From Beetlejuice and Heathers to Edward Scissorhands, Winona Ryder was the ultimate female star of the late 1980s and early 1990s, hailed as a generation-defining actress. She has dated Johnny Depp and Matt Damon. She has accomplished that rare feat of unifying men and women in admiration. But her life has not always been easy. It has been turbulent, it has been public, it has been bittersweet. She is now 37, although forever childlike in the collective consciousness, and she is still a subject of fascination. Read on for the highlights of ELLE’s exclusive interview, written by the director and novelist behind her new film, Rebecca Miller.
On being bullied:
‘We only shopped at the Salvation Army, and I would get these three-piece, 1970s little boy suits. I had really short hair, and the third day of seventh grade, these kids basically jumped me in the hall because they thought I was a gay boy, and they roughed me up… I think when that happened, I kind of went into a movie in my head because I couldn’t deal with what was happening.’
‘Kids would say, “You’re a witch, you’re creepy, you’re crazy.” I was in the number-one movie in the country and I was still being bullied in school.’
On her ‘extra-large breakdown’:
‘I had just done Dracula and Edward Scissorhands. I had just had my first real break-up, the first heartbreak. And I think it was really ironic because, like, everybody else just thought I had everything in the world, you know, I had no reason to be depressed, everything was sort of at its peak, but inside I was completely lost. I remember feeling, ‘I can’t complain about anything, because I’m so lucky, I’m so lucky…’ After that I realised I needed to take time off more [regularly].’

I never wanted to be beautiful

‘I’m so lucky because I really love doing what I do. There have been times when I’ve wanted to stop, but it wasn’t forever. It was just like I needed to stop and get my life together.
On being the leading lady: ‘For a few years after Beetlejuice I was cast as the outcast, so I thought that was my path. I sort of had it in my head that I was going to be a character actress. Then I did Heathers and it was the first time I had convinced people I could play [a pretty girl]. I went to get my make-up done for the audition. And then after that I got more substantial roles. And it’s funny in your career, you’re a leading lady for a while and then you end up wanting the character roles again.’
On her beauty:
‘I thought it was cooler to be interesting than to be pretty. I must have got that from my parents, who felt strongly about being an individual and being your own person and that looks aren’t everything. I always knew that I wasn’t, you know, beautiful. I never wanted to be beautiful, I never wanted to be a cheerleader.

THE FILM PLOT:
THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE
In Rebecca Miller’s novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Moira Dulles (Winona’s character, re-named Sandra for the film, directed by Miller) is the car-crash poet friend of Pippa Lee. Pippa, played by Robin Wright Penn, a fiftysomething devoted wife, loyal friend and talented homemaker, is married to Herb, a man almost 30 years older than herself. But she is beginning to wonder how she ended up in the life she now leads. Few would guess from her veneer of suburban respectability at the wild youth, affairs and encounters that make up her history. Highly-strung, insecure and emotionally splayed, Sandra seems to rely on, almost idolise, the grounded and supportive Pippa – as well as the secure marriage she shares with Herb. But she will eventually betray her loyal friend, proving a key factor in Pippa’s journey towards rediscovering herself.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is out on 10 July

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INSIDE ONE OF THE YEAR’S MOST TALKED-ABOUT DOCUMENTARIES

By Winona Ryder – photograph by Steven Klein

Winona Ryder has long been friends with Henry Alex Rubin, the co-director of the hit documentary Murderball, and counts herself a huge fan of Rubin’s hard-hitting new film. The actress spoke this month to both Murderball directors and its star, Mark Zupan, about the film and the fascinating true stories behind it. “I think it’s just something unexpected,” says Ryder. For her part, the actress can next be seen in Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly with Keanu Reeves.

The winner of the documentary Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Murderball delves into the world of wheelchair rugby, a full contact sport played in tricked-out chairs by quadriplegics of varying degrees of physical mobility. The film centers around Team U.S.A and one of its star players, Mark Zupan, a tattooed former high school athlete who lost the use of his legs when he was thrown from the back of a pickup truck driven by his best Friend, Christopher Igoe, who was drunk at the time. But more than a sports documentary or a movie about people with disabilities, Murderball is an exploration of the lives of the players and their experiences. Here, Winona Ryder talks to Zupan, along with Murderball’s co-directors, Dana Adam Shapiro and Henry Alex Rubin, about the film, which hits theaters this month.

WINONA RYDER: Zupan, I know you love shoes, so my first question is What kind of shoes are you wearing right now?

MARK ZUPAN: l’m wearing a pair of Fluevogs.

WR: They’re Doc Marten type shoes, right?

MZ: They’re very similar.

HENRY ALEX RUBIN: Tell her about how you never wear out your shoes.

MZ: Well, I don’t – I mean, how the hell would I? I’ll keep a pair of shoes for 10-I2 years. It’s not like l’m going to wear out the bottoms.

WR: But you want to scull them up a bit.

MZ: Yeah, so they don’t look so new.

DANA ADAM SHAPIRO: You really don’t get that worn-in shoe look, do you, Zupan?

MZ: The ones l’m wearing are pretty worn in. It’s not like I don’t scuff them up at all, boys and girl.

HAR: Zupan, are you at work?

MZ: No, I’m getting a tattoo. They’re just finishing up on my arm.

WR: What is it a tattoo at?

MZ: We just designed something. There’s going to be a lot of black.

WR: Are you at a tattoo parlor, or did they come to you?

MZ: l’m at a parlor right now.

HAR: Do they have on-call tattoo artists?

MZ: If you have enough money, l’m sure they have whatever you want.

WR: [laughs] I wanted to ask you, Zupan, how your parents reacted to Murderball when they saw it for the first time? I imagine it would be very emotional for them but also really uplifting.

MZ: Well, when my dad first saw it, he was like, “Holy shit! -I mean, he couldn’t put what he was feeling into words because the movie made him cry. My dad warned my mom that there were some things that might upset her, but when she saw it, she just kind of shook her head and said, “Yup, that’s my son.” A lot of the stuff that’s in the movie is stuff that l’ve never really dealt with. Seeing Igoe again was especially difficult, as was the first time I went back to the place I got hurt.

WR: What do you remember from those hours after the accident?

MZ: Not much, to tell you the truth. I remember hitting the water and looking around, going, “Oh, shit. This is a new one.” I remember trying to keep the red ants from pinching my fingers and toes. I ended up hanging off a branch to hold my head above water because I was afraid of drowning.

