When filmmaker David Frankel showed a rough cut of his film The Devil Wears Prada to his boss, Fox 2000 Pictures president Elizabeth Gabler, she was so pleased that she handed him a copy of another best-selling book to adapt into a movie: Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog.

Written by former Sun-Sentinel columnist John Grogan, the 2005 book recounted his and his wife Jenny's experiences with their Labrador retriever Marley, who grew from an adorable, precocious puppy into a hyperactive, relentlessly mischievous dog who discovered altogether new strains of canine bad behavior.

Although Frankel liked the book, he politely declined the opportunity to turn it into a film.

''It's a lovely book, and it made me cry, but I just didn't see the movie,'' Frankel said earlier this month over a glass of wine at Greenstreet Cafe in Coconut Grove, just a few blocks from his home. ``There's no conflict in it. It's charming chapter by chapter, but it's just an account of these people's lives. I didn't see how the pieces fit together to make a movie.''

A few months later, Gabler again pitched the project to Frankel, this time giving him an actual script, by screenwriter Scott Frank (Get Shorty, Out of Sight). And this time, Frankel immediately saw a movie, which wound up being filmed mostly in South Florida.

''What Scott wrote into the script was a sense of longing,'' Frankel said. ``He didn't make it an episodic, literal translation of the book. He made it the story of a marriage -- the whole rollercoaster ride this couple goes through over a period of 14 years. I felt like it was as close to an autobiographical film as I could possibly make, because it's about a happily married writer who lives in South Florida with his dog, and I'm happily married, living in Miami, writing some of the time, and I have five dogs.''

Unlike Marley, Frankel's dogs are all strays. Much like Marley, they are all ''crazy,'' he says. ``You come to my house, and you'll find chairs with holes six inches deep. There are no bedspreads in my home that have not been chewed up.''

More importantly, though, the 49-year-old Frankel, who has two children, connected with something deeper in Frank's script: The restlessness felt by John (played by Owen Wilson) who, despite his love for his wife Jennifer (Jennifer Aniston) and their three kids and his job as a successful newspaper columnist, still yearns for that archetypal, elusive ``something more.''

'I love my wife, and I love my kids, and yet there are always days when I think, `Is this it?' '' Frankel said. ``We all occasionally feel a sense that we haven't realized everything we thought our lives would be.

''That's what I wanted the movie to capture, and that's why the dog is such a beautiful metaphor for happiness,'' Frankel said. 'Dogs don't look forward, and they don't look back. They are all about `How can I be happy in this very moment?' People often forget to do that. My wife called it the most wistful movie she's ever seen.''

In casting an actor to capture that wistfulness, Frankel made a surprising choice in Wilson, previously best known for playing clowns and ne'er-do-wells (Wedding Crashers,Drillbit Taylor).

''This movie is a huge departure for Owen,'' Frankel said. ``He's such a remarkable actor, and no one really knows it. What you see in this movie is who Owen really is. There's a real sweetness to him, but you get the pain, too. He's Jimmy Stewart, although no one thinks of him that way.''

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