Cheryl Hines Turns Serious With Directorial Debut

By the time Cheryl Hines returned to the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday, the worst of the jitters were behind her. But for a while there, the Curb Your Enthusiasm star and first-time filmmaker confessed, she couldn't be too sure. "I thought I was going to pass out," Hines told Movieline on her way back to the fest, where less than a week before, her feature directorial debut Serious Moonlight premiered to a warm, sold-out reception.

The crowd's first laughs helped, she said, relieving much of the pressure that had accrued since she nabbed the job of bringing actor/writer/director Adrienne Shelly's unusual psychological dramedy to the screen. The assignment was bittersweet at best: Moonlight's industry profile elevated sharply following Shelly's shocking murder in 2006. The film she had just completed, Waitress, would go on to the Sundance Film Festival and a distribution deal with Fox Searchlight; less than a year later, Shelly's husband Andy Ostroy and producer Michael Roiff would handpick Hines, that film's co-star, to helm the late filmmaker's next project.

"You know, Adrienne was very good at capturing a certain tone," Hines said, contemplating how Shelly's style behind the camera informed her own. "I wanted to try and capture that tone in this film. I think more than anything I approached this project with that attitude. When I watch Waitress, I like being able to laugh one moment, and then the next be totally surprised by something dramatic. So I was trying to capture that."

And she does, to mixed and somewhat alarming effect. Meg Ryan portrays Louise, a big-city lawyer hoping to surprise her husband Ian (Timothy Hutton) by arriving early for a getaway at their country home. Except that Ian, already at the house, has plans of his own: specifically, to host his 20-something paramour Sara (Kristen Bell) for a romantic evening before they jet off together to Paris. Louise's sudden appearance prompts a confrontation with Ian, which ends with her clobbering his lights out and duct-taping him to a chair until they can discuss -- and finally salvage -- their marriage.

Both the farce (Louise ultimately tapes Ian to the toilet, lest he attempt an escape during a bathroom furlough) and the relationship bromides (they watch film of their wedding projected on the bathroom wall) only stretch so far, though. Enter Todd (Justin Long), a gardener whom Ian tips off to his captivity, and who subsequently robs and brutalizes the couple. Indeed, Shelly's tone lingers in that pitch-black fringe -- and quite uncomfortably so, considering the writer's own violent demise under similar circumstances two and a half years ago.

Hines fell silent at the mention of the parallel, simply replying, "I think you need to take that element out of the equation." But Long's sardonic savagery makes that hard to do, as Hines also seemed to acknowledge. "We needed to push that feeling that here was a young guy who might go too far," she said. "He's unpredictable and we don't know what he's going to do next. That's how the role is written. And I loved the idea of Justin Long because Justin is naturally funny, and I think that if this character didn't have a sense of humor or have any levity, it would have been really difficult to watch. Sometimes it's very uncomfortable, but that's the point of his character. ... [T]he only way the story works is if Ian feels truly threatened."

It also sets up an extraordinary final shot, another jarring tonal shift sure to fuel viewer debate once Moonlight finds a theatrical release. It's a nifty trick for Hines, who said she simply filmed exactly what Shelly wrote while working to steady her directorial hand.

"I think halfway through the shoot I started to understand the best way to approach filmmaking," she told me. "I started out thinking, 'Nothing can go wrong today, or we'll never make it through our day.' And stuff happens every day that's unexpected. And it was really stressful. Then, halfway through, I went to bed thinking 'OK, something's going to happen tomorrow, but we'll get through it. The world isn't going to stop spinning.'"

It's more than Hines can say in the long hiatuses between seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which generally promise nothing but Larry David's protracted noncommittal. "It's interesting," said Hines, who is currently at work on the hit series' seventh season. "It's been this way for me since after the first season, honestly. Larry said, 'I don't know if we'll do another season or not.' Maybe the second and third season, I felt pretty good that we would have another one, but ever since then I have to go on thinking, 'Maybe that was it.' So for me it's always a new end and a new beginning. In a perfect world, I'd like for us to keep shooting all the time. But it's not a perfect world."

[Photos: top, Will McGarry; Hines and Meg Ryan, WireImage]