Total Film UK has on their July issue a 4-pages and a review for ‘The Iceman’ – which gave the movie 4 stars and praises for Shannon’s performance – and I have scans up in the gallery.
“Written by Vromen and Morgan Land, the script steams from two sources: Anthony Bruno’s 1993 true-crime novel and James Thebault’s 1992 HBO documentary, featuring interviews with Kuklinski in jail. Seeing the doc just two months after his subject died behind bars, in May 2006, Vromen resolved to make a feature. From the outset, he was obsessed with casting Shannon. Rejecting other, more bankable stars, the project fell apart three times. “I said to everybody ‘I will burn this script if it’s not Michael Shannon’. I just had a meal with him – and I was terrified!”
He wasnt the only one. Enter Winona Ryder, who plays Kuklinski’s wife Deborah (real name: Barbara). She remembered shooting a domestic argument scene with Shannon. ‘It was written that he was supposed to say these things to me, then go out into the garage and get into the car and take it out of the steering wheel,’ says the actress. ‘He wasn’t supposed to flip the table over! I was genuinely scared. After the take, I burst into tears. He was bleeding, he had cut himself, and I didn’t expect all that.”
Winona has an interview published on this month Fashion magazine, and you can find the scans up in the gallery. She’s talking about growing up (a very recurrent subject on her recent interviews, actually…) and her career.
“In the ’90s I experienced a lot of success, and to be honest, I wasn’t expecting it to last. You’re told that you get a couple of years if you’re lucky. It was great, but it came with a lot of pressure,” Ryder reflects. “I wasn’t like, ‘Boo hoo, poor me,’ but I realized that I want a home and I want to spend time with my family and friends. It takes something very special for me to want to leave that now.”
By Stephen Mooallen for Interview Magazine
Winona Ryder knows her Simple Minds—and not just “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” to which she enthusiastically lip-synchs while propped up on her elbows on a dark red comforter on the set of our cover shoot. “Will you recognize me, call my name, or walk on by? Rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling, down, down, down, dooowwwnnn . . .” But like most things with Ryder, her connoisseurship is not half-assed. She requests deeper cuts, like “Alive and Kicking,” off the band’s Once Upon a Time (1985) album: “Staaayyy . . . until your love . . . is . . . love . . . is . . . a-live and kicking!” We listen to that one twice, which is probably appropriate since Ryder’s own romance with acting—that thing that kept her very busy throughout most of her teens and her twenties—is a recently rekindled affair. She will appear in two films this year, the second of which, Gary Fleder’s drug-lord drama Homefront, with James Franco and Jason Statham, is due out this fall. The first of them, though, hits theaters this month: Ariel Vromen’s The Iceman, a period piece set mostly in the 1960s and ’70s that stars Michael Shannon as Richard Kuklinski, a real-life contract killer for the mob in New York and New Jersey who is said to have murdered more than 100 people. The real Kuklinski, who was arrested in 1986 and died in prison in 2006, is said to have hid his bloody business from his wife, Barbara, who is played in the film by Ryder (the character is renamed Deborah), while she and their two daughters enjoyed a life of relatively affluent suburban idyll. The film is dark, at times difficult, and unlike anything that Ryder has ever done. But in her hands, Deborah emerges as something much more complicated than a dutiful wife—in one sense, a sympathetic figure, but in another, a woman whose blindness seems as much a product of a darker, more conflicted willfulness as ignorance.
I spoke with the 41-year-old Ryder recently in New York.
STEPHEN MOOALLEM: I heard that you’ve been under the weather.
WINONA RYDER: I don’t know if it’s a cold—it’s just that my voice was kind of going. But it’s back, so I’m actually okay. In a weird way, I was actually hoping that whatever voice thing I’ve got could stay so that I could sort of have a Debra Winger thing going on. I’ve always loved her voice. But it’s getting better, so I’m going to sound like me.
MOOALLEM: Well, you can take advantage of it while it lasts. I’m just going to make sure that we’re recording. Our recorders are digital now, and for some reason, I always doubt that they’re recording.
RYDER: And they used to do this with tape recorders . . . The world.
Holy sexy cover, Batman!
Winona is on the cover of Interview May issue, talking about her return. And THAT is a return!
For Winona Ryder, the challenge of playing the wife of a serial killer was all about what she wasn’t supposed to know.
“This was something that I’d never done before — this genre, true crime — and my biggest fear was that there would be something romantic about it,” she tells the May issue of Interview magazine.
