Hunt and Ebert give Oscar performances
March 15, 2000 BY BILL ZWECKER SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Introduced as "a Chicago native, gone Hollywood . . . and an Urbana-Champaign guy gone big-time," Bonnie Hunt and Roger Ebert had 'em rolling in the aisles Tuesday at the annual Oscar predictions luncheon co-hosted by the Chicago TV Academy and the Broadcast Ad Club at the Marriott on Boul Mich. The event also gave Hunt the chance to plug her directorial debut with the Chicago-made "Return to Me," starring David Duchovny and Minnie Driver, opening April 7. When Ebert asked the former Second City member what she learned from directing her first movie, the actress and comedian zinged, "I learned it's a helluva lot easier than doing what my mother did--having seven kids all under the age of 10. . . . I mean we kids were under 10, not my mother!" * The main agenda was to pick who Ebert and Hunt thought would win the Oscars--leading to many great lines. On the possibility of Annette Bening winning best actress for "American Beauty," Hunt quipped, "Come on. Annette's got four kids, a career and Warren Beatty. Let Hilary [Swank for "Boys Don't Cry"] win it." . . . As for "The Sixth Sense" child star Haley Joel Osment's chances, Hunt groaned. "Give the kid something to look forward to . . . he's too young to win an Oscar"--though Ebert reminded her the Academy "is partial to children" in the supporting categories. "All I know is, the first 20 years of my life, I just looked forward to having my own room," Hunt said.

Hunt draws from life
By Lynn Carey Contra Costa Times
Wednesday, April 5, 2000

In a direct contradiction of the characters she usually portrays, Bonnie Hunt is sad today. Prior to a photo session, a makeup artist dabs at her face and pulls a few blond strands of hair back in place, but it can't erase the feelings that come bubbling to the surface, causing the actress to tear up periodically. Her father-in-law has just passed away unexpectedly, and her dog is dying — at home without her — in Los Angeles. The feelings are to be expected from the director and co-writer of "Return to Me," one of the most sweetly romantic comedies to come down the movie pike in a long time. Opening Friday, it's a movie full of emotion, as David Duchovny portrays a widower, and Minnie Driver plays a woman who receives his wife's heart. They fall in love, of course, but they don't know — at first — about the transplant coincidence. Chicago is the backdrop for "Return to Me," and Chicago is the backdrop for Hunt, who grew up there in an Italian-Irish neighborhood (the sixth out of seven children), got her acting start there as part of the Second City improv troupe, and met her husband there. She loves the town. Most of her family still lives there. "This (movie) was a very personal piece of writing for me. So much of my childhood is in these characters," she says during a one-day visit to San Francisco. Duchovny's character is named for her dad and dresses like her husband. Carroll O'Connor's lovable grandfather character has lines that Hunt's late father used to say. His cronies argue over who was the best baseball player (dead), or who was the best male singer (also dead). "These characters exist in every neighborhood there. It's a community, a great place to grow up. It's a character itself, the city." Hunt retains the flat-and-fast Chicago way of speaking. And she's a character herself. All the late-night talk show hosts love having her on; she always has a funny story. And all the movie directors love having her in their films; she's a hard worker and she's talented. She was the wife of Charles Grodin in the Beethoven movies and the wife of Tom Hanks in "The Green Mile." ("I'll tell you, it's a great job, having to make out with Tom Hanks every day. It's a bonus. I'd go home, and my husband would say, 'Hi, honey,' and I'd say, 'Don't even try.'") She was the best friend in "Only You" with Marisa Tomei, as well as the best friend to Robin Williams' character in "Jumanji." She was Renee Zellweger's sister in "Jerry Maguire," which starred Tom Cruise. "Would I like to be a lead girl?" she asks. "Who wouldn't?" Hunt actually wrote the lead role in "Return to Me" for herself, but ended up playing the best friend since it was her first directing job. She wrote the screenplay with her longtime writing partner Don Lake (who also appears in the movie as a guy with hair plugs). They met when they were both in Second City (in fact, there are 12 actors from the troupe in the movie). "We didn't write any jokes," she says. "We write through improvisation. It's like solving this giant crossword puzzle when you're telling the story through people's conversation." Hunt also says they wrote for the characters. "And we lucked out, because if you write a good character, good actors want to play it." The other main actors she attracted to her first feature include Robert Loggia, Joely Richardson, James Belushi and David Alan Grier, "the funniest man on the set. He brings the whole set up 10 notches with his personality. He'd have the whole crew doubled over. I worked with him on 'Jumanji' and knew I just wanted to be around him." During filming, Hunt was treated as a favorite daughter by the crew. "There really was a great effort. They'd say, 'Whatever you need, Bon.' 'Don't worry about it, Bon.' 'What, you want a table? We'll build you a table, give us five minutes.'" Hunt admits she was terrified the first time she faced the cast with the cameras ready to roll. "I'd sold the studio on the story, I told them I could do it. And I worried about my family, I wanted them to be happy with the outcome." Much of her family is in the film. A sister plays a nurse, a doctor brother plays an emergency room doctor and a nephew plays Duchovny's character's dog walker. "He had no fear," she says of her young nephew. "David (Duchovny) and he improvised like crazy, those two. I had to cut it so it wasn't 'Danny the Dogwalker Movie.' If my mother had edited it, it would have been. She kept saying, 'Where's Patrick's stuff? We should see him again near the end!'" Hunt's mother, by the way, is the woman in the restaurant near the beginning of the movie, being served by Carroll O'Connor. "She said she was getting drunk from all the wine in all the takes. I told her it was grape juice, but she whispered, 'I'm getting very dizzy!' She was so nervous, she actually made herself drunk." Hunt credits her mother for her own ambition and humor. "I've been a movie addict all my life because my mother loved movies. She gave that to me. She has a great gift of storytelling." Many moments in the movie are taken from real life. The restaurant where Driver's and O'Connor's characters work and live is actually a Chicago joint called the Twin Anchors, where she and her husband ate while they were dating. That same husband teases Hunt for wearing shower caps — so, Driver wears one in a pivotal scene. The coterie of old men frantically attempts to find romantic music in one scene, so Hunt used her dad's old Jackie Gleason albums. In another scene, Hunt's character tells her friend not to shave her legs before going on a date, thus erasing any temptation to get naked. "I used to tell my girlfriends that," Hunt says, nodding earnestly. Hunt says she told MGM that she was going to do a movie "where people think they're sneaking a peek and they want to crawl in and live there. After he saw it, the president of the studio wrote me a letter saying, 'You did it.'" Test screenings brought back the highest scores in MGM's history, Hunt reports. "Isn't that something? They're happy, of course they're happy," she says of the studio. "I came in ahead of schedule and under budget." Not only was the studio happy — and they've already signed her to write (with Lake) and direct another film, called "Anniversary" — the actors were also pleased. "That was a great joy. Every actor was so thrilled when they saw the movie. Every last one of them. I wanted to give a gift back to them, for all their hard work. And it's hard work to do something simple," she says. "You want to keep it honest, you don't want to be preachy, you want to be funny. That was my mantra from the beginning. Keep it honest, because it's a fantasy."

