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" I arrive nearly a half hour early to interview Helen Hunt. I&amp;#039;ve heard that she&amp;#039;s always prompt, and I&amp;#039;m better known for being lost. But she still beats me to the appointed Santa Monica coffee shop: When I drive up, she and boyfriend Matthew Carnahan are already crossing the street, huddled together. Matthew, the creator of the FX show Dirt, a dark comedy starring Courteney Cox as a tabloid editor, looks like the surfer dude that he is -- baggy black clothes topped by a shock of sun-bleached hair. Helen&amp;#039;s wearing a calf-length brown sweater, casual pants, and clunky boots. A passerby would be hard pressed to peg her for the Golden Globe/Academy Award/pretty-much-every-prize-out-there winner she is. While it&amp;#039;s annoyingly fashionable these days to say that movie stars look so normal, it&amp;#039;s impossible not to make that observation about Helen. Straight blonde hair, no makeup, easy tan. The 44-year-old actress has let life create a few laugh lines.  Not long after they enter the coffee shop, Matthew comes out alone, hops into his car (with a surfboard on its roof rack), makes a U-turn, and drives toward the beach. Inside, Helen has settled in with a hummus and tomato-topped bagel, her laptop, and a thick paperback. She looks up and smiles when I get to the table.  Since the birth of Makena&amp;#039;lei, her 3-year-old daughter with Matthew, Helen has appeared in only one movie, Emilio Estevez&amp;#039;s superstar-studded Bobby. But she&amp;#039;s been in overdrive recently bringing Then She Found Me, a dramatic comedy, to the screen. Helen co-wrote, directed, produced, and stars in the film as April, a schoolteacher adopted at birth who is desperate for a child of her own. April has trouble conceiving -- a situation not improved by her husband&amp;#039;s (Matthew Broderick) epiphany that their short-lived marriage is a mistake. Just as he leaves, a flamboyant TV talk-show host, played by Bette Midler, announces that she is April&amp;#039;s birth mother. And Colin Firth enters the fray as the tentatively available father of a child in April&amp;#039;s class. Based on the novel by Elinor Lipman, the movie is a persistent reminder that things rarely happen as planned. As Helen later tells me, &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re too innocent, life has a way of coming in and growing you up.&amp;quot;  Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Since her divorce from Hank Azaria in 2000, Helen has found new love with an old friend, had a child she&amp;#039;s besotted with, and used her acting experience to catapult herself to a new rung in the movie industry. If, along the way, she was forced to forfeit a measure of innocence, it was only to make room for the equanimity that comes with looking the world squarely in the eye. Here, Helen talks to us about living life in the present. I hear you&amp;#039;re a surfer. Where do you surf around here? I almost never do. I like to paint myself as this groovy person, but the truth is I go out [into the waves] with my boyfriend and then I hyperventilate about how to get back in. And that&amp;#039;s a serious-looking book you&amp;#039;re reading. I&amp;#039;m taking a philosophy class and regretting it with everything in me. I&amp;#039;m taking one college class per semester. Philosophy is studying what you already know and dismantling it. I thought it would be right up my alley. I can&amp;#039;t tell you how much it&amp;#039;s not me.  When you go into a class, is there whiplash? People thinking, Whoa! That&amp;#039;s Helen Hunt! I have to say, my celebrity is not a big factor in my life. Once in a while someone takes my picture. But I&amp;#039;m not exactly one of the four girls everyone&amp;#039;s chasing at the moment. I went to a film festival in Mexico recently, and the driver was taking us to a restaurant. He said, &amp;quot;Are you okay to eat in public?&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;Oh, watch what doesn&amp;#039;t happen.&amp;quot; [She gives a little laugh.] Let&amp;#039;s talk about your new movie, Then She Found Me. When did you first read the book? About 10 years ago. I read it and thought there was something new in it. Every movie is a reincarnation of every other movie after a while, with rare exception, and I thought I hadn&amp;#039;t actually seen birth-mother-finds-grown-daughter before.  Did you have to make any changes to make it work onscreen? I spent a lot of years writing, then put the script away because I just couldn&amp;#039;t get it made. The best movies have one sentence that they&amp;#039;re exploring, a thesis, something that people can argue about over dinner afterward. I couldn&amp;#039;t say what that was.  At the time, I was wanting a baby. April&amp;#039;s younger in the novel, and I thought, You either have a baby, want a baby, or don&amp;#039;t want a baby, but you don&amp;#039;t nothing a baby if you&amp;#039;re in your 30s or 40s. Then a friend sent me an essay by James Hillman [author of The Soul&amp;#039;s Code] called &amp;quot;Betrayal.&amp;quot; I studied and studied it. I started to realize that people will think this movie is about adoption or motherhood, but for me it&amp;#039;s about this issue of betrayal. April feels betrayed by everybody. She betrays herself. She feels betrayed by God. I finally landed on the idea that you can&amp;#039;t be loved until you make peace with betrayal. With that, I had a compass for the movie.  You must have been nervous, taking on your first film as a director. It was beyond nerves -- it was pure hell. You just prepare and prepare and prepare. I&amp;#039;m good at that. I have a survival instinct. Did you and Matthew split parenting duties while you were filming?  While we were shooting in New York, Matthew was in L.A. -- Dirt was in its first season -- so it couldn&amp;#039;t have been harder timing. He was show running and I was directing and starring in a movie -- after both of us sitting at home and staring at our daughter for two years! It was the hottest summer on record in New York, so my daughter and I would be in Battery Park at 6:30 in the morning, and by 8 it was so hot we&amp;#039;d go home. I had grandmothers to help. I could be with her all morning, put her down for a nap, go see what the editor was doing for four hours, then go back and be with her.  