Below, Minnie Driver as Grace and David Duchovny as Bob in Return to Me, a film director Bonnie Hunt (above) describes as “my love letter to my parents”.
return to me

WWebster’s Dictionary defines fate as “the power or agency supposed to determine the outcome of events before they occur”. But Hollywood’s definition of fate could well be ‘the opportunity to make a film where the premise might be a bit exaggerated but exudes romantic possibilities’. Such is the case with Return to Me. Bob Rueland (David Duchovny) is a successful Chicago-based architectural engineer happily married to Elizabeth (Joely Richardson). They appear to have it all: love, career and a sense of purpose. On the other side of town, meanwhile, Grace Briggs (Minnie Driver) is wondering if she will ever have the opportunity to fulfil her dreams of becoming an artist or even fall in love. Working as a waitress in her family’s restaurant, she counts every day as a blessing. Born with a defective heart, she is awaiting a transplant in order to merely survive. But tragedy strikes Bob when Elizabeth’s life is cut short in an car accident and Grace receives a life-infusing gift from a woman she never met. One year later, the grief-stricken Bob, who has refused to socialise, finally accepts a friend’s invitation to go out to dinner. At O’Reilly’s Italian Restaurant he meets a waitress named Grace and, yep, you guessed it, the two gravitate toward each other and begin a relationship. On a quiet street in the trendy Old Town section of Chicago, the Twin Anchors pub has been given a cosmetic Hollywood facelift to double as O’Reilly’s restaurant. Although its name and decor would seem to denote an Irish flavour, the restaurant deviates a bit from the norm due to the ethnically diverse ownership of Marty O’Reilly (Carroll O’Connor) and Angelo Pardipillo (Robert Loggia), Grace’s overtly protective grandfather and great uncle. In the scene due to be shot, Grace is about to have a life-changing moment when she takes the dinner order of a newly seated foursome. In one of those magic cinematic moments, she looks up from her pad and sees Bob. “Have we met before?” he asks. “I don’t think so,” she responds. The die is cast. “I believe in romance and being in love,” readily acknowledges David Duchovny, taking a break on set and sporting a cut nose from a recent basketball game. “But I am not so sure about fate. If something happens, then it’s very easy to say it was supposed to happen. But I do believe that we have energies and impulses around us that lead us in certain directions.” Return to Me offers a new direction for the 39-year-old actor. A far cry from his breakthrough role as Agent Mulder in The X Files, the film promises to show a lighter side of his persona that most audiences have not yet seen. “People see Mulder in whatever I do,” he admits. “I look like him and I sound like him, but I think I have a lot more to offer.”

So comfortable in Mulder’s skin that he can admittedly act the character in his sleep, Duchovny was a bit more apprehensive about taking on the role of Bob. “I haven’t done anything new in almost five years and so, to create a whole new character was quite nerve racking,” he says. “I mean, it’s fun because it’s new, but it’s anything but relaxing because you don’t have a second chance in a movie. In TV, you get 22 chances with each subsequent episode. But with a movie, you get one chance.”

Director Bonnie Hunt as Megan, Grace’s best friend.

“When I first saw The X Files and Mulder, I kept wondering where the rest of David was,” says first-time director Bonnie Hunt. “He plays the kind of character that requires that everything is subtext, and so he doesn’t get to wear his heart on his sleeve. In this film, he’s on an emotional rollercoaster, and David hasn’t had the chance to really do that as an actor in a long time.” Having worked with him on Beethoven and remaining friends with Duchovny since, Hunt recalls the funny man she knew then. “I wanted to get back to that David so, every morning on set, we give him an IV of pure caffeine to get him pumped up!”