What Minnie Driver Really Thought About Working With David Duchovny And Bonnie Hunt On Return To Me

Posted by Jenniffer Sheldon on Monday, May 20, 2024

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Return To Me's premise is fairly absurd. At least, it's by means of nowadays's requirements. But again in 2000, there used to be one thing in point of fact hygge about the entire thing. The film follows Minnie Driver who is the recipient of a center transplant and ultimately falls for the widowed husband (David Duchovny) of the donor. A movie with any such premise will have to've tanked nevertheless it ended up making a tight amount of cash at the field office, earned some crucial praise, and built a cult following over time.

During an interview with Vulture, Minnie Driver, who is never afraid to voice her opinion, published her true feelings about making the Bonnie Hunt-written/directed movie. As neatly as spilled the T about working with her sometimes controversial co-star, David Duchovny.

Inside Minnie Driver's Relationship With David Duchovny

The first thing Minnie Driver remembers about making Return To Me in 2000 was the blisteringly hot summer time in Chicago. Despite the shooting location being lower than comfortable, Driver had an absolute blast in the city.

"I had a bike, and I’d ride all over the city. I made more friends shooting that movie — people who were my neighbors, people in the park, at the zoo. Which I’d visit every day because I fell in love with the apes," Minnie Driver explained all over her interview with Vulture. "I’d go hang out on my days off. I swear to God, in the great ape house, the keeper there would let me go in and hang out. The great apes would spit water on me and the chimpanzees would scream at me. I loved it."

While hanging out with the apes, who are closely featured in Return To Me, was once a spotlight, Driver went on to reward her co-star, David Duchovny.

Related: Gillian Anderson And David Duchovny Didn't Talk For 'Long Periods Of Time' While Shooting The X-Files

Even regardless that Duchovny has a complicated relationship with his most famous co-star, apparently that he and Minnie Driver were given alongside famously. Seemingly some distance smoother than whatever happened between her and her Good Will Hunting co-star, Matt Damon.

"David Duchovny is one of the smartest — he’s exactly as you would imagine. He’s as funny and smart as he is handsome and charming," Driver persevered right through her interview with Vulture. "And he’d just had his little baby, West, and Tea [Leoni] brought the baby to the set, and they hung out. He’s just the great best friend you’d want to hang out with on a set, to shoot the breeze with."

Inside Minnie Driver's Relationship With Return To Me Director Bonnie Hunt

Part of the explanation why Minnie Driver had this kind of certain experiencing making Return To Me in 2000 used to be the fact that she was working with a feminine director. Throughout her career, Driver has only had the danger to work with a few female directors, together with the director of The Governess, Sandra Goldbacher.

"I’d barely worked with any women in that capacity. It was completely different, and it was amazing," Minnie Driver printed to Vulture all through an interview. "Bonnie is the triple threat: a great actress, a great writer, a great director. Plus, she’s an epic improviser; anything that wasn’t working, if you didn’t have an idea that worked, she’d have one. And she’s from Chicago. There was so much ease about what I imagine was a very pressured situation for her. It was literally her baby. A big movie, ish, at the time — MGM — and it was a big deal. I loved watching her enjoy it. Even though I know she got very stressed at times like all directors do, she knew what the film was that she wanted to make."

Driver went on to expose that a lot of Hunt's pressure got here from some primary curveballs thrown at her all the way through the production. This incorporated a moment when an Italian lodge manager abruptly refused to let the movie staff are available in to shoot at the very closing minute.

"Everything’s been sorted out, and we get there, and the manager just decides that he doesn’t want a film crew traipsing through this hotel. He’s refusing to open the freight elevator to let us onto the rooftop. I remember everyone in the foyer of this hotel, and I heard Bonnie behind me, virtually in tears if not in tears. This is nightmarish."

Related: What Happened Between Madeline Zima And David Duchovny On The Set Of Californication?

In order to remedy this downside, Driver was once steered by way of David Duchovny to cross over to the hotel manager and essentially explain the plot of the film. She was once supposed to seduce him with the sweetness and romance of the movie. And it worked...

"I managed to tell the guy the whole story. I tell the whole story like I was at The Moth. And I’m not joking, by the end of the story, he’s in tears, and he’s like, 'Amore!' And he literally takes a big key chain out and goes and unlocks the elevator, and we go and shoot the movie."

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