Meg Ryan, Survivor

"What about when you and Dennis are on a shoot together? Don't you analyze scenes the night before?"

"Well, on Flesh and Bone we didn't, because Jack got in the way. We'd go back to the motel and have to take care of him, so we never really talked about the characters. Except for the baby, it was just like working with any other actor. And, to be honest, I don't usually like to know the people I'm working with that well, because I don't like them to know what I'm giving away."

We enter a quiet coffee shop, where Ryan orders a sticky bun that she's obviously had before, because she's able to describe it in all its nutty detail. When we get back to the business at hand, I confess that I'm hoping she'll be frank about the problems she's had with certain scripts, and equally open about Hollywood in general, because I've heard that she's famous around town for walking away from projects written with her in mind. She sighs, but doesn't veer from the topic.

"I've been in the business for years," she says, "and I'm still befuddled by the ways of Hollywood. Sometimes a studio will send me a script and say, 'Would you like to produce this with us?' Or they'll say, 'Would you like to develop this as an actress and be attached that way?' Or they'll say, 'Would you like not to be attached but have first dibs if the script turns out well?' Or they'll say, 'We want to "sneak" you a script that we're not showing to actresses yet,' but you know that with their very next phone call, they'll be sneaking it to someone else. I like to understand the logical progression of things, but this business is just too convoluted." I know that Ryan has a production company at Fox, but she tells me, "I have no clout as a producer." If that's true, why did they give her the perks that go along with paying overhead and expenses on a company? "Just so they could have a relationship with me as an actress," she says. I ask what would be a better, or even an ideal, setup for Ryan. She laughs at the notion, but says, "If they would just send me the script, and if I like it, and if I like the director, then I'm in. If not, no thanks. I don't want to be halfway attached."

Finding the right directors has not been easy, says Ryan. "The problem is, most of the good directors have production companies developing projects for them, and they're usually booked up two years in advance. Unless the script is extraordinary you can't get Demme or Scorsese."

But to return to the original question, what happened on the movies she left? On The Butcher's Wife, Ryan was originally cast in the role Demi Moore played. "I used to come in with reams of notes," she recalls. "There was a year-and-a-half of script discussions, and I'd talk, and people would go, 'Uh-huh. Uh-huh,' and never would a single word be changed. I finally realized that the people I was working with weren't taking me seriously, so I bowed out.

"The exact same thing happened on HouseSitter," she says of the film on which Goldie Hawn replaced her. "A script is really just a blueprint. After reading it, and committing to it, you have to find out what kind of movie the director wants to make. I didn't agree with Frank Oz on the tone or the point of view in HouseSitter. That's not to say I'm right, just that I don't agree."

Has such willfulness lead to fewer offers? She shakes her head, then says, "My fear is not that I won't be offered material, but that it won't be interesting material. Ideally, I'd like to work with people who are so much better than me that I come out humbled, but knowing more."

While she won't say on the record that she was offered Pretty Woman, or Ghost, or The Silence of the Lambs--though I've heard she was--she will admit that she was given early versions of the scripts and turned them all down. "The early draft of Pretty Woman that I read didn't work on the page, and after I read Ghost, I thought, 'What can an actor do with this role? Not an awful lot.'" Demi Moore clearly thought otherwise, but if Ryan really wants to work with Jonathan Demme, why did she pass on The Silence of the Lambs? "The script of The Silence of the Lambs was great," she allows, "but the milieu scared me. It was such a dark world."

I ask if she has any regrets, since all three pictures were smash hits. "Pretty Woman turned out so well," she agrees, "but it was because of Julia, not because of the script. She elevated it. But listen, I have to look at things the way they read. We all do. There's no school that teaches you how to read scripts. You have to learn by making mistakes."

"Tell me about the movies you did choose to appear in."

"I had a blast making Joe Versus the Volcano," she says, "but the third act just didn't play as well as it should." Neither did the first two, in the opinion of most people I know. What about The Doors?

"I've never seen The Doors," she admits, which puts her in with a fairly large crowd. "Making that film was disappointing. When you work in an Oliver Stone movie, you're there to serve his vision. But I wasn't sure what his vision was. My character was supposed to have been developed, there was supposed to have been a rewrite," she says with a sigh, "but there wasn't."

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