After decade-long odyssey, Silberling strikes gold with ‘Moonlight Mile’
What started out as a way for Brad Silberling to overcome the loss of his girlfriend has turned into a probable award nominee.
By Terry Lawson
Knight Ridder-Tribune

TORONTO — Brad Silberling is still waiting for the catharsis.

He thought it might come when the stalker who had murdered his girlfriend, actress Rebecca Shaeffer, in 1989 was sentenced to life without parole in a case prosecuted by Marcia Clark. He thought it might come when his successful efforts to get an anti-stalking law passed in California became a national model in 1994, and he thought it might come when he fell in love with and wed “Judging Amy” star Amy Brenneman, with whom he has a child.

He even harbored a tiny hope that he would feel it when Shaeffer’s father traveled to Toronto with about 60 friends this month to attend the Toronto International Film Festival’s world premiere of “Moonlight Mile,” written and directed by Silberling and inspired by the feelings he and Shaeffer’s parents experienced in the aftermath of her death.

“But you know what?” Silberling asks. “I’ve finally realized that big moment never really washes over you like that. There’s just a lot of little moments along the way that change your sadness and anger into different, less-painful feelings. I think the best one for me was when I sent the first draft of the script to Rebecca’s mother, who is a writer herself, after I had finished it, to get her reaction. She called and said, ‘Thank you for getting this right.’ If she hadn’t said that, I don’t think I would have gone on.”

So Silberling did, starting a nearly decade-long odyssey that finally ends with “Moonlight Mile.” Moreover, it arrives with expectations. It’s a film Silberling says many studio executives just couldn’t get — “a funny movie about grief? How do we sell that?” — is now being talked about as an Academy Award possibility, with Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon, who play the murdered girl’s parents, the most likely nominees.

Silberling is quick to point out the film is not autobiographical.

“I’m a very private person, and I couldn’t write that kind of film,” he said. “I’ve been describing it as emotionally autobiographical, but that’s just a phrase, really. There’s a lot of truth in it, but its story isn’t my story.”

Its story has Jake Gyllenhaal, the 21-year-old star of “The Good Girl,” returning to the small hometown of his fiancee for her funeral. She was murdered by a man who had come to a diner looking to kill his wife.

In a state of what Silberling describes as “emotional autism,” he finds himself moving in with his fiancee’s parents, who are also grasping at ways to cope with the pointlessness of the tragedy. The father figures the best thing to do is get on with life and invites Gyllenhaal to become his business partner; the mother is alternately paralyzed with grief and angry at everyone.

“I was so lucky to get actors who got it,” says Silberling, who spent many years dancing with studios who “loved the script but wanted to change everything about it.”

One executive assured him he had to change the parents to WASPs, which would have meant abandoning his dream of casting Hoffman in the father’s role. Though he won that battle, he had another fight persuading Hoffman to take the part. Though Hoffman is no longer the box-office power he was in the ‘70s, he still drives directors crazy with his reluctance to commit to a role, and then he drives them crazy once he does; he questions every comma in every scene.