Dakota Johnson and Ro Donnelly’s production company, TeaTime Pictures, has turned a corner. A string of acclaimed films that have also landed well with audiences, such as Cha Cha Real Smooth, Am I OK? and now Daddio, has changed the way Hollywood views the pair as a production powerhouse.

“I think it has changed this,” Donnelly mused. “When we started, people were very skeptical of us. They really were like, ‘Okay, little girls.'”

“There was a lot of that,” Johnson interjected. “There were a lot of belittling comments about the industry.”

Donnelly continued, “Dakota has made over 30 movies, so she’s not a novice. I had come from Netflix, and people were like, ‘Oh, really?’ So now people are like, ‘Okay, okay. We got it,’ and that has definitely been a shift.”

Daddio, written and directed by Christy Hall, sees Johnson play Girlie, a woman taking a cab from JFK to her New York apartment who gets into conversation with her driver, Clark, played by Sean Penn. Over the course of the journey, the pair get locked in an honest and sometimes uncomfortable dialogue that covers everything from sex and power to loss and vulnerability. Daddio is in theaters now and is not available to stream.

“We do lean a little commercial. It’s left of center commercial, but I think the movies we make are universal heart movies and those tend to hit a bigger audience,” Donnelly explained. “We’re not doing super niche things; that’s not our bag yet. We will for sure in the future, and people could have said that about Daddio because it’s two people in a taxi, but I think it is connecting with a much bigger audience because it is so human.”

“Daddio was a tough movie to get financed. Even if we had made a massive movie before that, it wouldn’t have helped. It’s just the way the business is right now. It’s hard to finance these special little movies, so it took a long time. We’re pretty tenacious with our films, so we keep going until someone says yes.”

Johnson added, “I totally understand the success of massive films, huge budgets, and very complex, action-oriented escapism, but people really crave human connection and want to recognize themselves in the characters they see on screen. So, for us, the fight to have Daddio financed was mostly people being like, ‘It’s so contained. It’s too small, there’s not enough for people, and it won’t be interesting.'”

“I can’t even remember how many times people were like, ‘Well, are there flashbacks? Do you go into her mind? Do you go into her past or his past, and you’re outside of the cab?’ The challenge for us to keep you captivated in this very contained little capsule was incredible and artistically, for me, amazing. That was the big argument. People were just like, ‘Oh, no, it’s too small and too boring,’ but it’s actually the most interesting thing.”

A powerful two-hander, Daddio feels like it would work as well on stage as it does on screen.

“It started as a play,” Donnelly confirmed. “Christie wrote it as a play and then flipped it into a feature, but we’ve always thought it would be incredible to transfer it to the stage.”

Johnson continued, “We’ve talked about it, and Sean is definitely down to do that, but who knows when? We liked the idea of reverse engineering it because normally, it’s a play that you’ve seen, and then it becomes a film. It’s definitely a hope of ours at some point.”

When Hall’s script found its way to TeaTime Pictures, it felt a little like fate. Johnson and Penn already had a long-running friendship in real life, as they are neighbors in Malibu.

“We read it and were like, ‘We need a Sean Penn type. Who can we get?’ and Dakota said, ‘Sean.’ We were very lucky,” Donnelly recalled with a laugh.

“It is a real friendship, so it felt safe and familiar in the best way,” Johnson said. “It was as familiar as you could be with a stranger in a car. Sean and I, having this foundation of a friendship before we made the movie, made it so that we could pretend to be strangers and not have it feel dark or scary.”

When it comes to what the pair look for as a producing duo, how do they decide what they think will cut through the noise and find an audience? Cha Cha Real Smooth, which is streaming on Apple TV+, and Am I OK?, a hit at Sundance in 2022 that is now streaming on Max, have been successes for their respective platforms.

“I think for us, it’s definitely about fighting for what our instincts say and not listening to the studio because they’re usually wrong,” Johnson declared. “I don’t know how people are going to see movies. It’s actually shocking that people have watched Am I OK? I did not think that was going to happen. Also, in terms of marketing and trying to get people interested in the films, I think that when you’re working with streaming platforms or studios, they tend to be leaning towards doing what is right or what has worked in the past to market films in a certain genre.”

“Take Am I OK? for example. It’s like, ‘Why would you put someone crying on the poster because people will think it’s a drama.’ That was a real fight. Our audiences are smart, complex humans who want to be inspired. They want their minds to work, and they want to be surprised, so it’s about fighting for what we feel is the truth of the projects we are making and then losing friends, burning bridges, crossing fingers, and lighting candles.”

Donnelly concluded, “We never really think about the things we don’t know when we make things. We’re not like, ‘How is this going to play?’ It’s more like, ‘Who’s involved? What’s the story? Does it connect with us?’ and that’s how we end up making what we do.”