WR: How long were you stuck in the canal?

MZ: Thirteen and a half hours. My initial thought was, Let’s just get up and find our way home. But when I tried to get up, my legs wouldn’t move, and I just pretty much lost it. I started crying. Then I got my shit together and said, “Fuck it, I guess it’s time to hang on.” I don’t remember anything alter that besides waking up when it was light out and getting hit in the face with raindrops.

WR: Did somebody find you, or did you get out yourself?

MZ: Somebody found me. There was a guy in an office building across from the canal, and he decided to go eat his lunch outside in his car. It was getting hot, so he opened his window a little, and he heard a noise. At first he thought it was from the off ramp, but he kept hearing the same thing, so he decided to get out of the car and check to see what it was. He saw the crown of my head across the canal, so he called 9-1-1. The fire chief told my father that the only things above water were my eyes, my nose, my mouth, and an arm. Once they got me over to land, I told them that I couldn’t move or feel my legs, so they took me to a trauma hospital, and the rest is history.

WR: What about the man who heard you and called 911? Has he seen Murderball?

MZ: I don’t know, but he actually contacted me. He found my name somehow, and we were supposed to meet for lunch, but we never did. The guy’s name is Martin Story. If he hears something about the movie, I’m sure he’ll see it. It was kind of wild.

WR: Who introduced you to wheelchair rugby?

MZ: This therapist, John True in Miami. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but after a while I was like, “This is cool.” I have an athletic background, so I can pick up sports fairly easily you know, the rules, the ideas, the ways of doing things. But the first time I played in a chair I was like, “Wow This is something that I never thought was going to be possible again.”

WR: I wanted to ask you, Dana and Henry, about the decision to include that footage of George W. Bush meeting Zupan and some of the other players at the White House. I understand that it was designed to show people how far murderball has come as a sport, but not long after, there’s another scene of the players showing these really young-looking kids who have come back from Iraq with missing limbs what you can do in a wheelchair. Whatever your opinion is of the president or the war in Iraq, I think it’s really important for people to see that there are these young kids who are coming back maimed. These kids went over to Iraq and fought, but there are a lot of questions right now about how well they’re being taken care of when they come back.

HAR: That’s the reality of war. We’re just showing it the way it is.

DAS: That’s something that we were really trying to do with the movie, to show everything that people don’t know about or are scared to ask about. People are going to war, and people are getting fucked up.

WR: Well, when you see these soldiers in the film, you no longer think of them as statistics. They become faces and personalities. That’s something that the movie does for the murderball players too.

HAR: That was really the overriding rule that Dana and I tried to apply to the whole movie–in other words, show, don’t tell. We tried very hard to stay away from statistics because we really didn’t want to paint with a broad palette. We wanted to get into the lives of these people and their stories.

WR: That’s what keeps the film from being tragic, it’s actually incredibly uplifting. Zupan, there’s a thing that you say in the movie that a lot of people have talked about.

MZ: That l’ve done more in a chair than I would have out of one?

WR: Yeah. It’s interesting because the film really doesn’t play into the sympathy thing. After a while you even start to forget that these guys are in wheelchairs.

MZ: Well, it helps that Henry and Dana decided to shoot from the perspective of someone in a chair. It’s like any other movie where you see eye-to-eye with the people onscreen.

WR: The movie also just kills everything that says you can’t make jokes about-

MZ: Poor old crippled kids?

WR: [laughs] I wonder if there are actually people who will find that aspect of the movie in poor taste?

MZ: Well, if you can’t make a joke about the situation you’re in, then what right do you have to comment on anything? That’s a big fuckin’ deal.

DAS: After Sundance we were looking around on the Internet for quotes or posts about the movie, and there was someone, I think from
Italy, who wrote that it was grotesque and disgusting and exploitative. I think the last line was: “What’s next? A film on midget tossing?”

WR: So, I don’t know if it’s been like this in other places, Zupan, but at Sundance people were stopping you on the street because they recognized you from the film.

MZ: Oh yeah, it’s weird. I got stopped recently in the Dallas airport. A woman came up to me and said, “I saw the film in Indianapolis.” She was trying ta catch up with me. I was just pushing along normally, and she’s like, “Dude, you’re moving fast.” And she was, like, running.

WR: Do the other guys give you hard time for being the star of the movie?

MZ: They gave me shit from day one. They’re like, “All right, Mr. Superstar, go do your movie shit.” And l’m like, “Fuck you, guys.”

WR: I don’t know if I’m allowed to ask, but what’s next lor all of you? I know that there are some things that are top secret.

HAR: Yes, l’m designing a new weapon. It’s plutonium based. I can’t discuss it at this juncture.

MZ: l’m working on a time machine, and if I get my government funding, it’s going to be good. It’s kind of like a transport, so you don’t have to take planes anymore.

HAR: And, I don’t know, Dana, should we talk about our midget tossing movie?

MZ: I thought that we were going to save the midget tossing for my birthday party.

HAR: Dude, is your tattoo done yet or what?

MZ: No, we’re still putting it on.

HAR: Can we put a picture of the tattoo design in the article?

MZ: [to tattoo artist] Hey, Pete, can they put a picture of the tattoo in the article?

PETE, THE TATTOO ARTIST: Fuck, yeah As long as my name’s underneath.

MZ: As long as his name’s underneath.

HAR: That’d be awesome. Do you have it on a piece of paper? Maybe we could send it to InterView or something.

WR: l’m just hurt that it doesn’t say “Winona Forever”.

Winona Ryder can next be seen in Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, due in theaters next year.

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By David Eimer

Her dramatic looks once ensured an audience no matter how bad the picture. Now she’s more choosy – so why is Winona Ryder playing opposite Richard Gere in a slushy romance, asks DAVID EIMER

A few years back there seemed no doubt that Winona Ryder would go on to establish herself as the actress of her generation. Having notched up two Oscar nominations by the time she was 24, as well as being anointed honorary queen of the slacker generation, she had a head start on everyone else. But with the failure of her last three films, to say nothing of the rise of Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, the golden girl of the early 1990s is in danger of looking like yesterday’s icon.

In truth, though, Ryder has never been huge in the multiplexes. “The thing people have to remember is that I was never in an overnight hit movie,” she says, almost apologetically. “I’ve only been in a few movies that made a lot of money, and that was because they were directed by Tim Burton and not because of me.”

