, her producing partner Ro Donnelly and writer-director Christy Hall were on hand to celebrate the New York premiere of their upcoming film, , at the Festival on Monday night. The film, which also stars Sean Penn, follows Johnson’s Girlie as she gets in a cab, driven by Penn’s Clark, to take her from John F. Kennedy airport to her midtown Manhattan apartment.
Over the course of their ride, the two have a “life-altering conversation” about the important relationships in their lives. Johnson told that she was drawn to because of “the idea of humans being strangers and being so vulnerable with each other and connecting with each other and having a sort of life-altering conversation.” The also produced the film alongside Donnelly through their TeaTime Pictures banner.
“It was amazing,” she said of producing and acting in the film. “There was such a flow to everything on set, and it just felt very natural and very inspiring to be able to be an equal with everyone that I was working with.” Donnelly echoed Johnson’s sentiment about the project’s story focusing on the power of human connection but noted that making a film almost entirely in a taxi cab with two people was not easy.
“It felt like a bit of an impossible film,” she told . “It’s just a story about two people who connect deeply as human beings without judgment, and we just don’t get to see that anymore. We were making the anti-blockbuster.
” Prior to , writer-director Hall had a career mo.
