The once-Oscar-nominated young actress talks about spinning out on drugs and slowly finding her way back to acting with director Garry Marshall in The Other Sister.
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I'm sitting in a darkened screening room, and something unusual is happening. I'm watching an old-fashioned love story and I'm not looking at my watch. On the contrary, I'm laughing, I'm crying, I'm rooting for two characters to get together. Mind you, this is no Hungarian film with a cuddly kid and lots of train stations. This is a big-studio film by Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall that's burdened with the innocuous title The Other Sister. But get past the title and the logy opening scenes and you discover that what Marshall and his cowriter, Bob Brunner, have done is taken your basic TV-movie ingredients (two mentally handicapped young adults who fall in love, plus the hard-assed mom who doesn't think the man worthy of her daughter) and ladled in loads of laughs and two actors who give Oscar-worthy performances.
Giovanni Ribisi is one of the leads. The other is ... Juliette Lewis. As I watch Lewis bring forth an honest, gentle, daring, completely convincing performance, I try to think when I last saw this spindly, wide-eyed actress on-screen. I can't remember. I certainly remember the first time I saw her. She played Nick Nolte's nymphet daughter in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear. The film featured a kinky, thumb-sucking scene with Robert De Niro and brought Lewis (at age 18) an Oscar nomination.
The next day, I hotfoot it to my local video store and try to pick up Lewis's trail. As I sift through the Lewis oeuvre, I find her in an astonishing array of edgy, ultrahip and too-hip films, most of which sport brand-name directors and big-time costars. Kalifornia, through which Lewis ad-libbed with Brad Pitt. Husbands and Wives with Woody. Oliver Stone's acid-driven Natural Born Killers with the other Woody. What's Eating Gilbert Grape with Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio. Kathryn Bigelow's futuristic Strange Days, which features Lewis crooning P.J. Harvey's "Rid of Me." The vampire tale From Dusk Till Dawn with George Clooney. That's quite a run. Then there's 1996's Terms of Endearment sequel The Evening Star with Shirley MacLaine. Right after which, Lewis immediately fell off the radar screen. I don't mean she went off and did some low-budget indie pics or straight-to-video losers. I'm talking nothing. Kaput. Out of circulation
Where has Juliette Lewis been? How did she find her way back from wherever she was? These are the questions percolating when, on a balmy Los Angeles afternoon, I journey toward a strip-mall deli deep in the heart of Hollywood. A few doors away is a coffeehouse called the I Bourgeois Pig. Across the street is the manorial Scientology Celebrity Center, around which pedals a uniformed security guard who presumably shoos away nomadic non-celebrities. Shortly after I arrive, Lewis struts in, greets the owner (whom she knows) and hurries toward my table. Her hair (which has undergone many incarnations, most notably the cornrows she sported one year at the Oscars) is reddish brown and straight. Her long legs are made even longer by three-inch heels. In her tight jeans and clingy, black Motor City T-shirt she's as sleek as a greyhound. "This is my rock-and-roll attire," she tells me. On her wrist is a tattoo of the cartoon "My Melody" bunny. On her earrings dangle bird feathers.
"Thank you for seeing The Other Sister," she says.
"I was unprepared for how good it was," I say.
"Oh, that's nice," she purrs dreamily. "Disney is still trying to figure out how to market it." The studio is obviously jazzed about it, though, since Michael Eisner himself showed up at a test screening out in the boondocks.
We both order chicken soup. The doughy-armed waitress tells us there's a $10 minimum at lunch, and we're short. Lewis calms her by ordering a double cappuccino.
Juliette Lewis has been acting professionally for half her life. She is now 25. This is the first interview she's done in four years, and she's understandably a little skittish. She eyes everyone who ambles by our booth, and some guys check her out as well. She says that despite her long hiatus, she may be even more recognizable now because of cable and video. Several times during our chat she'll stop in the middle of a sentence, look around and ask me if she's talking too loudly. At other times she'll fret about her syntax or her inability to find the right word.
But she's perfectly forthright about her employment gap. When I mention that the most recent article I could find about her concerned not a movie but the sale of her Hollywood Hills home for $929,000 in 1996, she says, "I totally self-destructed with drugs. On the set of The Evening Star I was a complete mess. I was late, apathetic and miserable. In some I scenes my eyes are completely dead."
Take a look at the film--she's right about that. In the story, her character has boyfriend troubles, and--talk about an eerie coincidence--she overdoses on pills. After shooting The Evening Star, Lewis fled California, went to Florida and moved in with her mother. "All my pride was gone," she says. "I had become this little meek creature. I didn't want to act anymore. I wanted to change my name and become a waitress."
