Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn share a cab and life-changing conversation in 'Daddio'

ANAHEIM, Calif. — In "Daddio," the feature film debut of writer-director Christy Hall, nearly the entire story unfolds in a New York City yellow cab as it travels through the night from John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens to the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan.

That's it.

A cab driver played by Sean Penn, a passenger played by Dakota Johnson, and a conversation that rises and falls over the course of slightly more than 90 minutes.

For the viewer it's an intense, mesmerizing journey through the lives, loves, remembrances and regrets of Clark and Girlie, whose actual name is never revealed. Its appeal to Johnson, who's also a producer on the film, and Penn, who she recruited as her co-star, was equally powerful.

"As an actor, it's a delicious meal," Johnson says as she sits next to Penn in a suite at the Oceana Hotel in Santa Monica recently. "For it to be this sort of sweeping, soaring conversation in a contained space about subjects I find really interesting — the dynamics and power dynamics between men and women and family. It felt just like such a treat.

"So as an actor, a no-brainer for me," she says. "And then as a producer, my partner and I really wanted to make this film because most of the projects that I want to make really have a very large and loud-beating heart in them. And this one did for me. So much."

Penn, whose bare feet in the suite made Johnson seem a little overdressed in simple flats, said he was attracted to the film, which opens Friday, June 28, by the visual and emotional qualities of the screenplay.

"When I read a script, I really am sitting in the theater as an audience, and not looking at the character that I might do or not do," he says. "So for me, it was like what you just did. You just saw the film.

"That was what reading the script was like in many ways," he says. "Where I felt like, 'OK, here's something that, you know, lamentably is not approached often enough in film these days. Two people finding vulnerability in each other and a connection, and just such smart writing also where it's hitting nerves of things whether it was part of your life or someone else that you know."

Strangers in a cab

...continued

swipe to next page