The direct approach

Helen Hunt goes behind the camera.

After a very busy stretch from the mid-1990s until 2000 (Mad About You, As Good As It Gets, What Women Want, Pay It Forward, Cast Away), Helen Hunt has kept a lower profile over the last seven or eight years. She has done a few roles but devoted much of her time to having a child. She also got interested in Then She Found Me, a novel by Elinor Lipman. Over the years, she went from pitching herself to star in a screenplay by Alice Arlen to writing, producing, starring and directing herself. The film follows a woman trying to reconnect with her birth mother while her marriage comes apart. We spoke to Hunt at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March.

How did the movie evolve from the novel?
There was a very faithful adaptation written by Alice Arlen. I sent it to a few studios, and everybody felt like, “This is better than most things I read and really interesting and not quite a movie yet,” and I couldn’t disagree with them. I did sort of a subtle rewrite on it with a writing partner of mine from Mad About You. We tried again, and everybody said, “yeah, closer, [but] not quite a movie.”

Then your personal life changed; you were trying to get pregnant around that time?
I put it away for a couple years and lived my own life, and in my own life, I wanted a baby more than anything in the world and suddenly went, “Wait. This is a mother/daughter story; she has to want something. If she’s in her thirties, she either wants a baby, doesn’t want a baby, but she doesn’t ‘nothing’ a baby. She should want a baby.” That’s not in the novel. There’s no “baby wish” in the novel.

How did you end up directing?
I started writing by myself. It became so personal that I just had to sit in a room by myself and stare it down. Once I did that, I felt such ownership of it. I didn’t know if I was going to know what I was doing, but I knew what I wanted. And I knew the story that I wanted to tell. Communicating that to a director would have actually been harder than directing my first movie, so I decided to direct it.

How was it directing other actors?
That was the best part of it. Maybe that’s because I’ve been them and been aching for a good piece of direction. I remember a few times when I said something, and somebody went, “oh, yeah!” And then something happened, and that was the bull’s-eye for me.

What did you learn from taking on so much responsibility for the film?
I learned that as important as you think each choice of the crew is, it’s even more important than you think. You know, my line producer would say, “You cannot get this shot of the outside of the house on the water. You can’t get it. We don’t have the money, we don’t have a boat, we can’t get it.” And I would say “Okay, I’m going to have to get it.” Somebody knocks on a neighbor’s door and says, “Here’s $200, do you have a boat?” And the key grip says, “I’ll go and I’ll rig it right now.” A member of the crew like a grip who says, “I will get the camera rigged in 20 minutes. Just watch”: That’s a big deal. Suddenly you have the shot. It’s a huge deal.

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