Girl
Crazy
TimeOut New York, November-December 1999
By Adam Rapoport, Photographs by
Brigitte Lacombe
Winona Ryder revisits her dark places
and brings the mad, mad, mad world of Susanna Kaysen's Girl,
Interrupted to the big screen.
SOMETIMES A GIRL just needs to find
the right guy. And Lord knows, Winona Ryder had been looking. For four
years, the woman who always seems to snare America's favorite man had
been coming up empty. A lunch here, a conference call there, a meeting
in between, and no one - not one single person - really got what she
was after.
Then she met James Mangold. Well,
actually, she kind of hunted him down. The point is, history shows that
during her 13-year career, the 28-year-old pixie of an actress has
usually gotten what she's wanted, whether it's Matt Damon (yes, she's
still seeing him) or scoring a part in a Martin Scorsese film. And when
she saw Mangold's first movie, Heavy (and then saw it again, and
again...), Ryder knew that she'd finally found the guy who could
untangle Girl, Interrupted, a film she'd been aching to produce and
star in since she first read the book in 1993.
When you see Girl, it becomes obvious
why Ryder was so hell-bent on getting this picture made. In her first
leading role since starring in the The Crucible in 1996 (since then,
she's had supporting roles in Alien: Resurrection and Celebrity), Ryder
plays a part that is tailored to all of her strengths as an actress -
no corsets, no fake British accent, just cut-to-the-core Ryder. She is
vulnerable, wounded, introspective and wryly funny. In other words, she
is the actress you fell in love with in the first place, so many years
ago.
Dressed in a gray sweater vest, a
baggy white oxford and simple black pants, Ryder sits in a big squishy
chair in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel. With her short hair tucked
behind her ears and wearing just a speck of lipgloss, she looks more
like a cute little boy than the Vogue cover girl she's become. She also
looks totally worn out. In town to film Autumn in New York, which she's
starring in opposite Richard Gere, Ryder has been working a whacked-out
schedule, on set one night at midnight, a day later at 6am. The result
is a starlet with all the snap of an overcocoked string bean.
Yet, Ryder's determined to gush about
Mangold and promote Girl, Interrupted, even if it means she goes
napless. "I kept thinking, If I could just meet the right person,
because I had no clue how to make a movie from this book," says Ryder,
who signed on as executive producer soon after it was published six
years ago. "It doesn't have plot points or a beginning, middle or end."
What it does have is incredibly rich
characters and a story that touched a nerve with young women. Written
by Susanna Kaysen and set in the late '60s, the memoir depicts the
cloudy years in Kaysen's life between ages 17 and 19 that she spent in
a Boston-area mental hospital.
Much of what drew Ryder to the book
was that when she was 19, she checked herself into a hospital - or "a
place" as she calls it - to confront severe anxiety attacks. "I wish I
could've seen this film when I was a teenager," Ryder says now. "I'm
not saying I'm problem-free. But it would've been very comforting at
the time. That sounds so naive, but when you're that age, you don't
know that other people are going through what you're going through."
Ryder met with Mangold two yers ago
at the St. Regis, and she essentially handed the film over to him. "She
was frustrated; she was ready for someone to be really aggressive and
not precious with it," says Mangold, who had just finished directing
Cop Land.
Mangold rewrote the script, giving it
a plot, but not so much of one that it would resemble a Mike Wallace
investigation of the mental health system. Instead, the film has the
feel of '60s classics like Hud and Midnight Cowboy. It is quite funny
and, like Heavy, has the ability to make you cry without being mushy.
"I wanted to make a movie about
women," says Mangold. "But I didn't want a chick flick, with girls
sitting around chitchatting about men, with pop music playing and soft
light."
Ryder finished shooting Girl six
months ago, yet the film still courses through her like a bad crush.
