Helen Hunt

Helen Hunt didn’t plan on her directorial debut taking so long.It’s been more than a decade since the Oscar-winning actress read Elinor Lip­man’s novel Then She Found Me, and knew almost instantly that she wanted to adapt it into a feature film. She worked on a screenplay adaptation, and was attached to the project first as an actress, then as a director, but met frustration when trying to pitch the idea to investors. “Everybody sort of thought that it was better than most things they read, and not quite a movie,” Hunt said during a recent promotional stop in Dallas. “I couldn’t totally disagree with them, but it was very hard to rewrite something that was as beautifully written as this book was.”