Courtney Hunt

Hunt directed and wrote the screenplay for Frozen River, a film starring Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, and Charlie McDermott in 2008. Frozen River received 2 nominations at the 81st Academy Awards, an Best Original Screenplay nomination for Hunt, and an Best Actress nomination for Leo. Hunt is a film screenwriter and director, but she also wants to be seen as a director for hire so that filmmakers could see her in control of both aspects. Frozen River was originally a short film and it first premiered in 2004 at the New York Film Festival. The development and writing of Frozen River was a lengthy process for Hunt. She began writing the film after her graduation from college, but put the story away since she was not convinced that she had found the right angle for the story at that moment. Many years later, she turned her initial idea into a poem and enlarged it into a screenplay for a short film and then for a feature-length film. At first, her idea of the story was going to be about the Mohawk People trafficking cigarettes across the Canada–US border, but it then became a story about smuggling illegal immigrants from Canada into America. Hunt has said in an interview with Women and Hollywood that this film is based on a real situation where the smugglers drive across the St. Lawrence River when it is frozen. In this film, she believes that she is able to show people rural communities that they may have forgotten about. Frozen River was an independent film that had achieved commercial success at the box-office in the United States, as well as in France and Spain. The film was pushed back by a few years due to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. She did not want to make and release the film around this time because she believed that people would not sympathize with these immigrants or smugglers and that the audience members would see it as a way for people to help others into the country.

Hunt has said in an interview with David Jenkins that Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel is a filmmaker who inspires her. She met Martel at the Sundance Film Festival. She has also cited Paper Moon as an influence.