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

For Hall, the seeds of "Daddio" were planted as a child when she slipped past her parents to watch a TV series entirely inappropriate for her age.

"Do you remember 'Taxicab Confessions?'" she says of the hidden camera docuseries that ran on HBO from 1995 to 2006. "I have to bring it up because I used to sneak downstairs in my childhood home. I was too young to be watching but I would watch it and I was absolutely riveted.

"I grew up in the Midwest, so at that point in my life, New York didn't feel like a real place," she says. "It might as well have been Gotham City, you know what I mean? Like, it didn't feel like an actual place, it felt like someplace in the movies but it wasn't real. But when I watched 'Taxicab Confessions,' It gave me a feeling like, 'Oh, New York is a real place with incredible people and characters and of all walks of life from all over the world."

Hall moved to New York City in 2008 to pursue a career in theater, primarily working as a playwright.

"This story is a bit of a love letter to New York," she says, describing it as a simple desire to write a story set in a yellow cab, an idea that arose alongside the rise of ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft.

"It made me a little nervous that experience might go the way of the dinosaur," Hall says. "So I think this film is my way of just saying there's something really special that happens when you get in the back of a cab, and I hope that we as a society decide that it should continue to exist."

Honest conversation

In "Daddio," when Clark picks up Girlie at JFK she's just returned from several weeks at home in Oklahoma, away from her life in Manhattan as a coder. As Clark and Girlie converse, a verbal dance of increasing intimacy begins.

"I think that both these people, it just so happens that they're both pretty mischievous and very curious," Johnson says of the conversation that begins as Clark leaves JFK on the Van Wyck Expressway. "I've definitely had moments with strangers where you find a common ground and a common connection.

"So I think in the beginning, she's guarded," she says. "She lives in New York. She's probably been hit on by many a cab driver. But there's something that's not that. At times, there's the thing that's igniting for her and inspiring for her and interesting for her.

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