In 1989, Rebecca Schaeffer, a 21-year-old television actress, answered the door of her West Hollywood apartment to a flower delivery man. Moments later, Robert Bardo shot her in the chest at point-blank range. He was a crazed fan who had been following her for weeks and adopted the disguise to gain entry to her home.
The case caused a sensation, eventually leading to anti-stalking legislation, and for months was the talk of Hollywood. Schaeffer's fiance, Brad Silberling, then 26, a film graduate, was caught up in the story as he struggled to come to terms with his loss. Minutes before she died, he had spoken to her on the phone and wished her luck for an audition later that day for The Godfather Part III.
"It stopped me cold in my tracks. I was supposed to write a project, I had started directing TV," Silberling says. "The moment this happened, there was a voice in my head saying, 'I don't know what I'm going to do'."
Silberling and Schaeffer had met at UCLA film school a couple of years earlier, but split up and only got back together eight weeks before she died. In the aftermath of Schaeffer's death, Silberling moved into her parents' house in Oregon, where he stayed for several months, cocooned in familial warmth and grief.
Four years later, his experiences inspired him to write Moonlight Mile, which shows a young man, Joe Nast (Jake Gyllenhaal), struggling to cope with the death of his fiancee while living with her bohemian parents, played by Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon.
Silberling says he didn't want to make a "bad documentary" about that period of his life, so he fictionalised it ("It is emotionally, not literally, true"), relocating the drama to the early '70s, when America experienced a collective sense of loss as it counted the human cost of the Vietnam war.
"There was an innocence and a shift in innocence which occurred at that time for a lot of these smaller towns, because so many young men didn't come home from the war," he says. The result is a moving, sometimes funny, family drama about grief and guilt, a studio film with an indie sensibility and few mawkish moments.
"Like the girl in the film, Rebecca was an only child with parents who were vital and interesting. I didn't know them very well and, suddenly, we were thrust into a unique type of intimacy in which the boundaries were unclear and the expectations hazy," says Silberling, courteous and candid, sitting in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel.
Given that the family weepie is a Hollywood staple, did Silberling think he could add anything to a much-maligned genre?
"What I hadn't seen on film before was some of the behaviour I witnessed or was part of, the kind of behaviour that shouldn't be around after a loss like that. I hadn't seen that on film, or at least depicted in an honest way," he says.
The relationships form the heart of the film, but there are welcome moments of gallows humour that help to balance the pathos. At the beginning of the film, there is a slapstick scene when the three principal characters scramble into a car, then rush to the funeral, leading to a comedy of errors. It is amusing, but surely too funny to be true.
"Actually, the most extreme behaviour in the film is the stuff that is closest to real life. One scene came from an incident after the funeral when I saw a friend of my girlfriend, although not a really close one, in a tug-of-war with my girlfriend's father over a tea set. I couldn't believe it. The poor man was so busy worrying about other people's feelings, he was probably thinking, 'Maybe I shouldn't be taking it', and I thought, 'No, it's your daughter's tea set, hang on to it'."
In the film, Nast is continually reminded how much his presence means to her grieving parents, which echoes Silberling's experience. "I did have all these people tugging at my sleeve, saying, 'Boy, you are really it for them now. You are what remains of their daughter'," he says.
When Silberling eventually moved back to Hollywood, he was greeted with pitying looks. Everyone, it seemed, knew about the murder. He carved out a career as a television director, but at the back of his mind he wanted to write something bigger based on that time.
At a recent lecture at the American Film Institute, Dustin Hoffman told the audience that Silberling "had made the movie to figure something out about himself".
"I think it's more ephemeral than that," Silberling says. "You'll write the same story your whole life, it'll have different characters, costumes and locations, but there will be certain issues and ideas running through the work."
In 1993, he "started running over the idea in his mind". A few months later, he would meet his future wife, Amy Brenneman, an actress best known for her role in NYPD Blue. "It's only after the fact that you look back and think, 'OK, interesting'. I was not only able to meet somebody and not run away - at the same time I was able to sit down and focus on some work." Two weeks before shooting started on Moonlight Mile, Brenneman gave birth to their first child, Charlotte. In some ways, the happy event brought back memories of the 1989 tragedy. "The four or five days after the birth was very much like losing my girlfriend. They were timeless days, when everything is in kind of a swirl and you don't want to eat," Silberling says.
Professionally, Silberling's fortunes changed when Steven Spielberg was impressed by an episode of Brooklyn Bridge, a television drama he had directed. Spielberg hired him to direct Casper (1995), and its success enabled him to take charge of City of Angels (1998), which starred Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan.
Both big-budget films were hits, but it would take three years to get Moonlight Mile, originally called "Babies in Black", off the ground. Four studios passed on the project, while Spielberg rejected it for Dreamworks because he thought it too similar to American Beauty, another family drama that was in production and had run into trouble.
Without a star as the young lead - Keanu Reeves, Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp were mentioned - everyone was reluctant to finance the project until Susan Sarandon, and then Hoffman, signed on.
The finished movie received mainly good reviews in the US. For Silberling, however, the most important audience members were Schaeffer's parents, Benson and Danna. I am curious about their reaction to a film that takes them back to the worst days of their lives. Silberling remains close to the couple, who read every draft of the script. When the film was finished, he took a print up to Oregon, rented out a local cinema on a Sunday morning, and held a screening. It was an emotional two hours, but the Schaeffers believe the film serves as an indirect tribute to their daughter, and has allowed acquaintances who were previously embarrassed to talk about Rebecca once more.
"This movie will bring her back to people's minds," said Benson Schaeffer at the premiere.
The desire to empathise with the parents has led to some awkward situations, however. Danna Schaeffer explained: "One lady said, 'I know just how you felt, my dog died last week', and she meant it."
For Silberling, however, Moonlight Mile symbolises the way he was able to rebuild his life.
"I was exploring how it is that I ended up still able to find hopeful things in life. I have family now and somehow survived the experience. With this film, I was trying to figure out how that became possible."
- Observer
Moonlight Mile opens on Thursday.