We’re Talking, We’re Talking…
Bonnie Hunts for True Movie Romance
By Mark Caro
Chicago Tribune, April 2, 2000

Romantic comedies are the most underappreciated film genre. They're extremely difficult to execute well, and even the best ones tend to be regarded as fluff.
Yet Bonnie Hunt knows there's a difference between the flip, hip, facile exercises usually released under the "romantic comedy" banner and the movies that are more lasting and emotionally engaging. There was no doubt which category the Chicago-born Hunt had in mind as she and longtime co-writer Don Lake prepared her directing debut, "Return to Me."
"We don't have one trendy reference in it, no Starbucks jokes, no easy-target jokes," she said while in Chicago on the day the locally shot "Return to Me" was to be unveiled for her sizable contingent of family, friends, cast and crew. "It's all just life, slice of life. That's timeless."
The thirtysomething Hunt boasts a quick, sharp wit that doesn't leave wounds, a quality that has made her a favorite talk-show guest of David Letterman's. Up to this point, her most famous cultural contribution is one for which she rarely receives credit: She's the one who came up with "We're walking . . . we're walking . . . we're stopping," the officious patter of her scene-stealing White House tour guide in "Dave."
"I'll be in a restaurant or something, and I see people do it all the time," she said. "They go, `We're walking . . . ,' and the group laughs, I'm like, `Oh, my God.'"
Hunt has unofficially written bits of other movies as well, attending the writers' meetings on the two "Beethoven" comedies (she played the wife) and helping shape her character of Renee Zellweger's embittered best friend in "Jerry Maguire." She also created and starred in two critically lauded TV comedy series, "The Building" and "The Bonnie Hunt Show," neither of which lasted a full season thanks to mishandling and low ratings.
The movie industry doesn't necessarily embrace her Second City-honed brand of comedy--which revolves around intelligent, sympathetic characters in humorous situations rather than rapid-fire punch lines and cheap gags--any more than the TV world does. But so far, even Hunt is surprised by how receptive Hollywood has been to her transition to filmmaker.
"I went to [my agency] CAA after `Jerry Maguire,' and I said, `All right, my TV show has been cancelled, and I want to write and I want to put stories out there, and I'd love to direct.' And my agent said, `Listen, we'll set you up with some directors' meetings; you read scripts and you go in and you pitch how you'd direct the movie. You won't get the jobs because it's your first time, but it will be really good practice for you.'
"And I said, `OK.' So I set up three for that week. I had one on Monday, one on Wednesday and one on Thursday, and Friday I was offered all three jobs. I couldn't believe it."
Hunt and Lake had taken a year to write three scripts, and MGM signed Hunt to direct the one that's a comedy about a divorced couple that temporarily reunites for the husband's parents' 50th wedding anniversary party. (She begins filming that one soon.) But MGM also had a concept for another movie it wanted to make, one that involved a heart transplant.
"I hated the heart transplant concept," Hunt said. "I thought it was ridiculous and who wants to see that? The concept was a body-parts movie where the person gets a body part and they're like, `Hey, this looks familiar. Didn't I used to live here?' I said, `Oh, come on, I've seen "The Hand"'--remember that movie where the hand goes and kills people?
"And they said, `Well, what would you do with it?' I said, `If I had to keep the concept in, I would make it a love story that's not corny.' And they said, `And you would direct it if you wrote it?' And I said, `Yeah,' and they said, `All right, go write it.'"
So Hunt and Lake took on an assignment that sounds like one of their old Second City exercises: Create a movie revolving around a heart transplant.
"That's what it was like," Hunt said. "And Don and I are writing addicts. We love solving the giant crossword puzzle that a script is. We wrote it in eight weeks, the first draft."
Working side by side on a two computer keyboards that Lake had rigged up to one monitor in her Los Angeles house, they came up with "Return to Me," which MGM not only green-lighted but also allowed Hunt to shoot in Chicago. David Duchovny plays a builder, Bob, whose wife (Joely Richardson) is killed in a car crash, and her heart is transplanted into a young woman named Grace (Minnie Driver), whom Bob eventually meets and falls for.
That's the kind of premise that has mass ickiness potential--which only increases when you consider that Bob has a big, lovable pooch, and his late wife was working to build a new home for the always-responsive primates at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Yet Hunt was determined not to take the easy route in eliciting crowd responses.
"I just think in order to maintain creative integrity and keep it smart in a romantic comedy, it is tough," Hunt said. "You've got to do a lot of convincing [of studio officials] along the way, like `This is going to be enough,' and `We don't need more gorilla' and `We don't need more dog.' You don't even know how easy it would have been to manipulate the audience. You could have drawn everything out and had a big bloody scene with the accident."
Instead, Hunt jarringly cuts directly from the happy couple dancing at a party to the hospital.
"I did it because of my own personal experience with death," Hunt said. "Whenever somebody close to you dies quickly, you literally go, `Well, I was just doing this, and then they were gone.' That's what I wanted the audience to feel: What the hell just happened? I had that conversation with the studio because of course at first they were like, `Oh, we have to see the accident.' And I said, `No. None of that slo-mo stuff.'"
Hunt, who most recently appeared as Tom Hanks' wife in "The Green Mile," cast herself in yet another of her best-friend roles, though she admits she considered playing Grace.
"Yeah, of course I did," she said, her eyes showing a bit of melancholy mist. "I love that character so much. Obviously I wrote it from a very personal place. But I felt the first time out [as a director] it was too much. I just didn't want to be too self-conscious during the first one. I just wanted to tell a good story. And I was so happy when Minnie said yes because she's smart and she's talented and she did a really good job."
As usual, Hunt surrounded herself with colleagues from her Second City and television days, providing roles for Lake, best friend Holly Wortell, Tom Virtue, Brian Howe and Chris Barnes. Plus, Hunt got the chance to direct her mother, Alice, as a customer in the Irish-Italian restaurant run by Grace's father, played by Carroll O'Connor in his first film appearance in more than 25 years.
"We're on like the fourth take, and I go, `Mom, just relax a little bit,' and she says, `Well, I am getting drunk from this wine. I'm sipping every take,'" Hunt recalled. "And I go, `It's grape juice.' She's like convinced she was lightheaded from it.
"Then she goes, `I think Carroll O'Connor should know my character very well, and they should kiss'--because she likes him. So Carroll O'Connor hears this--I don't even know he's listening--and I go, `Mom, he's not going to kiss you. You're some patron of the restaurant.' She says, `But I know if we know each other, we'd kiss.' I said, `But he's probably seen you already. The scene starts in the middle.' So, action, Carroll O'Connor comes out and lays one right on her, and I swear to God it was the happiest moment of her life, and I have it on film."
"Return to Me," which makes up in likeability what it lacks in polish, reportedly has scored well in advance screenings. For her part Hunt is happy to be directing her efforts toward the "captive audience" that enters a movie theater.
"In television, you're writing the tease and then you've got to write till the commercial break, and you've got to give them something so they'll come back," she said. "In movies they've come to see to your work, and they paid for it, so you hope you give them something they can sink their teeth into."
By Mark Caro, The Chicago Tribune