For Helen Hunt, Art Imitates Life

In the movie Helen Hunt created, the one she stars in, wrote and directed, every character is partly a representation of her.

"I do feel like it's very autobiographical," she says. "It's a very intimate look at what I care about."

That wasn't the intention nine years ago when she first read "Then She Found Me," a novel by Elinor Lipman. The book, about an adopted woman whose birth mother finds her during adulthood, was handed to her with a faithfully adapted screenplay. Hunt immediately wanted someone to make the movie so she could play the lead.

The Oscar winner shopped the script around to studios and directors, all of whom said, she recalls, "This is beautiful, and it's not quite a movie."

The project could've ended there, but instead it consumed her. And she, unrelentingly haunted by the story, consumed it.

Hunt says she spent almost a decade "writing it, rewriting it, rewriting it, rewriting it"; begging for money; getting turned down; begging again; wooing stars Bette Midler, Matthew Broderick and Colin Firth; and finally making her feature film directing debut with a hardscrabble, 27-day shoot.

"I didn't know it was going to become quite so personal a film or be quite such a big part of my creative life," Hunt says, hours before the movie's New York premiere. "It wasn't until I was deep into the writing of it that I thought, 'I don't know how to tell someone what I want here. I have to direct it myself.' "

After that first round of nos from Hollywood studios, Hunt concluded that the screenplay needed something that wasn't in the book. So, writing what she knew, Hunt had the main character adopt a dramatic yearning of her own: the desire to have a baby. "It was true in my life, so I gave this to my character," she explains.

In the years she was working on the script, the 44-year-old actress had split with former husband Hank Azaria and begun a relationship with television producer Matthew Carnahan. Hunt, first widely known for her role on the sitcom "Mad About You," won an Academy Award in 1997 for her role in "As Good as It Gets" and had a string of big-screen appearances in 2000, including "Cast Away" and "Pay It Forward," but since has been largely out of the limelight.

Two endeavors absorbed her time in the interim: having a baby with Carnahan (a girl named Makena Lei, who's almost 4) and getting this movie produced.

"I asked someone who'd done this kind of thing a lot -- gotten small, hard-to-get-made-movies made, what the secret was -- and he said, 'You don't give up,' " she recalls. "And I thought, 'Well, that's something I can do. I can not give up. I don't know if it'll work, but I can be a person who doesn't give up.' "

Which didn't prove easy, of course. There was a moment, after a particularly promising line of financing fell through, that Hunt says she was demoralized almost to the point of surrender. But with each rewrite, the characters all came to embody more of herself (not just the leading lady, but the pushy birth mother; the wounded, divorced dad; the protective brother), making it harder to abandon the project.

Every character, she says, is "100 percent autobiographical."

So when a small, solvent check came through, she cashed it and raced to line up a cast and crew and made the movie for less than $4 million. Months later, on the same night the finished product premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, it was bought for distribution by ThinkFilm.

It's surreal, Hunt says of the film's fast takeoff after such a long stretch of toil. As much as the actress never predicted this path for herself, she recalls thinking not so long ago that she "loved writing as much as anything and that I wanted to be with my family and make movies I really care about."

So even as Hunt catches her breath, hoping audiences will turn up for "Then She Found Me," she's at work on a second screenplay.

"The weird turn of events is that I'm living the life I said I wanted to live. The only trick now is that I have to enjoy it," she says. "And be grateful for it."