Rebecca Miller grew up with drama. Then she married it. Now she just wants to be funny

 It’s been six years since writer-director Rebecca Miller’s last feature, an HBO documentary about her famous father, the late playwright Arthur Miller. And another two years since her previous fiction film, 2015’s “Maggie’s Plan,” starring a pre-”Lady Bird” Greta Gerwig. So when Miller’s new movie, the wistful, delightfully unstable romantic comedy “She Came to Me” (opening Oct. 6), premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, some in the press described it as her comeback. But that’s not how she perceives things.

“I’m just plodding along,” Miller says over Zoom from her office in New York. “It takes quite a long time to get an independent film together, so I suppose it can feel like someone’s just been swallowed up by quicksand. But in reality, what they’re doing is creating a film and the producers are trying to find the money, and then we had the pandemic. And during that time, I was also working on a book of short stories. So, from my point of view, I’m just putting one foot in front of the other.”

Based on her own brief sketch about a novelist suffering writer’s block, “She Came to Me” expands Miller’s premise and changes the main character’s profession. Peter Dinklage plays Steven, a creatively stymied New York composer struggling to complete his latest opera. His cerebral psychiatrist wife, Patricia (Anne Hathaway), suggests he go for a walk to clear his head — an outing that will upend his life once he meets Katrina (Marisa Tomei), a blunt, horny tugboat captain.

“She Came to Me” boldly combines the screwball comedy and the existential drama, sharing with “Maggie’s Plan” a growing interest in using humor to tackle life’s great mysteries after focusing on more somber fare in 2002’s “Personal Velocity” and 2005’s “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” (the latter starring her husband, the actor Daniel Day-Lewis). Miller, who turns 61 in mid-September, finds it amusing that audiences might be thrown by her shift toward comedy.

“When I made ‘Maggie’s Plan,’ everyone was like, ‘But she’s not funny,’ ” she says, laughing. “I’m like, how do you know I’m not funny? I just haven’t been showing that part of myself as much. The older I get, the more I feel that looking at sad things through a lighter lens is hard. It’s very difficult to keep the bubbles of the soufflé up.”

Still, Miller owns up to a tide shift in her thinking. “It’s a forgiving way of looking at life,” she says of comedy, “which I find very attractive — especially right now. It’s not pretending that nothing terrible happens. It’s that you choose to look at the absurdity and the humor of life, and embrace it.”

Her characters may be more amusingly flawed than before, but they share with her earlier creations a soulful introspection and unbridled wanderlust: a desire to break free, and an uncertainty about whether true freedom is possible. Miller talked to The Times about her feelings about AI, her friendship with Gerwig and the long shadow of her dad’s legacy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I love that your characters never behave like movie characters — they meander down their own paths, not worrying about conforming to a straightforward plot. That’s especially true with “She Came to Me.”All of them seem to be operating in their own universes.

Once a character has popped into my head and I’ve decided to write about them, I have an obligation — to honor them and to make them complete. I really do believe that if you put enough love and psychic energy into a character, they do start to generate their own destiny.

I remember showing my husband the first 20 pages of this. He was like, “Oh, my God, good luck.” [Laughs] There were so many balls in the air. He was like, “How are you going to land this?” But that’s part of the challenge.

Not the easiest thing to hear from Daniel Day-Lewis.Were you tired of working in a more serious vein?