But what she lacked in box-office success, she made up for with credibility: Julia Roberts got the blockbusters, Winona got the critical acclaim. Films such as 1989′s wicked and brilliant high-school parody Heathers helped position Ryder as a favourite with image-aware young audiences, if not with Hollywood financiers. Then there were all those period pieces: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Age of Innocence, Little Women, The Crucible, in which Ryder showed she could hold her own in a corset opposite the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis and Gary Oldman.

Even when the films themselves had nothing going for them, like 1993′s dire adaptation of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Ryder’s extraordinary looks kept loyal fans watching. Lame scripts or not, canny directors simply closed in on her huge, expressive, brown eyes until they filled the frame. In an age of hyperactive leading ladies, Ryder is unique in that she would have been a huge star in the silent era.

In recent years, though, this appeal seems to have waned. It took Ryder seven years to get her boldest project to date into cinemas. Girl, Interrupted – the tale of a young woman’s experiences in a 1960s mental asylum – signalled her debut as a producer, and was a chance for her to stretch herself as an actress. But the film was only a modest commercial success, with most of the critical plaudits going not to Ryder but to her co-star, Angelina Jolie. Then came Lost Souls, a confused and derivative devil thriller, which finally crept into cinemas almost two years after it was made. And now we have Autumn in New York, a super-slushy romance in the tradition of Love Story, which finds Ryder looking distinctly uncomfortable as a terminally ill milliner who falls for the ever-implausible Richard Gere.

To her credit, Ryder hasn’t turned her back on this latest project. Despite the fact that the film wasn’t even screened for critics in America, and amid allegations that Gere tampered with the script to build up his part at the expense of her own, she’s still willing to play the publicity game and is refreshingly candid about the film’s ambitions and prospects. The closest she comes to criticising the movie is a bland admission that she hasn’t actually seen the finished edit. While that’s almost certainly code for “it makes me want to scream”, Ryder is defiant about her motivation for choosing it. “It was always a fantasy, growing up and going to the movies, that one day I would do a big, sweeping love story. Like, just a complete corny tear-jerker. It was just an opportunity for me. I never get offered these kinds of movies.”

Why not? “Well, I don’t know how people see me, but when I started making movies, I was the girl who was unattractive, ugly, actually described in the script as ‘unattractive’”.

Sitting in a Manhattan hotel room, the 29-year-old Ryder is anything but ugly. Unusually, her short hair is back to its natural light brown and is knotted into dainty little dreads. She’s dressed all in black, with heavy eyeliner accentuating her best-known feature. Tim Burton might have cast her as an oddball teenage witch in Beetlejuice, but it seems ridiculous for her to assert that she’s no beauty. Surely people are constantly telling her the opposite?

“I don’t hear that,” she insists. “Honestly, I was talking the other day to a friend of mine and we were both saying how neither of us hears compliments because people assume we hear them all the time. When a movie of mine comes out, none of my friends or the people around me say anything, because they assume that I’m so sick of hearing things.”

Ryder’s only concession to her striking appearance is that she’s “unique-looking”, but you don’t have to delve too deep to find the reason for her ambivalence towards her looks. “I basically went through adolescence and puberty onscreen, which is really rough. When I see young girls doing it my heart breaks for them. It’s a situation where if you’re on a set and you have a pimple, which is perfectly normal, they have to switch the lighting. You shouldn’t have to deal with that kind of pressure at that age.”

She’s also sensitive about her diminutive frame, afraid, perhaps, that people might mistake it for fragility. “It’s because of my size and this whole pixie thing that’s been labelled on me for my whole f***ing life,” she says in a rare loss of control. “In every article I’ve ever read – and my parents keep everything – it’s like, ‘waif, pixie, waif, pixie’. There are worse things to be called, but I feel a little stronger than people may perceive me.”

Her love life certainly suggests she’s no flake. She was famously involved with Johnny Depp, after meeting him on the set of Edward Scissorhands, before pairing up with Dave Pirner, the lead singer of the now obscure band Soul Asylum. More recently came the rumour that she was engaged to Matt Damon. It’s not that she’s only attracted to rock stars or actors, but simply that when she dates mere mortals, the press don’t report it. “I didn’t try to hide it or anything, but nobody wanted to hear about Ian the computer scientist.”

What they do want to hear about is her continuing relationship with the musician Beck, whom Ryder accompanied on part of his last European tour. Apart from the common denominator of fame, the pair are also both products of the 1960s counterculture elite. Winona’s father, Michael Horowitz, hung out with Allen Ginsberg and was an early acolyte of Timothy Leary, who was her godfather. Meanwhile her stage surname is taken from jazz musician Mitch Ryder, another favourite of her father’s.

Winona herself describes her parents as “a cross between intellectual beatnik writers and hippies. They weren’t burnt-out hippies, they were productive hippies. My dad still looks like a real beatnik”. Mostly raised in San Francisco, she spent part of her childhood on a commune in northern California, an experience that she didn’t wholly enjoy.

While eager not to hurt her parents’ feelings, or blame them in any way, it seems clear that Ryder is rather more conventional in her tastes. She likes a glass of wine, but isn’t really the sort to be found hugging trees in a haze of smoke. Instead, she collects first editions by authors such as Austen, Orwell and Salinger and moves between houses in LA, San Francisco and New York.

Where she has deviated from the traditional is in her recent career decisions. After 1997′s Alien Resurrection unsurprisingly failed to turn her into an action star, she took nearly two years off acting. “It was a conscious choice; I just didn’t read anything I liked,” she shrugs. “I have quite a bit of a life in San Francisco. I love being up there, I skateboard and see my buddies.” The offers kept coming. The only problem was that they weren’t very good ones. But she’s too established a name now to drift off into TV-land obscurity, despite her determination to keep mixing up her roles in pursuit of more challenging projects. “I’m not Lon Chaney,” she jokes at one point, “I can’t morph my face, but I would if I could. I’d like to play every type of character.”

While that’s satisfying for her, it has inevitably confounded those who like their leading ladies to stick to type. After 25 films, though, Ryder seems content with her current level of stardom. “I’m a familiar face but it’s not like, ‘Oh my God, there she is.’ I can walk down the street. Basically, I’m that girl who’s been around a while.”

