LOS ANGELES—Timothy Hutton was just 19 when filming started on Ordinary People, for which he won an Academy Award for best supporting actor. He went from there to starring roles in several films, including Taps, Iceman, and The Falcon and the Snowman. Twenty-six years after picking up his Oscar, he has come to terms with being a working actor and not a movie star. In fact, he has five films coming out in 2007, following a year that saw him take on roles in seven feature films, a television movie, and the failed series Kidnapped. In a Los Angeles interview room, he says he is not surprised that he works a lot.

“Generally speaking, actors who are ‘on the radar', so to speak, have done enough work and have been seen enough to at least be considered for a part. There are always things out there that you are being called about and so you know that if you really want to work, the opportunities are there. If you live in New York and there isn't a film or television show, you can do a play, and I think theatre is a comfortable place for most actors. I will admit that I, when I lived in Los Angeles, I did get that feeling of, ‘Gee, I just finished doing this movie. I hope that something comes through that I like.'?”

In the Vancouver-shot The Last Mimzy, which opens on Friday (March 23), Hutton plays David Wilder, a Seattle businessman whose children discover magical toys in the ocean near their summer cabin. Although the toys give his son (Chris O'Neil) advanced scientific knowledge, it's his five-year-old daughter (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) who seems to be changed the most by them. She tells her parents that one of the toys, a stuffed rabbit called Mimzy, is telling her that it needs her help to save the world of the future.

Hutton's own future looks bright. In addition to all the projects he has acted in recently, he has managed to find time to keep connected to directing, with which he has been involved since 1982. His latest project was directing a music video with Pink Floyd's Roger Waters for a song Waters performed on the soundtrack of The Last Mimzy. He says that the attraction to directing is that you have more control over your life.

“I started directing videos in my twenties,” he says. “I did one for The Cars and then I directed a Don Henley video and one with Neil Young. Steven Spielberg let me direct an Amazing Stories episode, and I did a film called Digging to China and several episodes of [the 2001 series] Nero Wolfe. I think about it [directing] a lot, but not music videos, because you can't really make a career out of them anymore. MTV is a different thing now. They are more into programming. VH1 does some, but MTV used to be like a visual radio station, and that just isn't true now. And if you think of yourself as a storyteller, as I do, you want to do a full-length feature. So I feel that if there was an opportunity to direct projects and there was a guarantee to it, I could leave acting behind and I don't think I would miss it.”

Having control over his life would give him more time to spend with his wife, Paris-based illustrator Aurore Giscard d'Estaing—the niece of former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing—their five-year-old son, and Hutton's 19-year-old son from his first marriage to actor Debra Winger. He says he has missed several special family moments that he will never get back but admits that he can't really complain.

“I feel like I can control a few of the projects I pick and the amount of time that they are going to take me away. But sometimes you will read a script that will take you to South Africa or the Czech Republic, even though you know you should be staying in New York watching your son's high-school basketball team. It is very hard to have complete control in this business on this level because you just don't know where you are going to be living or who you are going to be working with. And you can be making a movie and then get a phone call telling you that there is this amazing film coming up that starts just two weeks after the one you are currently working on after you have made a plan to go to Italy for two months with your family. All that being said, everyone should have such problems.”