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Film acting is the art of catching lightning in a bottle, a Herculean task Helen Hunt and John Hawkes accepted and achieved for their new film "The Sessions." Under the direction of Ben Lewin, Hawkes and Hunt played out four intense sex-therapy scenes that give the film its title, and all three told the Palo Alto Weekly just how they did it.

Hawkes plays Mark O'Brien, a poet who resided in the Bay Area but struggled to make his way in the world due to crippling childhood polio. Playing a character who spends most of his hours in an iron lung meant, for Hawkes, emotional imagination and physical practice. Determined to honor the real-life figure, Hawkes studied Jessica Yu's Oscar-winning documentary on O'Brien and designed a "torture ball" that would help him achieve O'Brien's spinal curvature.

"I love detail and specificity as an actor," Hawkes says. "I feel, for any storyteller, anyone making any piece of art, the more specific you can be, and the more truthful detail you can imbue into what you're doing, the more universal your story becomes, oddly."

Hunt had the opportunity to meet with the woman she plays, sex surrogate Cheryl-Cohen Greene, who helped initiate O'Brien to an active sex life. "Talking to the real person was a real gold mine," she explains. "I mean, I've played a lot of real people before, and it isn't often very helpful. You create a whole character, and they come in, and it's too late almost. And what fires up your imagination isn't really the same as what they went through, so you have to kind of pretend.

"In this case, it's what got me excited about the part. What she said, but also how she said it. And her enthusiasm about everything: her granddaughter, and that someone was able to go home and make love to their wife, and recipes, and meeting me ... that positive, enthusiastic outlook, combined with the topic of sex, seemed like a great thing to be able to play."

The common denominator was Lewin, who modeled taking every moment as it came by determining to enjoy the experience of making the film instead of fruitlessly fretting about the finished product. "In the past I think I'd had my eye always on the result. I couldn't care if I didn't win a popularity contest, if every day was a nightmare." This time, he says, he had "a very different mindset … and the circumstances were there, there (was) no one looking over my shoulder, there were no grown-ups to tell me what to do. And I think that the whole thing was collaborative enough for me to feel that I was in a family."

Collectively, the three agreed upon not rehearsing the sessions, in order to capture what Lewin calls "the spontaneity of the moment.... In the first scene where they meet, the ordeal of undressing a guy who can't move is a real ordeal. And we didn't sort of say, 'Well, let's block through this so we can make it efficient and easy.' It was 'Okay, rolling, go for it.'"

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