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Para nuestra entrevista, ella estuvo en un sofá que parecía demasiado grane para ella. Ella es menuda, tenía un jersey de fieltro gris y lana negra. Llevaba un par de botas netras que parecían parte de un armario antiguo. Sus uñas estaban si pintar. Apenas llevaba maquillaje.
Antes de la entrevista, su publicista dijo: “Winona no se siente bien; tiene bronquitis”, y Winona dijo “Pero no es contagioso”. Su piel es pálida y luminosa; su voz como melódica y melancólica.
Como un cortador de hielo -sin querer preguntar sobre su novio Matt Damon- pregunté cuanto se pensaba gastar en su cumpleaños: “Estoy trabajando… en el plató”, recordándome que estaba terminando “Otoño en New York” con Richard Gere. “No pienso en gastar demasiado tiempo en celebrarlo. Llevo trabajando el día de mi cumpleaños desde hace tiempo.” Ella sonríe haciendo una mueca, parece desconcertada.

Le pregunto acerca de los 2 años sin salir en las pantallas, desde Alien Resurrection en 1997. Ella pestañea y dice: “Estoy pensando en arreglar lo de trabajar en mi cumpleaños”
Quizá ella estaba cansada, pero parecía tener ambivalencia ante la actitud de su carrera. Ella empezó a hacer películas a los 13, y se convirtió en estrella a los 18 con la comedia de humor negro “Escuela de jóvenes asesinos”. Consiguió 2 nominaciones a los Oscar por “Mujercitas” y “La Edad de la Inocencia”. Ya ha trabajado con Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese y Nicholas Hytner. Es una de las grandes actrices de Hollywood. Todavía tiene un fuerte sentimiento que la hace continuar.

“Tengo un montón de papeles”, dijo. “Pero tengo también muchos problemas como mujer jóven”. Y es cierto -durante años estuvimos viéndola al borde de su adolescencia, absorvida totalmente por Hollywood. No por suerte, “Inocencia Interrumpida”, su primer papel protagonista desde “El Crisol” en 1996, trata sobre una chica que está madurando. Está basada en una biografía de la escritora Sussana Kaisen, y trata sobre el porqué de estar o no estar loco. El libro se editó en 1993 y fue aclamado por la crítica. Ryder tenía 21 cuando lo leyó, y conectó con él inmediatamente, porque ella misma había caído en una depresión con 19 años. Columbia Pictures compró los derechos, y Ryder firmó como protagonista y productora ejecutiva.

“Creciendo en la pantalla” es una frase hecha, y una de las cuales dice bastante Ryder, que la eligió para promocionar la película. Ella trabajó a traves de su adolescencia sin descanso, apareciendo en “Bitelchús”, “Eduardo Manostijeras”, “Sirenas” y “La Casa de los Espíritus”. Con 17 años, ella sufrió de pánico escénico y comenzó una su primera relación seria, con Johny Depp. Eran alocados, rebeldes relaciones con tatuajes de por medio, y al mismo tiempo ellos rompiero 3 años después. El pánico creció y ella explotó. Incluso ahora, ella no parece tener perspectivas de que no vuelva.

Tu primera ruptura, ¿no dices que fue muy duro? “Probablemente. Fue como si todos quisieran saber lo que había pasado. Yo quería estar “normal” y no ver mi ruptura anunciada en televisión.
Viviendo entre viajes de avión y hoteles, Ryder comenzó a estar “loca por tener tiempo para dormir”. Una mañana despertó y sintió “se demasiado sensata para vivir en el mundo”, y comprobó ella misma el estar en un hospital, donde gastó una semana en el psiquiatra. “Fue muy interesante, pero no ayudó del todo. No me ofreció realmente nada excepto un grupo de psicólogos que llegué a odiar. Había gente con problemas severos y entonces me dí la vuelta”. “Bueno, cuando hice esta película estaba realmente cansada.” Todo el mundo estaba igual, “Estaba confusa y tuve sexo con mi hermano(dijo una de la terapia).” Cuando oí eso me fui del grupo. Fue muy divertido… Ahora, no lo veo tan divertido. Fue terrible.” Ella sonrie. “Estaba pasando por un drama de esos, y entonces lo deje’. Yo fui voluntaria – los otros pacientes no.”
Después de todo ella continuó llendo a un terapista. “Y tomé la decisión de continuar a través de todo y elegir mi vida, fue difícil”. Ahora que se ha hecho pública su depresión, ella afirma que “eran tan autoindulgente, como para revolcarme en el estiercol… ya sabes.” Un romance marchitado, ella quiso decir. Actualmente, ella parece querer desahogarse: “Pero realmente no me gusta hablar sobre él, porque él [Depp] es otro actor y no quiero envolverle en esto. El tiene su vida.” Ella dijo que todavía seguía enamorada de él. Pero entonces, Ryder parecía estar un poquito enamorada de todos los hombres importantes de su vida. Entonces ella habló sobre Mangold, el director de “Inocencia Interrumpida”, fue como si ella hubiera chocado con él. “Fue una amistad preciosa que mantuvimos, y todavía mantenemos” dijo ella. Con Mangold, ella filmó su primera escena desnuda, y luego otra escena en la que sale en la bañera, afeitandose las piernas. “Habría hecho cualquier cosa por él”, dijo abriendo los ojos. “Incluso si él me hubiera preguntado de hacer… algo más… quizá… no sé donde me hubiera podido parar por él”.

Ellos rodaron en una institución mental de Pennsylvania. “Fue crítico… y heavy”, dijo. Durante doce semanas de rodaje, sus ataques de ansiedad volvieron y tuvo problemas para dormir. Para distraerse, ella veía películas con la compañera de 16 años Elisabeth Moss, otro miembro de la película. Hubo rumores sobre que ella estuvo cortante con Angelina Jolie (que interpreta a la sociopata Lisa), pero ella lo negó. “Fue como si dos chicas no simpatizaran, entonces no seguirían juntas. No tuve nada con ella, y la tengo completa admiración. No sé porque ocurren estas historias”. Las dos fueron yeso y queso – Jolie era extrovertida y Ryder se inclinaba por la introversión. “Siéntate aquí y piensa que todo va a ir bien para siempre” ella admitió. “Hay algo de cierto en esa respuesta, que tiene perfección – tu puedes volverte loca a ti misma”.