Chicago Sun Times
Michael Sneed's column: Wrap 'em . . . Havin' a Bonnie good time!
The cast and crew of "Return to Me," directed by Chicago actress Bonnie Hunt, took over the entire Club Macanudo Saturday for a wrap party for the movie, which finishes filming in Chicago this week. * The 375 guests, including actors David Duchovny, Carroll O'Connor and Robert Loggia and actress Minnie Driver, partied until 2:15 a.m. Director Hunt, who celebrated with several members of her family, showed a gag reel of bloopers from the movie's filming. "Bonnie Hunt was the life of the party," said one person in attendance. "She talked to everyone she could and had a real positive presence." 1999/07/13

Hunt is Dead On in Comedy Debut
filmbazaar.com
Alan Silverman
April 2000.

FB: From your acting in films like "Beethoven," "Jumanji" and "Jerry Maguire" we know how funny you are in front of the camera. What was the challenge of getting your humor across as writer and director?
BH: I wrote the movie for, hopefully, people that would get it. You just have to keep saying to the studio, "Please trust me. The audience is going to get it." (The audience) doesn’t want to be spoon-fed the crap that's out there. I'm so sick of it myself, going to the movies and saying, "Please! I get it!" You hope that you can get your version of it out there just once to see if it could work. Luckily, that first cut was the highest-scoring film in the studio's history, so then they went, "Okay, she's on to something."

FB: Is it a bit a dangerous in the face of all the broad, sight-gag comedy that's out there to make a film that expects the audience to think about humor?
BH: It is dangerous, but it's the only way I know how to do it. I had to see if I could do it and see if it worked. . .and it does. Audiences get it. I think they're just so happy that I considered that they're smart. I can feel it when I'm in the audience. It takes them a couple of seconds and then they go, "Oh, oh. . .we're smart for this one. This is good. I'm going to listen." And they listen more. They'd better, because they might miss something.

FB: "Return To Me" is, in many ways, an old-fashioned movie romance, but I understand you cringe every time you hear someone describe it as "cute" or "sweet" or "sentimental."
BH: But it's smart, and the word "smart" is better than sweet or cute in order to make people come and see it. People are afraid of cute or sweet. It's almost beneath them, so when we use those adjectives, for some reason, it turns people off. I understand because people don't want to think that they fall for that, and we don't use that sentimentality in this film. We use the truth, and it's smart. I wasn't avoiding sentimentality; I was just doing it truthfully. I think that's why people are responding to it. Never when I was directing did I think, "Oh, I'm going to make them feel ‘this’ here." I thought, "This is what makes me feel something, and maybe my life experience can be shared."

