Helen Hunt has finally received the funding to direct her second film, Ride.
The Academy Award winner will also be starring in the picture as a magazine-editor mother who chooses to follow her son to Los Angeles after he drops out of college to start a life as a surfer. While in the City of Angels, they both take their own journeys to find themselves.
The romantic comedy first gained some traction in 2011 in Cannes, with Michael Roiff and his Night & Day Pictures producing with Hunt, Matthew Carnahan and Moon Blauner. Now, the film will be produced by Hunt, Lizzie Friedman, Gregg Little’s Sandbar Productions, and Moon Blauner, with Matthew Carnahan as executive producer.
Ride will also star Luke Wilson, Dexter‘s David Zayas, Mike White, Richard Kind, Leonor Varela, Elizabeth Jayne and Brenton Thwaites. Thwaites will play Hunt’s son who goes to Los Angeles after dropping out of New York University to enjoy the surfing lifestyle, while unbeknownst to him, his mother isn’t far behind. Deadline says, “There, he pursues his dream and she pursues him. Along the way she meets a surf teacher (Wilson) who brings her to life in every way. Both mother and son find their own version of love, sex and an unexpected state of grace in a most unlikely place.”
Production of the film begins in Los Angeles in August and is scheduled to move to New York in October.
After directing five episodes of Mad About You, the sitcom that shot Hunt to fame, she had her feature film directorial debut with Then She Found Me. Since the release of Then She Found Me in 2007, she has directed an episode of the Showtime series Californication and an episode of ABC’s Revenge.
Most recently, Hunt received an Oscar nomination for her work as Cheryl, a professional sex surrogate in the film, The Sessions. She can next be seen on the big screen in Decoding Annie Parker, based on a true story of the “almost discovery of a cure for cancer.”