"Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing and Charm School" ministers dance therapy to a cast of broken souls when Frank Keane (Robert Carlyle) promises crash victim Steve Mills (John Goodman) to meet his childhood sweetheart at a dance school, as promised 40 years earlier. One man's fantasy becomes another man's dream come true, as widower Frank discovers love (Marisa Tomei) along the way.

From his editing suite in Pasadena, filmmaker Randall Miller (a veteran television director) explores living, dying and the color magenta in this story of rhythmic redemption.

Q: You did a short film 15 years ago that has now become a feature film. What made you go back to the future?

RM: My wife, Jody Savin, and I made a short when we were at AFI (American Film Institute) for our thesis film. I've since directed features for Disney and TV shows like "Thirtysomething," but no matter what I did in my career, people always looked at, and loved, the short. It captured an innocence. For years people were saying, "Turn the little rascals into something," and urged me to make it long. I resisted since I saw it as something pure. Three years ago my dad, my wife's mom and someone else really close passed away. We were looking back at things and feeling a lot of loss. I hadn't seen the short in ten years. But we saw that we could do something with this, looking from the perspective of today.

Q: So your character Steve Mill's memory sequences are actually footage from the short?

RM: Yeah, the short film is scratchy old 16mm and the new one is 35 anamorphic. What you can do with digital intermediate in the last couple of years is really amazing.

Q: The character arcs sync up as you cut back and forth in time. How was it building story through flashback.

RM: We weren't trying to do traditional flashback, but more on purpose three linear stories playing out. The way I see this movie is as a very simple story. One guy takes a baton from this other guy, but it's like a poem in the storytelling. Three different realities are going on at once--the dying man, the eight-year old kid and the man going forward–and the story unfolds in a linear way. When you go to analyze your past sometimes you think you understand one thing and it's the most important, but you get something else. If you allow yourself to look at it like art, it seems very thin in terms of story and dialogue, but it actually hit real depth.

Q: Life is what happens while we make plans, you seem to be suggesting, and that's what happens to the Robert Carlyle character on his way to carrying out a dying man's wishes: he finds love. Do you believe in fate?

RM: I believe that there are certain things that happen for a reason. This movie happened for a reason, given all the loss we'd experienced. [the Robert Carlyle character] was doing his normal routine. He was at a very sad state in his life, still grieving for his wife. His life may have gone completely to ruin. But the story, out of a chance encounter, ended up affecting him and his support group and everyone around him. The story may or may not have been the same as John Goodman's memory, but everyone got healed in the process.

Q: The domino school of destiny…

RM: Yeah, you may happen to say a nice thing to someone on the street, but it can also be about how if you go take this path you could set off a chain of events that could help every one else. Is Goodman an angel? Is this his payback, consciously or unconsciously? We're sort of saying that.

Q: For 40 years Steve has believed that his childhood sweetheart would remember and honor a rendezvous. Is ignorance bliss?

RM: I think it was the one pure moment in his life. He felt like that was the place after which his life changed. He wasn't the sweet young boy turned into a sweet man. He was something else. And he remembered that moment. Everybody, criminal or not, had a moment. You don't start out life with mars against your record.

Q: Can we trust the memories of a deluded man?

RM: People who have experienced loss, who are trying to piece together what they've lost, may see the rosy colored part but may not at the same time see the difficult part. When you look back on your past, it's not exactly the way it really was. Goodman remembered the purest moment of his life and Robert Carlyle is imagining it that way. You can either think you're getting the story from Robert Carlyle or John Goodman.

Q: So we pick our POV?

RM: Robert Carlyle is our Jimmy Stewart. When someone tells me a story, I picture someone I know. We imagine ourselves in a situation. The guy who plays Carlyle's best friend Samson played the kid 15 years ago. That's why we put him in it.

Q: We get that Lisa remembered the date, but we're not 100 percent sure. Did she?

RM: With Lisa, it was an adolescent thing and it made an impact. Lisa remembered it as well, though she acts as though she doesn't. She did keep his picture. She cries. There's a Spanish movie, "To Begin Again," about loss, a guy who looks back on his life. What I loved about that movie is that there are these moments that we put a lot of importance on even when others don't.

Q: Why didn't she go?

RM: Maybe she was uncomfortable with her looks or with how her life turned out. But she would have been heartbroken had she gone, because he wasn't going to go. So it worked out for the best for her. For him too. He would have seen that she wasn't so attractive or that she didn't really remember him. His memory was pure. That was his punctuation on his life.