FB: What's wrong with sentimentality? Why has it become a dirty word to filmmakers?
BH: There's smart sentimental and there's manipulative sentimental. There's a difference. When it's not done with respect for the audience's intelligence, it bothers me, too. I didn't use sentimentality to advance my story. The story advanced the sentimentality. There's a difference. That's important to me as a writer, and it worked on stage. I did eight shows a week for years at Second City and the audiences constantly let you know, "We don't buy that." The audiences are smart, and you get a sixth sense.

FB: Second City is where you started in show business, but your day job back then was as a nurse. Did comedy offer you a release from the tragedy you were dealing with in the hospital?
BH: I was a nurse for five years – two years in the emergency room and three years on the oncology ward. As an oncology nurse all my patients were terminally ill, and they had the greatest sense of humor of any people I've ever known in my life. I used to bring the whole Second City group over to the hospital, and we would do the show right there in the solarium. We'd drag all the beds out and all the patients in the beds. Then the patients started to inspire me. I remember sitting with this patient, Rudy, who had neck cancer and he said, "Bon, you gotta go to California." I said, "God, Rudy, I'm not going to go there and fail and be humiliated and come back. This is my job. I like doing the shows at night. It's a nice hobby." He said, "You have to go and fail. Fail all the time at everything. Go and do it." I thought, "What am I saying to this man who is dying: I'm afraid to fail?" I left two weeks later.

FB: I guess those words of encouragement came back to you when your TV shows came and went so quickly in 1993 and 1995. How did those experiences help you get ready to write and direct feature films?
BH: I think my television shows helped me a lot. Certainly, when I wrote my first television show, instead of going in a pitching an idea, I wrote an entire season because I was so afraid they wouldn't believe I could do it. I actually sold that show after writing 33 episodes. Only six ended up being made, but that's all right. Those are the ones I sent to the studios when I said I wanted to write and direct movies, because I was so proud of them. If you fail by your standards you end up succeeding.

Famous
Queen of Hearts
by Marni Weisz, Archived March 28, 2000
So here's the premise: A husband and wife are madly in love. One fateful night, they have a car accident. Wife dies. Flash forward one year. The widower decides to go on a blind date after much urging from a friend. That date, at a Chicago restaurant, is a bust, but he does meet a spirited waitress who makes a magical impression on him. They fall in love. But she has a secret. One year ago she had a heart transplant, and now discovers--through a fateful turn of events--that the heart that pounds in her chest for this new man was donated by his dead wife. Sounds too schlocky? Too over-the-top? Like movie of the week material? Well, you should know that this movie--Return To Me, starring David Duchovny as widower Bob and Minnie Driver as his new heartthrob Grace--has garnered the highest scores from test audiences in the history of MGM. Perhaps that's because the woman who co-wrote and directed Return to Me is acclaimed actress/comedian Bonnie Hunt, whose sharp and realistic sense of humour is always there to reign in this undeniably romantic story.

"Listen, I was shocked by the rating--absolutely shocked," Hunt says from her L.A. home, where she lives with her husband, investment banker John Murphy, whom she herself met on a blind date. "I wrote the movie basically for my family so they'd be proud and happy and get a good laugh out of it. Then to see a whole audience embrace it has been a great joy." Before the first test-screening, an MGM executive told Hunt if they scored in the 60s it would be a good sign. They got a 92. And that first score was no fluke. "It didn't matter where we tested--New Jersey in the middle of winter, the Valley in L.A., it always scored in the 90s," Hunt says.

Although Return to Me is a romantic comedy, it contains some honestly teary moments. Duchovny's wrenching turn as a shocked and grieving widower allows him to explore depths that his most famous character, The X-Files' Fox Mulder, has never even approached. As for Minnie Driver (Good Will Hunting), her biggest feat is managing to convince the audience that she's never had a boyfriend, as a result of her fear of being treated like "damaged goods" because of her heart condition. There are also delightful appearances by Joely Richardson (101 Dalmations) as Bob's wife, Elizabeth, and Caroll O'Connor (All in the Family) as Grace's grandfather, who runs the Irish/Italian restaurant that provides the setting for much of the movie.

But not one of those actors had to go through the rigours of the audition process. "I hate auditioning so no one auditioned," Hunt says. She had seen Driver in Circle of Friends (1995) and was impressed. "So I took her to lunch a couple of times. We hit it off: She liked the material, I thought she had the right look and she's a good actress. I also thought she'd be really cute with David."

