She came home from Hollywood to showcase Minnesota’s fall beauty

Wearing three hats on a low-budget movie that shoots where you live sounds stressful — and some of the time, it was. But Deephaven native Marisa Coughlan says that’s not the whole story of “Blue Eyed Girl,” which is available on streaming services Friday.

“I am in pretty much every scene of the movie and my kids are in it and my husband produced it with me and my friends are background players. It was all hands on deck,” said actor/writer/producer Coughlan. “I was nervous and there were so many things to take on and you would maybe think it was exhausting but it was the opposite. It revitalized so much creative energy, even when we had to be scrappy at times. It was just fantastically fun to do.”

“Blue Eyed Girl” was shot three years ago, when it was being called “Days When the Rains Came,” after a lyric from Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” which proved too expensive for the movie to include.

Inspired by the “Teaching Mrs. Tingle” and “Boston Legal” star’s relationship with her late father, it’s a comedy/drama in which three sisters bicker and reconcile at the bedside of their ailing father (Beau Bridges). Coughlan’s Jane is an actor who returns home from Hollywood and finds herself torn between her family in California and a long-ago love in Minnesota.

Coughlan, whose own clan relocated several years ago to the Twin Cities, said it was sometimes odd, shifting from writing to acting to producing: “I started to see myself almost as a different actor: ‘Well, that was a terrible take of hers. Let’s use that other one instead.’”

But she has no ambivalence about her costars, including Eliza Coupe, one of the leads from comedy series “Happy Endings.” Coupe plays Jane’s wise-cracking sister Alex, who lives in a Lake Minnetonka estate that regularly pops up on lists of the Minnesota’s swankiest houses.

“She’s just naturally a funny person, but when I see the finished cut there are so many moments where it’s intense or you feel sad and she comes on screen and brings levity at exactly the right moment,” said Coughlan.

“He just grabs you. He’s such a sensitive performer,” she said. “We have a scene where he tells a story and I’m mostly actively listening to him. I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to do some takes where I get emotional and some where I don’t because, in the editing room, we’ll want to have choices.’ But I literally couldn’t listen to him without crying.”

The splashiest star of the movie, though, is Minnesota’s autumn, which is shown off to spectacular effect. Coughlan told her collaborators how beautiful fall can be here but knew she was relying on the leaves hanging around long enough to get their close-up.

“People didn’t understand how beautiful it is here. I was like, ‘Just get here and you’ll see,’” recalled Coughlan, who said the leaves understood the assignment. “People were shopping for houses while they were here.” (Said co-producer Conroy Kanter, “I’d never seen fall in my life. It has taken my breath away.”)

Minnesotans who frequent the western suburbs will recognize places captured in the movie, including Water Street and Parlour Bar in Excelsior, Christmas Lake in Shorewood and McCormick’s Pub in Wayzata.

Making a movie about contemplating one’s next chapter and “falling in love with your own life” helped clarify some things for Coughlan, who just finished shooting the upcoming “Super Troopers 3″ in Boston, with fellow Minnesota native Erik Stolhanske.