Creo que ella hablaba de las películas, los hombres, todo. Ella no había escapado del todo de sus recaídas de los 20. Ella comenzó a estar muy delgada, e iba teniendo conciencia de ello: “No es facil sentirse bien todos los días. Tu tienes días buenos y malos, y otros con algo de depresión, ya sabes, siempre está contigo…gente que está en tu vida, gente que muere y gente que nace, y más cosas.”

Ryder pasó un tiempo de su juventud en una comuna al norte de California. Ella nació en Winona, Minnesota y su apellido real es Horowitz (es judío). Su familia tenía amigos como el poeta de la generación Beat, Allen Ginsberg, y el gurú de LSD el Dr. Timothy Leary, que apadrinó a Winona. Él murió en 1997 -fue una gran pérdida en su vida- y ella leyó el elogio en su funeral. La familia (sus dos hermanos y su hermana) son importantes para ella. Una vez se describió como “alguien que nació esperando estar casada y tener hijos”. Pero cuando le pregunté, ella parecía confusa. “Sí, realmente quería eso, la única cosa en la que pienso. Te mostraré una foto de mi nueva sobrina” dijo, como explicándose, y se volvió hacia el bolso negro que estaba al lado del sofa.

“Ella acaba de nacer” dijo. “Ella tiene un mes. Fue tomada cuando tenía un par de días -se llama Riley. Es de mi hermano mayor, sí…” Ella buscaba a tientas entre otras cosas y sacó más fotos. “Esta soy yo y mi hermno pequeño” dijo. “Oh, aquí estoy abrazándole”, dijo.”Es la única vez que alquilé un avión. Fuimos desde New York a San Francisco. Sólo estuvimos un par de horas [ella estaba rodando], pero no nos fue mal. ¡Mirame! Era un fracaso…” Su pelo era una mata espesa como la de los bebés.

“Oh, fue la mejor cosa en el mundo”, dijo. “Pero estaba tan preocupada por él todo el rato. Trayéndole al mundo, con todos sus…miedos…que tiene…este loco mundo…”
Ella está siempre con algún problema en la vida real, como ella admitió, y sólo podía vivir otra vida cada vez que hacía una película. “Cuando viví en la comuna, mi madre convirtió el granero en un casa con cine, así que reamente me han influido las películas. ¿Conoces del personaje de Chauncy Gardnet en “Being There” y como quería intentar cambiar de canal a la gente? Mis padres solían regañarme porque cuando las cosas iban como a mi no me gustaban, yo tenía que hacer que fueran como yo quería.” Ella parpadeó con sus enormes ojos. “Cuando algo no me gusta, cambio de canal. Realmente vivía en un mundo fantástico en el que estaba creciendo. Deseaba, por otro lado, que no sería ninguna actriz. Mis padres eran activistas y escritores, y considero a la gente importante dentro de este sector. Así que cuando me preguntaban que quería ser cuando era una cría, decía “Oh, yo quiero ser un doctor”. Pero ellos contestaban “Tú quieres que el mundo sea una película”. Entonces protestaba y me iba a escuchar una película.”.
Cuando tenía 10 años, la familia se translado a Petaluma, cerca de San Francisco, y ella se apuntó en las clases para actuar del American Conservatory Theathre. A los 13, ella hizo su primer casting, e hizo su primera película. “Al principio pensé ‘Esto es lo mejor. No me irá nunca mal en eso’” dijo. “Pero entonces tuve mareos y recordé la apuesta que hice, y tuve que trabajar algo más porque, ya sabes, era un gran día. Y entonces todo fue terrible porque empecé a perder el sueño. Pensé ‘Dios mio, no puedo estar mareada’”.

Ella consiguió finalmente tener su mundo fantástico, pero pasando por unas dosis de dura realidad. Había crecido, ella empezaba a ganar dinero, “pero realmente sentía que no me podía permitir cualquier cosa. Uno de mis grandes miedos cuando crecía fue no permitirme el estar triste porque había tenido mucha suerte. Si me quejaba, entonces podría ser horrible… horrible… por no ser una persona agradecida.”

En los estandars de Hollywood, su estilo se considera modesto. Ella tiene una casa en San Francisco, donde viven ahora sus padres, y donde ella se escapa alguna vez. “Gue el único lugar donde la gente no se preocupaba “dijo. “La mayoría dicen ‘Hey, ¿qué tal?’ y no preguntan si puedes darles un autógrado” )Ryder no da autografos a los adultos – ella pensó que parecía raro. Ella también tiene un apartamento en New York. En 1998 ella compró una casa de estilo español en Beverly Hills por 2,5 millones de dólares (cerca de 400 millones de pesetas), “fue un robo” dijo. La casa se la recomendó un amigo íntimo y la decoró otro amigo. El interior lo diseño Kevin Haley, quien conoce a Winona desde que era un bebé – “Es como si fuera mi hermano. W magazine hizo un artículo sobre él, y me entrevistaron – fue tan raro que te entrevisten sobre un amigo”.

Su hermano pequeño, Yuri, solia estar en su habitación, pero ahora su lugar sólo lo visita 5 minutos al día. Ella esta colgada a la televisión wide-screen que Johnny Depp le dejó. “Me gustaría tener una más nueva, pero son muy caras.” Recientemente, ella ha invertido dinero en Roustabout Records, una firma independiente que tiene su hermano mayor, Jubal, y su amigo.
El único de sus tres novios serios de los que ella habló fue Dave Pirner, el cantante de Soul Asylum, que apareció entre Depp y Damon. En el pasaso, ella le describe como su mejor amigo. “Es un poco diferente porque él vive con una mujer ahora”, dijo cariñosamente. “Es un poco más difícil estar cerca de él…porque ahora ya no está solo. Él es alguien que es monumental en mi vida, que cambió mi vida en un gran camino hacia la mejoría -de hecho, él me sacó de la depresión. Le conocí cuando tenía 21, y el me enseñó a escoger en la vida.” Pirner tiene un agradecimiento especial al final de “Inocencia Interrumpida”.

