The homeless couple who lived on the street outside Paul Bettany"s $6.9-million Tribeca penthouse slept under a transparent plastic sheet. The actor passed the pair every weekday while walking his kids to school, and everyone shared awkward hellos. Sometimes he"d give them money. But after a while the conversations waned.
"I"m ashamed to say that as time moved on, I stopped talking to them," Bettany admits.
And then Hurricane Sandy struck the city in 2012, and he and his wife, actress Jennifer Connelly, and their three children left the city. After the storm passed, he returned to find the homeless couple had vanished. He couldn"t stop thinking about them. Had they been lucky? Or unlucky? Could he have prevented their disappearance?
So the British actor started writing his first screenplay, "Shelter," about a widowed junkie and a Nigerian immigrant who fall in love and subsequently start bettering their lives. The film, distributed to theaters by Screen Medial Films and available on video-on-demand opened earlier this month. It marks Bettany"s directorial debut.
Buy he wasn"t sure his years of observation qualified him to make a film. Eventually, Ron Howard — who has directed Bettany twice and knew the actor was itching to get behind the camera — asked what he was waiting for.