Winona Ryder: Ryder on the Storm

"I know that everybody was really upset," she says. "Paramount was really angry. I felt bad--I still feel bad. I hate that I had to fuck people over. But they knew I was coming there in bad shape. Everybody kept telling me that I had to do the movie; they kept saying, 'C'mon, you can do it.' I couldn't tell what to do. I was so bogged down, and so overworked." Winona takes a sip from her tea, and pauses. "I learned a big lesson," she adds quietly, evenly, making it clear that she considers this topic now closed. "I won't make movies back to back. I won't get so worn out that I can't function. I'm going to slow down a lot."

The project would seem to have been exactly the role Ryder needs right now. It offered not only an adult audience, but an adult part that included love scenes with Andy Garcia, which might have let Ryder begin to explore her sexuality on-screen, something her other parts to date have not touched on.

Ryder herself seems to know this is the kind of part her career would most benefit from. "I'm at that stage where most actresses really screw up," she acknowledges. "What I have to my advantage is that I haven't made, like, John Hughes movies. I'm a young actress, but people don't immediately associate me with high school, or a bitch, or a good girl. Now I need to find a role that's in the middle ground--not a kid, and not a lawyer."

Ryder seems likely to find that role despite the Godfather fiasco. "She's only a teenager," one casting director told me. "Leaving Godfather III could only have spelled disaster for her career if it had been the beginning of a pattern, but no one's heard of any problems on her next film. That's very important. No producer will worry; she's finished another film. With a talent like hers, she'll get work."

Ryder is only a teenager. And for whole minutes talking with her, I think I'm just talking to a very pretty version of the teen next door. But then I remember what Heathers writer Waters told me about her--"She threatened to kill herself or us if she didn't get the part"--and I realize that despite the flashes of girl-next-door enthusiasm, Ryder is an intensely gifted actress with her own very willful ideas about her career. She's anything but the girl-next-door.

And this should come as no surprise, because her upbringing was anything but ordinary, though she takes pains to point out that it was not quite as out-of-the-ordinary as it's been described. "My father's a wizard," she says about the man who's been characterized as a '60s bohemian holdover. "My parents are intellectuals. My father's a rare book dealer, my mother's a video artist. They're more like beatniks than hippies. It bothers me to have tags slapped on them. I didn't grow up in pot fields. We didn't live on a commune, but on a piece of land where other people had their own houses. It was just, like, a neighborhood, except it was out in the country. It's not what people make it out to be. You have to realize that I was not raised by the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers."

Still, Ryder's parents' good standing among the counter-cultural literati meant that Ryder grew up knowing Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary long before she was old enough to realize their places in history. "My first date with Johnny was at Timothy's house," Ryder says. "Timothy's brilliant. I can talk to him forever. You listen to him speak and it's like watching a movie. Like turning on the TV, or something."

I ask Ryder how much of her childhood she feels she's had to sacrifice to become an actress. "My friend Helene, one of my real good friends from home, just had a prom," Ryder says softly. "I've never had a prom. I've never even been asked to a dance. Here I am, almost getting sued, and she's picking out a dress for the prom. It was like... God, I want that so bad. Then I realized that maybe I've missed out on proms and Valentine dances and keggers, but I have movies as my memories. I like what I've done, you know? I wish I could have had it both ways, but I couldn't, and I don't regret the choices I've made."

Outside the window of the Four Seasons restaurant, the sky is beginning to darken. The waiter drops our check off on the table, and Ryder begins to get fidgety. As we stand up to go, she looks really annoyed. "That limo driver is so retarded," she says. "He never told me how to contact him when I'm ready to leave."

Shrugging, she puts her windbreaker on, and we head out to the circular driveway. The vehicle is nowhere in sight, so Winona asks one of the parking attendants if he's seen her car and driver. "Was he a short guy with blonde hair?" the uniformed man asks. She shakes her head no. He suggests she go look around in the rear parking lot, but she doesn't believe the car will be there. She refuses my offer of a ride back to her hotel. "All my stuff is in the car," she says distractedly. And then without another word, without a goodbye, she turns and heads down the circular drive towards Doheny, hangs a right, and disappears.

Michael Kaplan has written for Spy, GQ, and Manhattan, Inc., and is a frequent contributor to Movieline.

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