Ryder sobre los ordenadores opina que ella siente ansiedad al estar lejos de la gente, no verla lo suficiente. Estuvimos hablando sobre lo de que ella cambiaba de canal en la gente – ella admitió que lo hacía…”Yo…no…tengo…ordenador” dijo avergonzada. “Estoy pensando en comprarme uno, sólo porque es lo típico. Pero es mucho más romántico papel, lápiz y escribir. ¿Sabes? Eso está bien -mandar y recibir cartas” Entonces su cara se nubló, como algo serio. “Estoy asustada porque en el futuro no haya comunicación y nunca más se vean las caras de los otros, porque eso es necesario. Esto aterrorizada por ello.” “Así qué ¿escribes muchas cartas a la gente?” “Sí, lo hago”, ella sonrió. “Realmente sí. La gente no lo hace. Esto es porque amo hacer esas cosas” dice. “Porque hay diálogo,, la gente habla unos con otros. La gente siempre dice ‘¿Por qué escribes cartas?’ Porque la gente se cuenta cosas los unos a los otros.

Su siguiente trabajo, “Otoño en New York”, es una historia de amor moderna. Richard Gere es un restaurador/playboy de New York y se enamora de Ryder, un mujer jóven con sólo un año de vida. Lo que ocurre es que ella ha hecho un papel brillante, pero ella es siempre recordada como la chica de la película de Richard Gere, se siente como “una actriz en alquiler”. Ella siempre dijo que no estaba interesada en ser productora, pero su experiencia en “Inocencia Interrumpida” le había abierto el apetito. “Tú ves como tienes poder para proteger el material y proteger al director y asegurarte de que nadie entra y cambia algún material sagrado, ¿sabes?”
“Lo que ocurre es que este precioso trabajo es sexista, y ser una mujer jóven te conciernte el recibir un trato diferente si el protagonista es un hombre. Siempre oyes ‘Oh, hay está él’. Es más fácil rebajarte y decir “OK, sólo quiero que me den cariño”, porque eso haría la vida mucho más fácil. Y al final del día eso es lo que quieres oír.”

The Times Magazine

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Photographed by Brigitte Lacombe

When I arrive at Winona Ryder’s house in Beverly Hills, she has only been awake for 10 minutes, so I guess that the make-up (racoon eyes, pale foundation, pink lipstick) is from the night before. She’s wearing a red and white Who T-shirt with no bra and a turquiose A-line skirt, cut off several inches below the knee. Her short, unwashed hair, flecked with blonde tips, is pushed up with a black hairband: on her right wrist are a rubber band and a beaded-leather bracelet. Her elegant, diamond and gold earrings look as if they belong to a much dressier outfit. In a word – a word which she probably hates – she looks adorable. Some more Winona clichés: she is tiny, doll-like, luminescent, with impossibly far-apart huge brown eyes.

Clutching a cup of tea, Winona heads outside to sit at a table under a big white umbrella on her redbrick patio next to an oval pool. “I live at this table, ” she says. It shows: there are piles of yellowing newspapers, an old candle with cigarette butts stuck in it, a sketchbook, Time magazine, The Paris Review, a copy of Richard Ford’s Wildlife and the book she’s currently reading, An Underachiever’s Diary, by Benjamin Anastas. Over the next two days I, too, will live at this table, while Winona sips from cans of Coke, smokes my cigarettes and chatters away about everything but Matt Damon, who is off-limits.

Winona’s house, modest by Hollywood standars, is of the typical, two-story Spanish variety. She bought it last year for £1,5 million (‘a steal’) from Rene Russo’s sister, the ex-wife of Bernie Taupin. Sir Elton John’s lyricist. There’s a lot of rock ‘n’ roll history in these walls, a selling point that thrills her. ‘Neil Young’s Harvest was written here,’ she says, as only a person who lives and breathes music would. ‘That’s one of my favourite albums.’ Winona recently launched Roustabout Records, an indepenedent label which her older brother Jubal runs. She lives with her room-mate of six years, Brett Brook – a handsome menswear buyer at Fred Segal – and her younger brother, Uri, a 23-year-old actor/writer. ‘It’s my first real house,’ she says. ‘I have a pool. I have gardeners. It’s an adult house. I definitely couldn’t live here alone.’

She stops suddenly and her eyes widen. ‘You want to go on a tour now?’ she says, as if suggesting that we open our Christmas presents a day early. And we’re off on a tour through all 10 rooms, complete with a meticulous narration of each and every tchotchke, the provenance of every piece of art revealed, the story behind each framed picture told. She uses the phrase ‘my prized possession’ three times: referring to a W. Eugene Smith photograph of a little black boy climbing up a street sign, circa 1950; a snapshot of herself with her hero Tom Waits, taken a month ago at a concert; and a Sullivan’s Travels poster featuring Veronica Lake.

Scattered about the house are memorabilia and artefacts from nearly every movie she has been in – proof, perhaps, that the unreal, out-of-time life she leads, with its ever-changing cast of characters, has actually happened. There, just behind the bar, is a foot-high bronze statue from Alien Resurrection; just off the kitchen, on a shelf, is a framed page of her narration from Heathers, signed by the director and editor. Next to it is a Polaroid of herself, Glenn Close, and Meryl Streep taken during the shooting of The House of the Spirits. Upstars, in her messy bedroom (a mountain of beauty products next to her bed and many pairs of shoes), we find a photo her mother took of Winona and Daniel Day-Lewis in full period costume on the set of The Age of Innocence. And, of course, there’s the requisite photo of Winona and Marty (Scorsese to you), ‘My show-off thing,’ she says. Most endearingly, she has framed Arthur Miller’s bank-deposit slip on which he wrote his home phone number during the filming of The Crucible. Under his number, he wrote: ‘Call!’ This gives her no end of joy.

There are other, more personal effects in her bedroom worth mentioning, such as a tiny framed picture of a three-day-old Winona. ‘My mom’s a Buddhist and I’m in this position that the Buddha is in, and she’s like, “Noni, I know that you’re special because of this…” and I’m like, “Mom, you probably positioned me like that.” But this is what’s really cool.’ She takes the picture out of the frame and turns it over. ‘My dad was on the lam with Timothy Leary during this time and he showed this picture to him while they were in Switzerland skiing, and that was when he asked him to be my godfather, and Tim wrote: “Love to the beautiful newest Buddha girl from…” – I think he meant to write “Godfather”. They were probably both really high.’