These are stunning admissions from a formerly outspoken and headstrong actress who from a very early age seemed to know exactly where she was going and how to get there. And get there she had. Indeed, so convincing were Lewis and costar Woody Harrelson as Oliver Stone's reckless and ruthless natural born killers that the movie allegedly inspired some real-life mayhem, prompting John Grisham to lambaste Stone in the pages of Vanity Fair and inspiring legions of young, rebellious fans to idolize Lewis. Ironically, these days Natural Born Killers makes Lewis cringe. She admits that the raw power and the technical virtuosity that Stone brought to the film are impressive, but says, "All I did in that movie was yell. I was watching it the other night, and I'm like, 'Shut up, you idiot.' That movie doesn't make me feel good."
I ask her if the reported drug use on the set of Natural Born Killers was what started I her down the road that I proved disastrous. She I denies this.
"On that set, I was mostly just heartbroken. In fact, so much of my younger [acting] experiences were tainted with sadness because of my personal dramas, which absorbed me more than filmmaking. Either I was in love and it wasn't working or I was in love and we were apart."
One major object of her personal I drama was Brad Pitt, whom she'd met on the set of a TV movie called Too Young to Die when she was 16 and he was in his mid-20s. "Brad was part of an innocent, anonymous journey," she says of their early relationship. "In fact, he was the first guy she cooked for. I made rice and steamed vegetables and chicken dogs from the health-food store. The same meal for two weeks."
She and Pitt were still together two years later when Thelma & Louise came out. They waded through the flashbulb frenzy at the premiere and got a sense of what was to come. "We split just before Legends of the Fall and Interview With the Vampire came out," she explains.
That's like breaking up with a guy just before he gets elected president. Where do you go to recover from that? An offshore oil rig is one possibility. But Lewis stayed on the mainland and, as a result, she couldn't walk down the street without seeing Pitt's gorgeous mug on a billboard or magazine cover. "It was like a haunting," she says. But she's quick to add that it wasn't just the breakup that sent her spiraling downward. "It wasn't any one thing," she says. "[Even] at the age of 17, I was full of self-loathing, and who the hell knows where that comes from?"
How bad was it?
"I'd be sitting in the makeup chair contemplating suicide. And I can't blame [drug-using] people on movie sets, because I was a pothead from when I was 13. Pot was my way of trying to sedate some of my creative energy." How much creative energy? Well ... Lewis once stood on her head in a movie theater and yelled at the screen, "I love you, Superman!"
She says, "The funny thing is, I was rumored to have had a drug problem before I actually had one. To explain my uniqueness, people would say things about me." She sips her soup and shrugs. "I'm being candid, but ... why not?"
In Florida she got into a detox program run by the Church of Scientology. Her parents are Scientologists and though Lewis had not exactly been a poster child for the organization, they took her in when she needed help. "I'd give you the gory details of my withdrawal," she says. "But it's so sad."
Slowly the poisons were leeched from her system. Slowly her strength and self-esteem began to return. Slowly her soul was revived. What got her through, she says, was the support of her family and her belief in L. Ron Hubbard's philosophy. After 18 months with Mom and the Scientologists, Lewis began looking at scripts. The Other Sister resonated with her.
"Because my character, Carla, was leaving an institution and entering the world again, her journey paralleled my own, and so I related to her more than any character that I've played. Not only her journey, but her alienated existence and her perseverance. When I went in to read for Garry, I was scared shitless. I didn't have the character down, but I did what I always have had the ability to do--say lines honestly." (Marshall later recalls to me, "I didn't know her at all. And she came in with this bright yellow, spiky hair, and I thought, 'This isn't exactly what I'm looking for. This is not a Lucille Ball type.'")
"In the past," says Lewis, "if I went to an audition and didn't get a part, I'd say, 'OK, that sucks, but they didn't 'get' me. They want something safer, something more predictable.'" But this audition was different. "To get this part, I was the most passionate I've ever been." She told Marshall she wanted to come back and read again. He was so impressed with her determination that he gave her a second shot.
Still the executives at Disney were leery.
"I can understand that," says Lewis. "First of all, I was never a star." (Now wait a second. If Gretchen Mol is a star, Lewis is a legend.) "Second, because of The Evening Star, I had this crappy reputation." She did a third audition. " 'Vanni [Ribisi] gave me courage," she says. The two actors have known each other for nine years. Their parents were friends. Years ago, Lewis recommended Ribisi to her manager. Now Ribisi was repaying the favor. "He inspired me to drop the fear and go for it."
After the third audition, Lewis had a long talk with Marshall and told him of her odyssey. Then she met with his sister, Penny, who helps him with casting.
"How did you dispel concerns about your state of mind?"
"The way I hold myself and present myself now is different. It gets rid of any concerns, because I'm not concerned. What am I trying to say? I can totally trust myself. I'm my friend now."