“I could not watch all of those interviews with Richard Kuklinski that are on YouTube or do a lot of research, because what creeps me out even more than the guy himself is the fascination that other people have with this kind of violence. I mean, I get it, but I also see it as repulsive, because this was not a guy in a situation where this guy was war-torn and it was kill or be killed. He was straight-up murdering people for a lot of money.”
Kuklinski, who grew up in Jersey City, claims to have killed more than 100 men before he was caught in 1986. He started commuting into Manhattan to practice murder on random victims in Hell’s Kitchen in the ’50s, and worked as a hit man for the DeCavalcante and Gambino crime families. He earned the chilling nickname “Iceman” by freezing his victims after killing them to disguise the time of their deaths.
In “The Iceman,” out this weekend, Michael Shannon plays Kuklinski and Ryder plays his wife, Barbara, though the script changes her name to Deborah.
“I thought about the wives of people like Bernie Madoff and even about ‘The Sopranos.’ But I didn’t do a lot of research, because if I had, then I think I would have played it in a way that the director did not want me to play it. I just went through the script with a Sharpie and blacked out all of the scenes where he was killing people and the ones that I wasn’t in where things were happening that she wasn’t aware of — or maybe she was aware them, but was choosing to be in denial about them,” she tells Interview.
“On some level, she had to have known, and so I think she does bear some responsibility, and that was something that I tried to infuse into the character — a sense of greed and of, like, ‘Baby, you better go do what you gotta do, because I want to buy my Valentino suits.’ It was very important to me to show that she was not this naive, wide-eyed mother. She wants to live the way they’re living. There’s also a scene where the girls come into their bedroom and Deborah says the thing about how there are too many people in the world for God to care about all of them. That’s actually a horrible thing to say to your kids . . .
“While I know that a lot of people refer to her as a victim, I don’t. Maybe she didn’t know that he was, like, shooting people in the face, but to have stayed with him for that long, she had to have known on some level.”
The photoshoot is really beautiful, you can find it already in our gallery, and I can’t wait to see the whole spread. Of course you’ll have scans up as soon I put my hands on my own copy. Thanks Chris B for the heads up!
The Sunday Times Culture Magazine: 14.10.12
“Winona has been animated at last…”
She changed the way cinema depicts women, then disappeared. Reunited with Tim Burton on a new cartoon, Winona tells Jonathan Dean what it’s like to be lost.
The slow crawl to Disneyland, on roads such as Magic Way, is lined with palm trees. At two in the afternoon on what the radio announces is the second day of autumn, they’re the only shelter other than Buzz Lightyear banners or the vast foyer of the Grand Californian Hotel. The latter is accomodation designed by fans of The Shining: floral chic, cobwebbed, brainwashed staff. Kids in swimming costumes run around in Mickey Mouse ears. I head staright for the lift.
Why is a thitrysomething man hanging out in Walt’s kingdom all by himself? The answer, oddly, is the icon of early-1990s cinema, the goth poster girl for the alternative nation, Winona Ryder, who is waiting in a suite on the hotel’s fourth floor. I’m also going to spend the half-hour with Martin Short, but I haven’t really told anyone that. He’s lovely telling me about a recent family reunion in London with his “fabulous” politician cousin, Clare, but you don’t fly 11 hours to meet Martin Short. He was hilarious in Father of the Bride, but, with the best will in the world, he has never changed the way people make films. Ryder, though, did.
Dressed in loose black trousers, a black jacket and a white T-shirt, with her hair tied back, she talks with a quiver in her voice, brown eyes darting, eager to please or, maybe, just nice. Short is in a casual suit, reclining on a sofa, staring at me like an ever-watchful chaperone. Yes, Ryder shoplifted back in 2001, but for anyone who wants to continue to laugh at that, there’s the internet. Besides Hollywood has worse. People still work with Roman Polanski. Ryder’s hero, Jodie Foster has a close relationship with Mel Gibson. This is an industry that rewards sinners who aren’t contrite. Ryder has constantly said she’s sorry.
I just added scans of March issue of Mexican Harpers Bazaar, with a glorious new picture!
I just came across this Spanish magazine featuring Winona on cover. Pictures are the same of 2009 Elle UK, but is always great see Winona covering some publication.
You’re not man enough. You haven’t the guts.” Winona Ryder’s Elizabeth Taylor with Marc Jacobs’s Richard Burton.
Harper’s Bazaar’s March issue features a stunning spread capturing iconic scenes from films directed by Mike Nichols, with stars including Marc Jacobs and Winona Ryder reenacting Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