There’s one framed picture that’s lying face down on a shelf. She turns it over and panicky giggles issue forth. ‘That’s… that’s… Matt.’ It’s a picture of Matt Damon, the boyfriend. ‘Trying not to talk about it,’ she singsongs, putting the picture back, face down. The final stop on our tour is a room that she says is – with air quotes – ‘the “office” I never go into. This is the embarrassing room’. The sources of her embarrassment are two framed Academy Award-nomination certificates hanging on the wall, one for Best Supporting Actress in The Age of Innocence and one for Best Actress in Little Women. ‘Totally mortifying. Don’t look in that direction. Brett talked me into putting those up.’ Embarrassment – usually to do with issues about fame – is a recurring theme in Winona Ryder’s life.

Some facts about Winona: she does not sign autographs (except for children), because she thinks it’s weird. She has taken a vow not to repeat negative gossip, though this remains a struggle (I caught her once, telling me that she had heard Britney Spears has breast implants). She does her own hair and make-up for premieres and award shows. She swore she would never get a tatoo, but broke down two years ago after dreaming about one every night for six months. The result is dime-sized, elegant and sits on the top of her left forearm. It’s a combination of the Indonesian symbol for compassion and the Tibetan symbol for enlightenment. She is 28 and has had three serious boyfriends thus far: Johnny Depp, for four years, Dave Pirner of the band Soul Asylum, for four years, and now Matt Damon. She is a natural blonde but dyes her hair dark brown.

Is Winona all grown-up? Yes and no. She clings to a kind of spacy, lazy, California-teen-girl cadence, still uses words like ‘totally’ and ‘awesome’ and ‘like’ and ‘lame’. She smokes each cigarette as though she were 13 years old and it was her very first one: awkwardly (in Woody Allen’s Celebrity, she was quite good as a sexual predator and, at long last, seemed like a grown woman – until she moked a cigarette). A few times in conversation, as we were sitting on her patio that first day, I found myself wishing she would get to the point, and answer my question, stop drifting away, be more articulate. Apparently she read my mind because the next day, out of nowhere, came: ‘I’ve never been that good with interviews, and I know that I’ve probably been really inarticulate. I was reading this interview with Sharon Stone last night, and she’s just really great at it. And I was like, “Man, Jonathan’s gonna think I’m so lame.” I wish I could talk like that. This is me, but I just wish I could be more… like Sharon Stone.’

On the other hand, Winona is obviously a woman who is in control of her career and, in some ways, always has been. ‘Right from the beginning, she chose what appealed to her,’ says one of her dearest friends, the interior designer Kevin Haley, who has known Winona since she was a baby and used to take her to auditions before she could drive. ‘She has always had her own taste, and she sticks to it.’ At 14, she did Heathers against the advice of everyone around her, and she was right. The recent landslide of dark teen dramas is, in many ways, the progeny of Heathers. She seems to have a knack for choosing offbeat, or dark, or literary material that exists just this side of mainstream, like Beetlejuice, Mermaids, Edward Scissorhands, Reality Bites, Little Women – classics, really. Even her big mistakes, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Alien Resurrection, are interestingly camp.

After the long and demanding shoot of Alien Resurrection in 1997, Ryder, exhausted, decided to take some time off. Her career went into a slump, and a few months turned into almost two years. ‘The stuff I was being offered was like, the Rookie Cop,’ she says, laughing. ‘Or this whole craze of super-violent independent movies that I thought were ridiculous. They were just excuses to show the most disgusting images and people shooting up, and I was just so repelled by them.’ When she finally went back to work, she made a film called Lost Souls, directed by Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer she had worked with on How To Make an American Quilt. ‘I wanted very much to work with Janusz, who’s a friend,’ she says.

Last winter, she began filming Girl, Interrupted, based on the bestselling memoir by Susanna Kaysen. Ryder had been attached to star from the beginning, but after her display of canny instinct on Little Women – which she single-handedly persuaded a reluctant Gillian Armstrong to direct, and handpicked much of the young cast, including Claire Danes – she was made an executive producer. ‘I don’t think I am going to be some great producer,’ she says. ‘My main reason for wanting to produce was to not let anyone fuck up the material, and there were a lot of people who wanted to make it something else.’ After six years, several prospective directors and many drafts of the script, Girl, Interrupted finally made it into production with Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Whoopi Goldberg and Vanessa Redgrave. ‘Her act as a producer was pulling together a great vehicle for herself because the world wasn’t doing it,’ says James MAngold, the director and screenwriter, whose previous credits include Heavy and Cop Land.

Girl, Interrupted, published in 1993 to much critical acclaim, is an intense and surprising little book about 18-year-old Kaysen’s two years on the ward for teenage girls at McLean, a psychiatric hospital in New England, in the late Sixties. Kaysen’s prose is spare, elegant and, at times, darkly funny. Through her eyes we meet a bizarre cast of characters: doctors, nurses, and the other girls on the ward. The book raises more questions than it answers – about what it means to be ‘crazy’, who is and who isn’t – and yet it manages, through Kaysen’s clear-headed and egoless insights, to be deeply satisfying.

‘I read the book when I was 21 and I freaked,’ says Ryder. ‘It was like, “Oh my God, my whole life I’ve tried to say that and I’ve never been able to.”‘. Ryder’s connection to the material came through her own unravelling at an early age. She started making movies when she was only 12. By 17, she was having ‘horrible’ anxiety attacks. Over the next few years, things quietly got worse. ‘I was working constantly,’ she says. ‘I didn’t take any time off. When I did, I was really stressed out. I went through my first break-up with a long-term boyfriend [Johnny Depp]. It wass really difficult and weird, and it was amplified because it was in the press. I really thought I was losing my mind. I became a terrible insomniac. I lived on aeroplanes and in hotels. I didn’t really have a home.’

One morning she woke up felling ‘too sensitive to be living in the world’ and checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. ‘I only stayed a week because no one was talking to me,’ she says. ‘They were just trying to medicate. I was like, “No, I need to address my life right now; it’s a mess.” It was a very dramatic move, and my friends really made fun of me. But I needed help.’ Ryder started seeing a therapist she met at the hospital, and her life eventually evened out. ‘Right as I was coming out of it,’ she says, ‘I read the book. I realised that what had happned to me is not unusual. I had the money and the time and a lot of people don’t. Part of what the book says is ‘Everyone’s crazy; they just pretend to be OK so they can get by.’

Mangold explains: ‘We look for people and moments that are about to blossom, and I couldn’t get past the feeling that Winona was someone who was really ready to reach someplace. There are tremendous parallels between Winona’s experience and Susanna Kaysen’s. I love it when I find actors who are ready to address the larger issues about themselves and their choices in the material. She operates very much from the gut. She’s very free that way. And she gets the architecture of film on a profound leve.’