As for Duchovny, she had a small, sparsely-written scene with him on Beethoven, where director Brian Levant encouraged them to adlib. It turned out really well and Hunt remembered that when it came time for casting.

Aside from co-writing and directing the film, Hunt also plays Grace's protective and wise-cracking best friend, Megan. It's a humorous role, as most of Hunt's are, which isn't surprising considering she started performing with the well-known Second City improv troupe in her hometown of Chicago in 1986. That's where she first met Return to Me's co-writer, Don Lake, who also has a small, but funny, role in the movie as a guy with a bad hair transplant.

In 1988, Hunt made the jump from Second City to the big screen as the toothpick dropping waitress, Sally Dibbs, in one of Rain Man's most memorable scenes. She went on to play a string of sassy, apple-pie characters like the wifely Alice Newton in Beethoven (1992) and Beethoven's 2nd (1993); Robin Williams' childhood friend, Sarah Whittle, in Jumanji (1995); and Renée Zellweger's sister, Laurel Boyd, in Jerry Maguire (1996). (It was Jerry Maguire director Cameron Crowe who encouraged her to direct. "I guess it was just me saying 'What about try this, what about try that,'" Hunt says. "Me driving him crazy.")

Then, just last year, she appeared in the most dramatic role of her career as Tom Hanks' wife, Jan Edgecomb, in The Green Mile. The performance earned her a nomination for Favorite Supporting Actress in a Drama from the Blockbuster Awards and she admits a small part of her was hoping to hear her name when the Oscar nominations were announced in February. "Absolutely," she says, "but I haven't told anybody that except you and my husband [laughs]. I knew that I wouldn't get one, but it was fun to pretend that maybe it could happen."

Return to Me was her first kick at directing, never mind directing herself. "I never really thought of it as directing myself," she says. "I would just jump in and do the scene and then jump back behind the camera, take a look at it on the monitor and then say, 'Okay, let's move on.' It was easier than having to tell someone else what to do."

From the film's opening shot, it's clear that this is going to be a movie about fate. The camera hovers high above Chicago, then slowly descends through a labyrinth of skyscrapers until it finds one particular construction site and one particular architect--Bob Rueland. Then, after his wife's death, Bob has several chance encounters with Grace, leading to the conclusion that they were meant to be together. So does Hunt really believe in fate, or does she just use it as a device to tell a magical story?

"I believe it. I believe that lot of times we don't know what's happening when the chess pieces are being moved," she says. "We don't know fate until after it's happened. I feel it's always when you decide that you're going to be okay no matter what happens that good things come to you. And I think that's when David [as Bob] finally picks himself up and brushes himself off and thinks, 'I'll go on this date even though I don't want to' that fate intervenes and he meets Grace."

And maybe that fateful story isn't so far-fetched after all. These things do happen, and Hunt would be the first to attest to that. Before she was an actress, comedian, writer or director, Bonnie Hunt was a nurse for five years. Only she almost wasn't. When she was an 18-year-old nursing student in Chicago, her father died suddenly of a heart attack. She was devastated. Thinking she was only in nursing school to make him happy, she wanted to quit. But her mom convinced her to stick it out for one more week. "I went back to school that Monday and I was assigned a patient, Mr. O'Brien, and I remember thinking, 'Oh, here we go, my dad's gone and now I've got this patient who has cancer,'" Hunt says. "I would meet him every morning and get him ready for breakfast, and he would talk about how lucky he was to have cancer because he could say goodbye to his family. And he talked very often of a man who was one of his best friends from work, who was a family man, and who had died very suddenly and didn't have a chance to say goodbye. And by the third day we realized that he was talking about my father."

After that, Bonnie couldn't leave Mr. O'Brien. She was his nurse until he died three months later. She went on to finish school and become a full-fledged nurse. "It was one of the best things that ever happened to me because I was meant to be a nurse," she says. "It was a very important part of my life." Over the next few years, it was her patients--people who were often her age and didn't have much time left--who inspired her to put aside her fears and take a shot at becoming an actress. And, despite not having practised for years, she says she still feels like a nurse. "It's just a different form of nursing--to write and make people laugh and feel good in their heart."

What the Stars Say About Return to Me

David Duchovny (Bob Reuland)

"The script of Return to Me was so simple and direct, it wasn't tainted with the kind of cynicism which seems to affect everything else these days. It earns it sentimentality through truth and honesty--with integrity. I just read it and immediately wanted to do it, knowing that Bonnie would be the best director for her own screenplay."

Minnie Driver (Grace Biggs)

"There's a magical element to the entire movie which you must give yourself over to. What happens between Bob and Grace is a little farther over from coincidence, but in the spirit of the film it's not unbelievable. You like these characters so much, you want them to be together...and the film allows the audience to fulfil their wishes."