Erin and I were dying to get out of the house last night and see a movie. We checked all the local theaters, and we were pretty bummed to find that there really isn’t much out right now that’s worth paying to see. (That we haven’t already seen, mind you).

Erin found this really cool theater downtown Portland called “Living Room Theater” that was showing 6 indie films. This cute little theater has a cafe/bar inside it. While we waited for our movie, we sat in the cafe - and ate two of the best panini’s we’ve ever tried. We topped the food off with some really great (read: strong) cocktails. 15 minutes prior to the movie starting, we walked into the theater, which was essentially like a big living room. There were ottomans to go with the huge - overstuffed chairs. There were little tables between each seat, and you could order a cocktail or food, right from your seat. Once the movie started - we were in heaven (and slightly buzzed).

We had previously narrowed our two movie choices down to “Priceless” starring Audrey Tatou, and “Then She Found Me” starring Helen Hunt, Matthew Broderick, Colin Firth and Bette Midler. We decided A) we didn’t much feel like reading subtitles and B) we would watch any movie Colin Firth is in - so we went with the latter.

“Then She Found Me” is one of the better movies I’ve seen in a long time. I can’t even tell you guys how much I enjoyed this movie. I have been hearing about it for quite some time, as it has been Helen Hunt’s passion project for almost 10 years. I would HIGHLY recommend this movie. It’s such a great movie…kudos to Helen Hunt! Erin and I both cried at least once. Colin Firth is so great!!!

You guys need to find where it’s playing near you - and go see it! You won’t be disappointed!

A New York schoolteacher hits a midlife crisis when, in quick succession, her husband leaves, her adoptive mother dies and her biological mother, an eccentric talk show host, materializes and turns her life upside down as she begins a courtship with the father of one of her students.

EW recently interviewed Helen Hunt on this very special project:

Wondering why you haven’t seen much of Helen Hunt lately? For the past 10 years, the Academy Award-winning actress has been fighting to get her directorial debut, Then She Found Me, off the ground. Co-adapted by Hunt from a 1990 novel by Elinor Lipman, and featuring her as a woman eager to have a child just as her own birth mother (Bette Midler) enters her life for the first time, Then She Found Me premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on Friday. By Saturday it was the subject of the biggest acquisition news out of the festival: ThinkFilm and a Canadian distributor picked it up in a reported $2.5 million-to-$3 million deal.

Congratulations on your distribution deal. Was there crazy deal making going on behind the scenes?
HELEN HUNT: For me, most of the night was about the premiere, 1,500 people standing up at the end. Oh my God, that was one of the big moments of my career, mostly because the audience seemed to be responding to these weird thoughts I have and things I care about. So that was the biggest part of it, and then I went to bed not knowing [if we had distribution], and I woke up to congratulations.

Why did it take you 10 years to make this movie?
Writing it took forever, because [the Lipman novel] was one of the pieces of material that was better than most things, but not yet really ready to go. It’s easy when the [source] novel is lousy, but there were characters in [this] novel that I ”loved”, but I had to execute and replace them. And the character has no wish for a baby in the novel, so it took me a long time to get there, to figure out what the movie was about. That took an embarrassingly long period of time, and then it took forever to finance it. And there were a couple of years that I acted in a lot of films. But this movie just walked along next to me and kept my attention.

Did you always know you’d star in it?
No. That was the toughest decision I made for the entire time. I just thought it was every actor’s rookie mistake, to put themselves in their movie, but I hadn’t seen myself play this part. And I also needed someone who would work 24 hours a day, who would change their clothes in the street, would go to Bette Midler’s apartment when she snapped her fingers to rehearse. I had no money, so I was like a desperate woman, and the one thing I could control was the lead actress — I could make her do whatever I said.

M ORE AFTER THE JUMP!

You’ve got a 3 1/2-year-old kid. And your character, April, wants a baby. How closely does April’s life line up with your life?
HELEN HUNT: I would say the core elemental things are the same, in my character and Colin Firth’s character. In the movie, his character wants to sleep on his kid’s floor, and work outside of his kid’s school. I don’t do those things, but I fantasize about them. I would be more relaxed if I could stare at [my daughter] all day. [Laughs] I used to say I wanted to be a kangaroo: I could put her in my pouch and then go work and whatever.

So we also haven’t seen as much of you on screen because you wanted to spend time with your daughter?
It’s been about finding my life at home so compelling that it takes a great story for me to say, ”I’m not going to be around this kid every day. I’m just not bored of being with her.” So if I read a movie that’s pretty good, that in my 20s I would’ve said, ”Yeah, I’ll jump on a plane and go to Utah for three months,” it’s just not the same now. One quality I envy in other actresses is their ability to just put their kids on a plane and move and be fine.

So now that this movie is finished, since it sounds so personal for you, does it mark the end of a certain part of your life?
Maybe. When I thought about what to write next, I said to myself that I’ve put everything I think into this movie. I don’t care about anything else. It’s all in here.

Were there movies you looked to for inspiration?
Kramer vs. Kramer. That’s a perfect movie. I don’t think this is a perfect movie, but there’s something about the purity of how it was shot, the lack of pretension. I guess if [my movie] has a style it would be a lack of pretension, and you hope it just registers on someone’s radar. I love About A Boy. That’s a comedy where you find the mother in her own vomit after trying to kill herself, and this is a comedy where some dark things happen. Those are my favorite kind of movies.

Do you have an acting job lined up?
There’s one thing that still needs to be financed, but I don’t have a next big thing.

You want to direct again?
I hope so.

Have you always wanted to get behind the camera?
I think I have more of a director’s brain than an actor’s brain, in a way. I love acting, and I’d love the next thing I do to be someone else handing me a wonderful, luscious part. But I feel like my personality is kind of suited to this job.

EW

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