When I ask her how Autumn in New York is going, she lets out a sigh,
gives an exaggerated roll of the eyes and lifts her right hand to her
forehead. "Um.. Autumn in New York... I have no idea. It's the first
movie that I did after Girl, and it's a big movie, and I've been
reminded of that ev-er-y sin-gle day," says Ryder, who tends to season
her California accent with lots of italics. "Big budget. Acting
opposite Richard Gere... I've never felt more like an actress for hire.
I'm not trying to dis the movie; I'm just explaining the difference
from Girl, Interrupted."
By all accounts, the filming of Girl
was an emotional, bonding and, at times, gossipy experience for Ryder,
Mangold and the rest of the ensemble cast, which includes Angelina
Jolie, Vanessa Redgrave and Whoopi Goldberg.
Filming took place over a 12 week
period last winter in a state mental hospital outside of Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania. The entire cast holed up in an apartment building near
the set. And while Jolie and other actresses would escape to New York
for the weekend, Ryder never left. "I couldn't go to New York and
party," says Ryder. "Are you kidding? I was in a certain place, and I
had to stay for the duration."
If it sounds like she's taking a shot
at Jolie, Ryder's quick to point out she's not. Jolie plays Lisa, a
badass who's the vinegar to Susanna's oil. By shoot's end, rumors
circulated that the actors were clashing offscreen as well as on.
"If she was a guy and we didn't hang
out, that would be, like, normal, no problem," says Ryder. "But because
she's a girl and we're not best buddies ang giggling, there's an issue.
There's absolutely no problem between us. I really like her. And Im
really in awe of ther talents. She's raw, and so beautiful."
Nevertheless, during the shoot at the
hospital, Ryder's anxiety attacks started to recur, and she had trouble
sleeping. When she wasn't working, she was hanging out with 16-year-old
Elisabeth Moss, who plays one of the other girls in the adolescent
ward, who together make up a kind of psychiatric Bad News Bears.
"We went and saw really bad movies at
the mall," Ryder says of her time with Moss.
"Such as...?" I prod.
"Oh, no, that'd be too mean. But
remember when all those teen movies were coming out?"
"Like She's All That?"
"Yes! [Big laughs] And Cruel
Intensions."
Not surprisingly, watching movies is
what Ryder often does when she's kicking about her modest Spanish-style
house in Beverly Hills, where she lives with her friend Brett (her
23-year-old brother Yuri was another roommate until he recently got his
own place five minutes away). She likes to cook dinner for friends and
then sit down for a few films in front of what she describes as her
"relly big television." "Not to name-drop," says Ryder, "but it belongs
to my first boyfriend Johnny [Depp]. He never took it after the
breakup. I always felt guilty about that. I was always like, "I should
get a new one, but they're so expensive."
Straddling thrift and extravagance is
something Ryder's adept at. On one wrist she wears Buddhist prayer
beads, and on the other a slim, diamond-encrusted silver watch. She
freely talks about growing up "super poor" in the Bay Area with her
alternative, intellectual-minded parents. Yet in addition to her house
in L.A., she also owns a Manhattan apartment and a place in San
Francisco, in which her folks now live.
It's there that Ryder is planning to
spend the holidays when Autumn in New York wraps. After that, it's back
to work. Lost Souls, an exorcism flick costarring Ben Chaplin, is due
out January 14. She's also planning to produce and star in Roustabout,
about the death of the traveling circus, directed by Smoke Signals's
Chris Eyre. Finally, she hopes to make a sequel to Heathers with the
film's original writer, Daniel Waters - but not with Christian Slater.
"I wanted the JD character to come back as this Obie Wan kind of thing,
kind of fade in and out, and give me advice," Ryder says. "But then
Christian wouldn't do it, so I was like, 'Ah, fuck you [Laughs].'"
Right now, though, it's all Girl all
the time for Ryder. And while making the film took her back to a
difficult time in her life, Ryder feels she's emerged from both
episodes a stronger person. "I don't want to be known as the depressed
girl," she says. "I made a conscious choice to live. I chose life over
just being miserable."
Girl, Interrupted opens December 21.