Anne Hathaway on Working with Director Rebecca Miller 20 Years After First Auditioning for Her (Exclusive)

For Anne Hathaway, working with Rebecca Miller was a full-circle second.

The actress stars alongside Peter Dinklage and Marisa Tomei in She Got here to Me, a romantic dramedy directed by Miller (The Non-public Lives of Pippa Lee) that follows Dinklage’s character Steven, an opera composer who has a breakdown earlier than later discovering inspiration — inventive and in any other case — in a tugboat captain (Tomei) whereas battling work and household life, together with his relationship with spouse Patricia (Hathaway).

In PEOPLE’s interview with Hathaway and Miller in regards to the movie — which was granted a SAG-AFTRA Interim Settlement to permit promotion in the course of the ongoing actors’ strike — the Oscar winner, 40, mentioned how “it was every little thing I hope it could be and extra” to work with the filmmaker, whom she first auditioned for 20 years in the past, for a special challenge.

“I am very pleased with my teenage self for having such beautiful style that I acknowledged, in Rebecca, somebody that I actually aspired to be extra like,” Hathaway says. “And so the concept we discovered one another on the proper time with the proper half, and now I simply get to be associates along with her.”

“Rebecca brings a lot to the desk, and I’ve beloved your entire films, and this one is a extremely particular addition to the canon of your work,” she tells the director.

Miller is recognized for movies like Angela (1995), The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005) and Maggie’s Plan (2015). She can be the daughter of late playwright Arthur Miller, and spouse of retired actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

Recalling Hathaway’s first audition for her, Miller, 61, tells PEOPLE, “After I first met her, I believe she was simply already just a little too grown up for what I used to be on the lookout for. … And I wanted any individual who was virtually much less fashioned.”

“However now,” says the award-winning filmmaker, “it is simply been such a pleasure as a result of Annie has a really full means of one thing.”

“She’s ready to take a look at the entire story, however she’s nonetheless very a lot inside her character and advocates for her character and actually thinks it by way of in a extremely lovely means, however she’s very instinctive on the identical time,” Miller continues. “It is this mix you are all the time on the lookout for in a associate.”

In She Got here to Me, Hathaway’s type-A personality, Patricia, is a psychiatrist, and tells her uninspired husband Steven (Dinklage, 54) to go on a stroll and “get misplaced” to kickstart his creativity.

However Patricia struggles with demons of her personal, lots of which finally come to a head in an intense scene that Hathaway jokes to PEOPLE she ready for “the identical means you eat an elephant: one chew at a time.”

“I simply form of imagined somebody who actually had constructed her life round caring for different folks and had, in a means, three full-time jobs, all going on the identical time,” she explains. “And the one means that she may make it work was that she simply did not must ask herself particular questions. So it isn’t like she was ever not herself, however she was a model of herself — simply by no means all on the identical time.”

As for Dinklage’s casting, Miller says she “wished to redefine, rethink, who could be a beautiful, tremendous engaging male lead, however in a brand new means.”

“And he is so actual, on the one hand, on display, however he has immense comedian timing and he can specific nervousness in probably the most hilarious and possible way,” she provides.

Requested what message she hopes viewers take from She Got here to Me, Miller tells PEOPLE, “I believe that ‘Generally, you simply should get misplaced’ is definitely not a foul means to take a look at it.”

“That typically all of us suppose we all know the place we’re going and we all know who we’re, and we have virtually given up that we are able to redefine our narratives, and that really there is no time that it is too late to reclaim possibly your more true self,” she says.

Hathaway calls the film, which additionally follows the connection between Patricia’s teenage son Julian (Evan Ellison) and his girlfriend Tereza (Harlow Jane), “a love story that throws open the doorways and says, ‘All people in.’ ”

“And my coronary heart wants that proper now. And the truth that it is a film that feeds my mind as nicely, I am thrilled about that,” she says. “The primary time I noticed this film — the place my coronary heart was on the finish of it, it was so stuffed with pleasure and it was exploding and stuffed with laughter and emotion.”

Hathaway provides, “I am simply actually, actually proud to be part of placing one thing like that out into the world.”

She Got here to Me is in theaters Friday.