A Movie with Heart

Dateline:4/3/00

Many Hollywood romances are about heart. People have their hearts broken. Some lose their heart to another person. Others leave their hearts in San Francisco. Return To Me is actually about a heart. One that is transplanted from one woman to another, and the way that action ties a group of people to one another.
Starring David Duchovny and Minnie Driver, Return To Me tells the story of Bob Rueland and Grace Briggs. When Bob's wife dies in a car accident, her organs are donated to those in need. One such person is Grace, whose weak heart is days away from giving out. A year later, Bob is still in a deep depression over the loss of his wife and Grace has been given a new chance at a normal life.
Bob spends his days designing and building the expansion of the ape house at the zoo where his wife once worked. Elsewhere in Chicago, Grace is the waitress at her grandfather's Irish/Italian restaurant where she spends most of her time with the senior citizens that work there. After a chance meeting, Bob and Grace actually begin to fall in love, although she is very hesitant to tell him about her heart transplant. Of course, Grace doesn't know that she has Bob's late wife's heart, at least not at first.
After spending years in front of the camera as an actress in such movies as Jerry Maguire and The Green Mile, Bonnie Hunt decided to take a seat in the director's chair. "I love being the storyteller, whether it's on a talk show, or in the movies, or in the theater, or as an actress being a part of the storytelling process," Hunt explained. "It's also protecting your own writing. Obviously the characters are very real and the emotion is very real. A lot it comes from our own lives and you want to protect it. You want to make sure that it's done the way you see it."
When Hunt went about casting Return to Me, she turned to her good friend David Duchovny. "David and I know each other from Beethoven. That's how we first met and we've been friends ever since," Hunt recalled. "It was a joy for me to have my friend do, I think, his best work in my first movie, because I was able to help him bring out all these levels that he had as an actor. David really wanted the part and I wanted an actor that really wanted to be there. What a great thing, we're both friends, we did one of our very first movies together and here we are on something that is so important for both of us; his first leading man role in a romantic comedy, and my first movie that I've written and directed."
Duchovny's friendship with Hunt allayed his fears about having a first-time director. "My forays into movies are very difficult, because I only get two months a year to do it. Everybody is very concerned with me making a transition from TV to movies -- I'm just an actor playing whatever role I'm playing," Duchovny argued. "So when this script came along, I thought it was very straight ahead sentimental and a nice story. I thought if Bonnie brings herself to it, it would be a really good movie, like Moonstruck which had the same operatic sadness and really weird funniness in it. I'm just shocked that she was able to pull off this hybrid sentimental/funny movie that's not one of these computer programmed romantic comedies that comes out every two to three months."
Although he's not a romance fan, Duchovny blurted out, "I love this movie. It's not the kind of movie that I would run out and see. I only see the movie that comes to the theater near me. I really feel like if I can get the word out, that this movie is not what it seems to be, that it is actually a very complicated, tricky movie that is both profoundly funny and sad at the same time. I would be really happy if people came to see it, because if I stumbled into it, I would have been really happy."
Minnie Driver was drawn to complications of her character. "I was very interested in the whole life of somebody who has had a heart condition," said the actress. "It's so daunting about how she literally has not had a life at all. Her life begins when she's twenty-six. That naiveté and innocence and the detail of the mundane becoming incredibly extraordinary, that's a little bit of hyperbole there. You know, her riding a bicycle is like climbing Everest."
Unlike Duchovny, Driver was working with Bonnie Hunt for the first time. "She's a very passionate director," Driver said. "We didn't see eye to eye on some things, but I have to say that looking at the movie, she was right about pretty much all the choices that she encouraged me to make. I look at the movie and I really think she did an amazing job."
Jim Belushi has known Hunt since their days in the Second City comedy group, and was not surprised that the actress took so well to her duties behind the camera. "She's constantly directing," Belushi exclaimed. "Whether you're having lunch with her or walking across the street. What's funny is, the alpha male, which we all were at Second City, we just submit to it. The problem is, she was always right."
"I got that from my mother," laughed Hunt about her natural ability to direct. "You know, she had seven kids, so she was the first director I ever had in my life. Sunday morning was, 'Happy family take one, we're leaving the house, everybody be happy'!"