Marshall and producer Alexandra Rose decided to go with her, and so, for the first time in almost two years, Juliette Lewis walked onto the set of a big-studio picture. Who says there are no second acts in American life?
The first act of Lewis's life began when she entered the world in an unassisted home birth, and it continued in the bohemian households of her actor father (Geoffrey Lewis, who can be seen in six Clint Eastwood movies) and her mother, Glenis Batley, a graphic artist who divorced Juliette's father when Juliette was two. The parents nurtured their daughter's creativity and set few boundaries.
"Our dad never had a curfew or anything, but if I needed a video camera, he gave me one. He gave me the tools, but he never tried to form me." Each parent has since remarried more than once, so there's a raft of siblings and half siblings, some of whom starred with Juliette in lots of garage productions. Lewis claims she knew she wanted to be an actress when she was six. "People can't grasp it, but I knew I was legit."
Dad, who lived in the San Fernando Valley, agreed high school wasn't doing much for Juliette, so she dropped out, went to a tutor, studied for the proficiency test and passed. At 15, she became an emancipated minor so she wouldn't be bound by child labor laws. She left home and temporarily moved in with a family friend, actress Karen Black, until she saved enough money for her own apartment. Ever resourceful, she used a friend's name (and birthday) to buy a used car, and with no license she drove around to auditions. Though she'd never had an acting lesson, she quickly began landing jobs in sitcoms which, not surprisingly, she found constraining. On such short-lived series as A Family for Joe, the directors would stand there and say, "Don't do anything with your hands."
"Since they don't care about character and everything is geared for the punch line, I'd be standing there stiffly waiting to yell my lines in a really animated way. 'BUT DAD, YOU KNOW WHY I DIDN'T...'" She shudders thinking about it. "TV strangles your creativity and turns you into a bad actor."
In 1991, Scorsese rescued her from sitcom purgatory.
"Scorsese allowed me to do what I thought I knew. He validated me. This was huge. I needed that validation. And afterwards, I thought I had arrived. I thought, 'This is professionalism at its finest. It'll be this way from now on.' I got spoiled." As it turned out, she would have to wait seven years before she'd get spoiled again.
During the two weeks of rehearsal for The Other Sister, Lewis hadn't yet homed in on the guttural monotone of her character's voice. She and Ribisi had visited with the mentally handicapped, and Ribisi was already in character 24 hours a day, but she was still searching. "I'm sure other directors would have kept coming up to me and saying, 'Do you have the voice yet?' but Garry didn't. He had faith that I'd find it, and that made me more courageous." She needed this shot of courage, because not only was she making a comeback, but "this was the most challenging part I ever played. I couldn't fall back on instinct or mannerisms. I had to be more precise, and I had to trust Garry to give me ... what's the word ... barometers?"
"Parameters."
"That's it. Because I knew it would be easy to do this part badly. Normally I don't trust directors. Some of them try to get under my skin and do some weird mind-gaming. I don't need that. With Garry I had the kind of relationship where we got intuitive with each other. He would think something and I'd end up doing it on the next take. It was this special thing."
Marshall later tells me, "We got on so well that I went to her birthday party and roller skated. I never realized how funny she could be. On the set, she had these moments of exuberance that don't exactly go with her past. There was a real joie de vivre about her. I'd screened some of her movies, and I'd never seen her light up the screen with that kind of smile. It helped that she liked the boy."
When "the boy" and Lewis's character, Carla, have their first kissing-on-the-couch scene, she confesses to feeling some things in her belly that she's never felt before. "I'd go into my trailer after a scene like that and feel such emotion," Lewis says. "I was so moved by what was going on between these two characters. I've never been moved by a piece like that."
Lewis will wait for the movie's release and brace for the media onslaught in a Hollywood Hills house she shares with her sister, her brother-in-law and two nieces. As for boyfriends, "I haven't had one in a long time. I'm not running to a love life. I've finally started to like being alone." And when there's a little too much private time? "I get on the highway and drive to Pasadena and listen to New Order."
Of course, after The Other Sister, there may not be a lot of private time. When I ask Marshall about Lewis's Oscar possibilities, he says, "All I know is that I had this poor girl in a bird suit, I shot her with makeup on only half her face, and I shot her with cracker crumbs on her sweater. Most actresses want to be glamour girls, but Juliette doesn't worry about that." As for her range, "She can go from comedy to losing it completely, and that's a stretch for anybody." But perhaps most importantly, when it comes to the Oscars, Marshall says, "The town likes people who get it together, and Juliette has gotten it together."
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Jeffrey Lantos interviewed Nick Nolte in the Dec./Jan. 99 issue of Movieline.