Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly met while acting in 2001’s A Beautiful Mind, for which Connelly nabbed a best-supporting-actress Oscar. Now, after 12 years of marriage and three children (including Connelly’s son from a previous relationship), they are working together again, in Bettany’s directorial debut, Shelter, out this fall. Inspired by a homeless couple who lived in their Manhattan neighborhood but disappeared at the time of Hurricane Sandy, Bettany wrote the script—which he later had vetted by the Coalition for the Homeless—in three weeks. The film (for which Vanity Fair deputy editor Dana Brown served as executive producer) stars Connelly and Anthony Mackie as Hannah and Tahir, a couple from totally different worlds who bond—and fall in love—on the streets of New York City. Bettany says he didn’t want to make “an art film that just takes you to a really dark place and leaves you there and just says, ‘Isn’t it bad? Aren’t you lucky you’re not homeless?’ I wanted to write a story that is uplifting—hard-won, but uplifting.”

Connelly’s Hannah is an affluent woman devastated by her husband’s death in a terror attack; she abandons her young child and disappears into drug addiction. “It was a beautiful and complex role,” she says. “Working with your partner—that intimacy was a different experience for me and was really very fulfilling.” Her director and husband acknowledges that the stakes were high. “She goes to some deep, dark places that are also really revealing and involve nudity,” Bettany says. “But I think she trusted me as her partner, and she knew she could kick the shit out of me for the next 20 years if I got it wrong.”