However, Belushi has his own theory in explaining Hunt's directorial abilities. "Bonnie really is about heart," he said. "You can argue about people's logic and reason, but you can never argue with someone who is coming from the heart. It's ironic that she picks a movie about a heart to direct her first time. This is all about her heart, her comic sensibility, her
sense of family, her sense of what ensemble really is and her sense of care. What is not in this movie is cynicism and negativity. It's all about people caring for each other. She does without sentimentality and without melodrama.
"If you are not honest in a moment in a scene she'll stop the scene and talk to you," Belushi recalled. "She's just so caring. The movie is really not about finding love so much as it is about being loving. She's captured the true essence of ensemble. What is ensemble? Ensemble is family. I think this movie will take her to another level. And she'll never get spoiled or lose that sense."
Hunt agreed that having been an actress first made her a better director. "I think one of my biggest strengths is empathy, just understanding," she explained. "Every actor is so unique -- you have to be a different director with every actor. You can't just come in and say 'This is the way it's going to be,' although I tried that approach. They all have so much to give you that if you let them have their input it's just a bonus for you and your story."
Duchovny even went so far as to say he hopes to work with Hunt in the future. "I would love to keep working with Bonnie, I would love to keep coming back to Bonnie because we're only going to keep getting better, with each other, too," he said. "I think this is a great movie. I think this is a great first movie and I think the second one is going to be even better.
Bonnie is just gonna get better every time out."
Hunt was not as convinced of her ability to direct. "There were days where I was terrified, but for the most part, I guess, I just didn't want to disappoint anybody," she confessed. I didn't want to disappoint the executives at the studio that believed in me, because that doesn't always happen. I didn't want to disappoint the actors that had said, 'Yes I'll do your first movie', and I didn't want to disappoint myself as a writer. I wanted to see the words mean as much as they did on the page. I didn't want to disappoint my family and the audience. Because if somebody is going to pay money to see something, you at least want to give them an emotional thrill and make them feel good. Make them laugh and feel like they've been told a good story."
The pressure to succeed was kept in perspective by Hunt, who began her career as a part-time actor and full-time nurse. "It's very serious work and I'm very sensitive about it," she explained. But because I was an oncology nurse first, the challenges seem different in comparison. I don't
want to belittle the experience and say that there aren't tough days as a director. I mean, I was dealing with people that were at the end of their lives that had incredible strength of character and wisdom and inspiration, and they gave that to me. So when you have a bad day on a movie set, you're lucky to have had the bad day on a movie set. I don't always feel that way in the moment, because certainly I lose my temper, and you have your own drama. But in the big picture, you feel so grateful."
While Hunt may have left the medical field when she moved to Hollywood from Chicago, she returned to her hometown to film her first movie. "For me, Chicago is such a character in itself," she said. "You can shoot on a studio lot, but to me it just wasn't Chicago, it wasn't that community."
Belushi felt that Hunt worked Chicago into the film beautifully. 'Bonnie and I met at Second City, which is on North Avenue and Wells. And the restaurant is Twinb Anchors, which is two blocks west," Belushi said of the small Chicago neighborhood of Return To Me. "She really captured the smell of that neighborhood. It was another character in this ensemble piece."
Duchovny had actually never visited the windy city before. "It was 107 degrees and just beautiful," he smiled. "I had a great time, it's just a great city. It truly is a mid-western city. I'm a New Yorker and it had that New York feel and the people were really friendly. I would live there in a minute. I know I'll probably never live there now. But I kind of wish, at some point in my early twenties, I'd lived there. Although I've never spent a winter there!"
Minnie Driver, who is British, had never been to Chicago either, but is used to filming in the hometowns of her costars. "In Sleepers everybody had worked in New York and lived in New York," she said. In Gross Point Blank, everybody was basically related to the Cusacks who were in that movie, and Good Will Hunting was shot in Boston, it was like a homecoming for Matt and Ben. I've never felt excluded. You feel a party to somebody else's family and their life. Especially if you feel homesick and miss being a part of that as I do. I miss being a part of an English community and my family. So it was really nice."
That feeling of community and belonging is what Hunt thinks came through in the film and why advance audiences of Return To Me have loved the movie. "Everybody gets to put their flavor into it," Hunt said of her directing style. "You're really just cooking up an incredible meal and I bring most of the ingredients, but I'm hoping somebody will bring salt and bullion and whatever they're going to add to it, so that it tastes even better. So that it tastes good to everybody at the end and everybody is satisfied after they eat. It really is a big kitchen."