Helen Hunt explores an unusual mother-son relationship in Ride

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In Helen Hunt's Ride, a surf instructor played by Luke Wilson describes the encountering of a surf board to water as an intimate object meeting an ever-changing environment. It's a metaphor for life, and the theme to the film about a domineering single mom and her bubble-wrapped son. We spoke to Ride's star, director and screenplay-writer Hunt about mothering, writing and catching the perfect wave.

Your film centres on the unusual relationship between a single mother and her son. Can you talk about the atypical bond they share?

I wanted two people who were very, very, very connected. They finish each other's sentences. They think on a frequency other people can't even hear. That was the ambition. I wanted the audience to sense that these two were in it so deep, that they don't even know how deep they're in over each other.

You starred in As Good as it Gets, which dealt with a single mother and her son. And you directed, starred in and co-wrote the screenplay to 2007's Then She Found Me, which dealt with a mother-daughter relationship. Are you particularly drawn to that mother-child dynamic?

I'm drawn to mothering stories. Good mothering, bad mothering, clunky mothering – it seems to be a theme in my two-film oeuvre [laughs]. The feelings I have for my own daughter run indescribably deep. I can only imagine with a son, that there would be another spin on it.

What inspired that spin in Ride?

I was partly observing a couple of really brilliant woman New Yorkers. One was a composer and one was an acting teacher and writer. They had sons who were in the same professions. I watched how connected they were to their sons, and how much not only did the mother need the son, but that the son needed the mother and wanted her help creatively. And that just made the bond even tighter.

I have to say, for me, the bond was a bit jarring to watch. That the son calls his mother by her first name, and the scene in which he takes her by the arm and physically leads her outside the restaurant. Thinking about my relationship with my mother, it seemed very foreign.

You're a Canadian. You're decent. It's like an anthropological experiment to you. With the two women I knew, the relationship they had with their sons was bizarre, and it really needed to be revised in order for the boy to have a successful relationship in life. As much as they loved each other, the relationship was in need of an upgrade.

Surfing is used as a metaphor in Ride, and you're a surfer yourself. But could you have used a different sport or activity?

It started with this phenomenon we have here, the soccer mom. I hear it's the hockey mom there. There's also a surfer mom here, where the child is in the water playing. I thought, 'Boy, I'd like to flip that around.' I think there's real trouble when one becomes a parent and all the playing gets done by the child, and all the policing and plan-making gets done by the parent. So, in a way, the film is an advertisement for 'you better get in the water and play, whatever that means to you.' If that's getting out finger paints or climbing a mountain or jumping on a trampoline, it better not be only the child who's doing that.

Is surfing as thrilling as it's made out to be?

It's everything I painted in the movie, which is glorious and horrible. There's nothing more humbling or horrendous than learning how to surf. But you get on a wave for 10 seconds and you see why people give their whole lives to the sport.

Given that the film deals with writing, and that you're an established actor who is branching out into writing scripts, would you equate surfing with putting pen to paper?

Yeah. I think for me it's very similar. Writing is the worst job in the world, except when it's the best job in the world. It's the same way I feel about the sport. There's nothing more exciting than the feeling that you've had a good writing day. But when it's bad, it's really, really bad.

This interview has been edited and condensed.