: WHAT has the Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt, 44, been doing since her 2000 hit What Women Want? Raising a daughter (Màkena lei, now 3) with her partner, the screenwriter-producer Matthew Carnahan, appearing in a couple of big-screen misfires (The Cures of the Jade Scorpion, A Good Woman) and wondering what was missing in the screenplay she was rewriting based on Elinor Lipman’s novel Then She Found Me.
Hunt said it was the Jungian psychologist James Hillman’s essay on betrayal, of all things, that suddenly made everything click. The next thing to fall into place was her decision to direct the film herself, and to star as a haggard schoolteacher whose life is upended by her philandering husband (Matthew Broderick) and the loss of her adoptive Jewish mother, then unexpectedly reassembled by a rumpled single dad (Colin Firth) and her cheerfully aggressive, truth-challenged birth mother (Bette Midler).
Here are excerpts from her recent conversation with Margy Rochlin in Los Angeles.
Q. Describe your first day as a feature film director.
Wait. You’re skipping the years of humiliation and hazing that I went through to try to get it made.
Q. You’re right. Your humiliation narrative, please.
It was every version of no I’ve ever imagined. ‘No, we’re not going to make it because we can’t sell it.’ ‘No, we’re not going to make it because it’s about a woman who is 40.’ Then, worse than that, ‘Yes, we are going make it,’ my bags are packed, then I find out, ‘Never mind’. The person who green-lit the movie apparently didn’t have the ability to do that. Then this company said, ‘We’ll write you this petite but steadfast check. Go.’
Q. When did you decide to star?
I think it was the last decision I made. Warren Beatty said to me, ‘If you act in it, you’ll have at least one person in the movie that will see it the way you do.’
