Meg Ryan, Survivor

"Then I did Prelude to a Kiss with Alec Baldwin."

"I've got to ask you a tough question about Prelude," I say. She sits back and gives me a look that says, "Give me your best shot."

"Was there any talk on the set that a movie about the transmigration of souls might be a tough sell? Because it's not the most cinematic concept..." She laughs and says yes, there was "some concern" about the supernatural elements of the story, but they all felt that, at its heart, it was still "a relationship movie." Whatever it was, it didn't find an audience. She shrugs, as if to say, "What are you going to do?"

Following these career disappointments, Ryan has recently gone back to working with one of the people who helped put her on the Hollywood map, Nora Ephron, the screenwriter of the 1989 hit When Harry Met Sally .... Ephron cowrote and directed Sleepless In Seattle, a romantic comedy with Tom Hanks that toys with the grand themes of destiny and passion and poses the question, should an engaged woman in Baltimore pursue a widowed insomniac in Seattle whom she hears on a radio call-in show?

"I liked being around Nora," comments Ryan. "She's so smart and so quippy and such an astute observer." This was only the second time Ryan has worked with a woman director. "I was always interpreting myself for a man. Instead of just saying a line, I had to figure out how to say it to a man. I didn't realize I was doing that, of course, until I didn't have to do it anymore. With Nora, I shared a kind of woman's shorthand."

Ephron, of course, wrote that scene in When Harry Met Sally... that made everyone remember Ryan. All it said in the script, Ryan tells me, was, "Sally fakes an orgasm." During rehearsals, Ryan relates that she started to take the scene further, and then further. "All the New York extras in the deli were muttering, 'What the fuck is she doing over there?'

"After you do a scene like that," says Ryan, "it seems very risky, and you think, 'Oh, my God, what did I just do?"' She adds that as she left the set after completing the scene, the crew presented her with a two-foot-long salami wrapped in pink tissue paper.

Reflecting back on that scene--and on acting in general--Ryan says, "This thing that goes on between two actors in a scene is, in the beginning, a private thing. It's a reflection of what's in your soul. And then it's put on film, and then it's sold, and then it's criticized." She shakes her head and says, "It's such a strange marriage between business and art."

It's hard to believe that Ryan's been plying her trade for 12 years. She says she almost gave up her career just a few years ago, in the mid-'80s. "I didn't have much direction in my life, and I really wasn't sure if I wanted to continue in the movie business. I was thinking of going back to school. Then I met an acting teacher named Peggy Feury. She was inspirational," says Ryan. "She made me feel there was something intellectual about the process of acting, that it was not solely emotional. She showed me that there was a choreography to it, that it wasn't just a dance. Peggy made me want to continue as an actress."

Since she has demonstrated a deft touch with comedy and melodrama, I ask Ryan what genre she prefers. "Comedy is so hard," she says. "Setting something up, paying it off, making people laugh. It has to be so precise, and you're trying so hard to make it look easy and frothy. After the comedy that was needed for Sleepless In Seattle, for example, I needed a break. I wanted a different challenge."

Which brings us to Flesh and Bone, the success of which will depend on the screen chemistry between hubby and wife Quaid and Ryan. Though they've been paired in Innerspace and D.O.A., this is far different than anything they've done to date. Interest in the film around Hollywood is high, because writer/director Steve Kloves is the man who brought us The Fabulous Baker Boys. Ryan is quick to point out, however, that his new film is no Baker Boys. "It's not a comedy," she says. "It's an intense familial drama, very dark, very Greek, about two fuck-ups who find each other.

"Kloves had sent the script to Dennis, and after he read it, Dennis said that I should take a look. We'd been searching for something to do together." The nature of the material was such, says Ryan, that she knew the shoot would take an emotional toll. "In the end, though, I realized that if I didn't do it, didn't try a dark story like this, if I didn't grab the opportunity to give that part of myself away, then I'd have to live with it, and that would be more stressful. I know I'd be insane if I wasn't an actress," she says. "Because a lot of stuff comes in, and I process it, and then I have a venue to get it all out again."

On the set, Kloves and Ryan didn't always see eye to eye. "There's always one scene in a movie that seems to me like it doesn't belong," Ryan explains. "It's something that seems contradictory, not part of the character arc. I kept reading this one scene in Steve's script, and I said, 'She wouldn't say this at this point in the story.' Dennis's character was going to leave her, and Steve had me picking up his hat and saying, 'You don't want to be leaving without this.' I said to Steve, 'Why is she being so nice?' Steve said, 'It's an important line. It shows she's grown.' I said, 'I don't get it,' and then Steve said that the message the line was supposed to send was, 'Okay pal, if you're gonna leave, COME OVER HERE and TAKE this hat out of my hand!' In other words, the line said one thing--'Bye, no hard feelings'--but the behavior was, 'Fuck you, pal!'" In the heat of what Ryan now calls a "good discussion," Kloves told her, "I'm not going to give this line up." Ryan now says, "He was so right, of course. I love the scene. It's usually this kind of exchange, the one that doesn't seem right, that often becomes the key to understanding the character."

Now Ryan is set to make Significant Other with Andy Garcia, another dark drama that was once planned for Debra Winger and Tom Hanks. She seems confident. "It's easier to be an actor the older I get," she says. "I have experience with things, my work is better informed. When I played Sally [in When Harry Met Sally... ], she was five years older than I was. I didn't know what a baby bell was. I had to pretend, but all of a sudden, I'm a woman who's not an adolescent anymore."

"Do your family responsibilities conflict with your career at all?" I ask.

"Not at all. Last year I refinished a house, had a baby, and did two movies. And I'm not tired. I like the fact that, finally, I have a home where I want to stay for a long time. And I like that Jack has a routine, which I never had, and now that I have one--because of him--I realize that I thrive on it."

"Mmm. Two films, refinished a house, Jack ... how much more thriving can you do?"

"At my company we're going to develop projects that I won't necessarily act in," she says. "And I'm looking for projects that I might direct."

She may not be an adolescent anymore, but there is still something about Meg Ryan, in person, that suggests summer nights and denim cutoffs. I tell her that, frankly, I have a hard time imagining her in a power suit and heels.

"When I wear high heels I have a great vocabulary," she says with a laugh, "and I speak in paragraphs."

"Really? How often do you wear high heels?"

"Not often enough. I should wear them more. So I'd be more eloquent."

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Jeffrey Lantos interviewed Joel Schumacher for the April Movieline.

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