Does being a director feel sort of like being a mother? Mother and father both. Not caring if people like you every minute. But I also know from the directors I&amp;#039;ve worked with that the ones who are secure enough and have done enough homework are very open to suggestions. The ones I&amp;#039;ve not liked working with were so insecure or underprepared that they were threatened by a suggestion. Over and over on movies I&amp;#039;ve seen a great suggestion come from a camera operator or makeup girl or wardrobe person. Matthew must be so proud of you. He is. He had a lot of great ideas, but the biggest thing was that he would tell me, &amp;quot;Remember, you said you wanted to make it about this. Make sure the decision comes from there.&amp;quot; Which is even better than help -- it&amp;#039;s reminding you about yourself. Are you calm, cool, and collected behind the camera? Pretty much. I mean, you&amp;#039;re the guy in charge, so if you freak out everybody&amp;#039;s lost. I was frustrated sometimes. Everything meant a lot to me. On this movie, people freaked out because they wanted to do a good job and didn&amp;#039;t have any money. I had said, &amp;quot;Make a beautiful movie with four movie stars -- and here&amp;#039;s a nickel.&amp;quot; It was kind of insane. We borrowed things from everybody. Some of the art on the wall in the school was done by my stepson. My poor assistant/producer -- she&amp;#039;d be wearing a sweater and I&amp;#039;d say, &amp;quot;Take it off,&amp;quot; and I&amp;#039;d walk through the scene in it.  What in the story parallels your life? Everything. I don&amp;#039;t literally sit outside my daughter&amp;#039;s school in the car [like Colin&amp;#039;s character], but I would take comfort in that. I don&amp;#039;t sleep on the floor of my daughter&amp;#039;s bedroom, but if I let my fears about her off their leash I&amp;#039;d be him. I&amp;#039;m the one who got left and the one who left, I&amp;#039;m the good mother and the not-good mother. I&amp;#039;m everybody in that movie. And by &amp;quot;left and got left,&amp;quot; I mean Matthew Broderick&amp;#039;s character is sort of, from April&amp;#039;s point of view, a Peter Pan, not sure he can be there, not ready. I&amp;#039;ve been that person. And I&amp;#039;ve certainly been April, although her situation isn&amp;#039;t the same as my experience with my divorce. Basically, I feel all the characters deeply because they are parts of me. Are you eventually able to look at negative events in your life as something positive? Almost everything negative has turned into a positive -- it&amp;#039;s just hellish getting there. But when I can remind myself that I am fall-to-my-knees lucky and should be fall-to-my-knees grateful, these big negatives are not so bad as they feel when they first hit. Do you see your own mom in yourself as a mother? I don&amp;#039;t know. People say that you have to be what you want your children to be. Like, do I want her to be a stressed-out person running around trying to get it right all the time? No. Then I&amp;#039;d better not be a stressed-out person trying to get everything right all the time. It makes you work on yourself, because it&amp;#039;s instant karma. I have a habit of just patting her on the back gently. The other day I was thinking about something, probably looking worried or troubled, and I felt this little teeny paw on my back. I thought, Well, I didn&amp;#039;t teach her to do that. I certainly don&amp;#039;t want her to take care of me, but that&amp;#039;s the imprint, good or bad. What I put in will be what she walks away with.  It must be odd for a child to have a parent in the room and on the TV. I&amp;#039;m not anywhere near letting her watch TV, so that&amp;#039;s not going to come up for a long time. I really think that&amp;#039;s not where the good stuff is for her right now. The good stuff is when she&amp;#039;s gardening with her dad or baking with me. She likes to paint. Play with her pals. Hula. She&amp;#039;s seen a hula show or 20 in her life. The Hawaiian friends of ours who&amp;#039;ve seen her say it&amp;#039;s the beginning of the real thing. What&amp;#039;s in your garden? I can&amp;#039;t take any credit for it -- it&amp;#039;s all Matthew and my daughter&amp;#039;s doing. They&amp;#039;ve planted an entire vegetable garden. I did nothing but come out and take a picture of it -- she was in her pajamas and her boots. There are Thumbelina carrots that are shaped like apples, broccoli, purple cauliflower, peas, squash, strawberries.  Is your relationship with Makena&amp;#039;lei changing as she&amp;#039;s getting older? When they&amp;#039;re first born and you nurse for a year, you kind of feel like there&amp;#039;s no separation between you at all. She&amp;#039;s just drinking you in and spitting you back out -- you&amp;#039;re all one big, gooey person, sort of. But more and more I see her as the separate person that she is. We look a lot alike and love being around each other. When she was first born, she looked exactly like I did when I was born. My father walked into the delivery room and said, &amp;quot;Wait a minute!&amp;quot; Even then I said, &amp;quot;I have to remember this is not me.&amp;quot; I have to remember that she is herself. She&amp;#039;s 3 now and crazy-verbal and tall and smart, so I also have to remind myself how little she is. She could be sitting here having this conversation and she&amp;#039;d say, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know what you mean.&amp;quot; And I&amp;#039;d find a way to explain it and she might or might not get it.  What are you up to next? I&amp;#039;ve written the draft of another screenplay. It&amp;#039;s about mothering, but totally different from Then She Found Me. Similar in that it&amp;#039;s funny. I&amp;#039;m taking a break so I can see it with fresh eyes. Would you do another TV show? Sure. A lot of shows now are 12 episodes a season instead of 25. That sounds really good to me. If you had three hours of free time, what would you do with them? Probably what I&amp;#039;m doing now. Sitting at a coffee shop, reading.... So it&amp;#039;s a good life? It&amp;#039;s a good life. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/life/interviews/a2864/helen-hunt-interview/>