 49-day schedule. Bad Boston weather prevented the scheduled exterior shoot, and "a screw-up with the local art department" meant that the cover set was not ready. With an actors' strike looming, Disney grew alarmed — to the extent that the studio sent a physical production executive to Boston.

"The executive was very anxious, and I saw Michele, along with my UPM and line producer, Patty Whitcher, work magic in terms of anticipating her concerns, calming her fears, walking her through the solutions we had come up with to account for the lost time, and having the backbone to not feel cowed," Silberling said.

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