Destiny, serendipity costar in a life

“At a certain point,” Rebecca Miller says, the drip of melting snow outside her window accenting her words as she thinks back, “I was not getting films made. I’d knocked on every door and no one was interested. I thought I’d never be allowed to make my films.”

Understanding that this was “after all a commercial medium,” Miller decided “I should get real, I should be writing fiction. I started writing short stories, and out of that came ‘Personal Velocity’ and here I am again. Sometimes when you turn your back on something, it comes knocking on your door.”

“Here” is the Sundance Film Festival, where Miller’s “Personal Velocity” won the Grand Jury Prize in 2002. Now she’s returned as writer-director of the emotionally powerful “The Ballad of Jack and Rose,” a compelling, imaginative film about the love between fathers and daughters and the perils of idealism that stars her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s a story, she says, that “unrolls like a carpet.”

“All my films come out of a very personal place, but this was the one where I held back the least, was most unafraid of sentiment,” the filmmaker explains. “I knew it would be made or broken by nailing emotions, that if I could bring people in they would really care.”

“Jack and Rose,” set to open in Los Angeles on March 25, is in the festival’s noncompetitive Premieres section, which Miller, an articulate and down-to-earth woman of 42, says is fine with her.

“When my films (1995’s ‘Angela’ as well as ‘Personal Velocity’) have been in competition, I was in a state of complete anxiety. During ‘Angela’s’ first screening, I was in the back of the theater curled up in a fetal position. I was hyperventilating, I thought I was having a heart attack. I said to myself, ‘This thing is so personal, what was I thinking to show it in public.’ ”

That same sense of serendipity that got “Personal Velocity” made from a short-story collection seems to have been a thread running through Miller’s creative life. It figured in both how she became a director and in how “Jack and Rose” got to the screen in the form it has after a process that took 10 years.

Miller was 21, the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath living in an artist’s colony in Munich “when I realized I wanted to be a director. I was a painter, so far away from being able to do that that I felt ‘This is awful. I don’t want to have this feeling.’ ”

The roundabout process of becoming a director (“I was on a search” is how Miller describes it) moved forward after agent Sam Cohn suggested she should be an actress. She went on her first audition “almost as a joke” and when she got the part she thought “this could be a beginning, maybe I could learn about making films.”

Miller appeared in Mike Nichols’ “Regarding Henry,” Alan Pakula’s “Consenting Adults” and Alan Rudolph’s “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.” “I was not in anybody’s greatest film, but I learned so much,” she says. Once she’d raised the money for “Angela,” her first film, “that was it; I would never act again.”

She began working on the script that became “Jack and Rose” even before she shot “Angela.” Miller thought she had financing lined up in 1995. “I said, ‘Let’s offer it to the best actor’ ” and, though she’d never met him, she sent the script to Day-Lewis. “He was intrigued, but he was not prepared to do it for many reasons,” Miller says. “You have to be ready to tell that story, it has so much emotional dynamite.”

As luck would have it, that 1995 financing fell through. “The thing that was unusual about the script is that though it took so long to get right, it never got stale, it remained fresh to me, a little wellspring that was very much alive.”

After Miller married Lewis and became the mother of two young sons, she came back to the script and “saw things in a different way, my ideas started to change. Initially I had been more interested in Rose, but now I saw Jack’s conflict, the hyper-protective oceanic love he feels for her. My experiences as a person completed it, made me see what I had to do.”

Once she’d finished, Miller offered it to Day-Lewis again. “I said, ‘No pressure,’ ” she recounts, laughing, “ ‘but you’re still my first choice.’ He said, ‘Let me read it.’ Then months and months went by, and he decided to do it.” Which was a very good thing.

“If you have Daniel in a film, you have the experience of working with a great actor and it lifts everything to another level,” Miller says. “It’s like having a great car, you just touch the accelerator and you’re going 160 miles per hour. It’s not like a Volkswagen -- and I like Volkswagens -- it’s just not.”

Though she knew Day-Lewis was “not capable of faking an interest,” Miller worried that working with a spouse would be tricky. She found that the “day-to-day working together ... was so easy and so simple.” Still, “that was a slightly different us, and I’m glad to have the old us back.

“You do risk everything when you work together, you just do, and everyone who’s done it knows that. But if you get through it, it’s a wonderful thing to have done.” A pause. “This film was the closest thing to my heart, and I’m glad he’s at the heart of it.”

Even as an actress, Miller, who in “Jack and Rose” also gets strong performances from Camilla Belle, Catherine Keener, Beau Bridges and the rest of the cast, had a gift for working with her peers. “When I took classes with Sandy Meisner, the only thing I was good at was making other people break down emotionally, which was like a sexual experience where only the other person says, ‘That was great,’ ” she says with a laugh.

Miller says “Jack and Rose’s” story of an idealistic former commune leader with a teenage daughter and a potentially serious illness comes from both her fascination with the ‘60s and the fear she had as a child of both her parents dying and leaving her alone and vulnerable. As to how much of its story of a girl dealing with a powerful father was informed by her own experience, Miller says, “I’m certain that there’s some reflections of my own life, but as the writer you’re the worst person to be able to tell.”

With her mother having died three years ago, Miller and her family have moved back to Manhattan from Ireland to be near her father, who is 89. She has extensive footage shot for a documentary on him she is waiting for the right moment to edit, and her next project will be adapting her father’s “The Man Who Had All the Luck” for a film. “I love the idea of being able to talk to him, get ideas from him,” she says. “My parents were so proud of me, I always felt so cherished and loved.”

Now that she has established a strong artistic identity of her own, Miller looks back on her earlier years without it as “very, very tough. I was always a little oblivious, which helped me, but at times I was hurt and singed by press reports about me, confused by it. I would think ‘It’s just me.’ ”

From her perspective today, Miller also feels that, in a good way, “growing up in the shadow of a titan was humbling. You learn high standards, but it’s hard to become grandiose, which might be for the best. If what you make is a small thing it’s OK, because to try and wipe out your parents is impossible. If you play it right, it frees you.”

The other thing Miller gained during those years when directing didn’t seem possible was the determination that “I’m going to have a life anyway. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who woke up at 40 and said, ‘I forgot to have kids.’ I can’t live without expressing myself, but as long as I could do that in some way I’d be healthy and OK. That was a good lesson.”