THEN HELEN HUNT FOUND HER FILM

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.’

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.’

Q. At one point in the movie, the novelist Salman Rushdie pops up as a gynaecologist. How did that happen?
The casting director walked in and said, ‘Uh, Salman Rushdie wants to read,’ and I said, ‘Shut up!’ He came in and gave a great audition. It’s one of those things you don’t overthink. It was just strange enough to be a good idea.

Q. In an early review, a critic commented on your “gaunt” appearance.
‘Positively gaunt.’ Is that thin? Or ghostlike? I heard an audible gasp one time I screened the movie. I wanted my character to be tired, look older, like she’d suffered a lot of challenging things. I also thought, ‘I’ll never make this movie if I worry about lighting me well or getting me into hair and makeup.’ It was a relief to only have one woman who needed to look glamorous—and it wasn’t me.

Q. This is your first screen appearance in a while. How much is that about raising a child? How much is it about the phone not ringing?
I lived my whole life wanting to have a baby—and I got to have a baby. I suddenly wasn’t offered parts that were worth walking away from the most compelling thing I’d ever been involved with, which was my family. It was nervous-making along the way to not be drowning in offers for big movies. But maybe running off and pretending to be this one’s girlfriend or that one’s wife isn’t what I want to do with my life. Maybe my dirty little secret is this is the life I’d been wanting.

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Q. Your movie had its premiere at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. What was it like to be there?
For the first 10 minutes the movie was so out of focus. I was dying. Then something happened: they went with it. Two thousand people stood up at the end and wouldn’t sit down until the credits were over. I mean, it was crazy. And I wore the right thing—something black and tight. I felt good! It was a weirdly, weirdly good night. Like being Cinderella after 10 years of being the ugly stepsister. (NYT)