‘I’m very proud of my performance,’ says Ryder. ‘This is the first time, aside from working with Martin Scorsese, that I really let everything go. I was incredibly raw. I delivered myself on a platter to him. There’s stuff that I did in this movie that I’ve never done before. I did a scene where I’m in bed [with a guy] and I’m naked, and I was the most comfortable. I did a couple of scenes in a bathtub, naked.’ She pauses: ‘And it’s certainly not a beauty-shot movie for me.’

Other Winona facts: she was born in Winona, Minnesota. She’s Jewish – Ryder is a stage name. Her real last name is Tomchin, but half the family goes by the name Horowitz because of a snafu at Ellis Island. Don’t ask; it’s complicated. She has an unnatural fear of being separated from her family, which she believes comes from having lost relatives in the death camps. She is obsessed with World War II. Ethel Horowitz, her 99-year-old Russian-immigrant grandmother, lives in Brooklyn and enjoys a friendship with Daniel Day-Lewis. Dave Pirner, her ex, is her best friend. She still loves Johnny. She gets asked about her ‘falling out’ with Gwyneth Paltrow every day. It’s not as dramatic as you think, but it’s complicated – don’t ask. Most of her friends are gay. When she was 12, she was beaten up and called ‘faggot’ by a group of kids who thought she was a boy. When she got home from school, with a bandage on her head, she went into the bathroom, lit one of her father’s cigarettes and did a Jimmy Cagney imitation in the mirror. She was discovered by a casting director at Salmagundi’s (‘very Lana Turner’). She has a substantial collection of vintage Hollywood costumes, including Leslie Caron’s dress from An American in Paris, Claudette Colbert’s gown from It Happened One Night and Olivia de Havilland’s blouse from Gone with the Wind. She has worn a much-altered Ava Gardner dress to three different Hollywood events, for which she came in for some grief from the press.

When not working, Ryder goes to the movies every single day, or she and Brett rent a video, open a bottle of champagne and make a night of it. ‘I’m at the point where I have seen every movie in the video store,’ she says. ‘And I’m not kidding. I can’t find a movie that I haven’t seen – except the really cheesy Eighties teen movies.’ The American Film Institute sent Ryder its 100 Greatest Movies collection on video as a gift. ‘I was so excited.’ Pause for effect. ‘I’d seen every movie in it. That’s 100 movies, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When I was growing up, my mom kept me home from school to watch movies. Kept me home. Like, I would want to go to school. I remember trying to explain to my teachers: “I saw Imitation of Life, and it’s this incredibly story.” And they were like, “You missed school.”‘

In conversation, Winona refers to movies constantly. Clearly they were an unusually important and formative part of her childhood. Now that she’s an adult, movies are her job, her life-blood. And if she has been criticised, as she says, ‘for playing one too many brown-eyed waif girls’, who can blame her? That’s what the movies – that’s what we – wanted her to be. But perhaps playing a teenager when she was well past her teens slowed her process in real life. She has seemed, for a long time, to exist in some strange lacuna between girlhood and womanhood.

One afternoon, we are sitting in her living room in front of a gigantic television watching dailies from Girl, Interrupted. As she runs through take after take of a spooky, emotional scene, her face filling up the entire screen, she says: ‘Ive learned a lot about my face on this movie. My eyes are kind of big, and I can express more than I want to. I do that in real life.’ She turns to me, makes her eyes huge, and cracks up laughing. ‘See what I mean?’

Girl, Interrupted begins and ends with a cab ride. ‘When you look into Winona’s eyes at the beginning and end of this film, going to and from the hospital, there’s such a tremendous difference in this woman,’ says Mangold. ‘Indescribable and lyrical and powerful in terms of the girl you see arriving at the hospital, and the woman you see entering the world.’ Ryder can no longer play the little girl with the big brown eyes. And if, as Mangold says, she ‘grows this girl up’ in the movie, perhaps Winona, herself, has finally grown up.

Tatler Magazine – February 2000

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Winona Ryder revisits her dark places and brings the mad, mad, mad world of Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted to the big screen.

SOMETIMES A GIRL just needs to find the right guy. And Lord knows, Winona Ryder had been looking. For four years, the woman who always seems to snare America’s favorite man had been coming up empty. A lunch here, a conference call there, a meeting in between, and no one – not one single person – really got what she was after.

Then she met James Mangold. Well, actually, she kind of hunted him down. The point is, history shows that during her 13-year career, the 28-year-old pixie of an actress has usually gotten what she’s wanted, whether it’s Matt Damon (yes, she’s still seeing him) or scoring a part in a Martin Scorsese film. And when she saw Mangold’s first movie, Heavy (and then saw it again, and again…), Ryder knew that she’d finally found the guy who could untangle Girl, Interrupted, a film she’d been aching to produce and star in since she first read the book in 1993.

When you see Girl, it becomes obvious why Ryder was so hell-bent on getting this picture made. In her first leading role since starring in the The Crucible in 1996 (since then, she’s had supporting roles in Alien: Resurrection and Celebrity), Ryder plays a part that is tailored to all of her strengths as an actress – no corsets, no fake British accent, just cut-to-the-core Ryder. She is vulnerable, wounded, introspective and wryly funny. In other words, she is the actress you fell in love with in the first place, so many years ago.

Dressed in a gray sweater vest, a baggy white oxford and simple black pants, Ryder sits in a big squishy chair in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel. With her short hair tucked behind her ears and wearing just a speck of lipgloss, she looks more like a cute little boy than the Vogue cover girl she’s become. She also looks totally worn out. In town to film Autumn in New York, which she’s starring in opposite Richard Gere, Ryder has been working a whacked-out schedule, on set one night at midnight, a day later at 6am. The result is a starlet with all the snap of an overcocoked string bean.

Yet, Ryder’s determined to gush about Mangold and promote Girl, Interrupted, even if it means she goes napless. “I kept thinking, If I could just meet the right person, because I had no clue how to make a movie from this book,” says Ryder, who signed on as executive producer soon after it was published six years ago. “It doesn’t have plot points or a beginning, middle or end.”

What it does have is incredibly rich characters and a story that touched a nerve with young women. Written by Susanna Kaysen and set in the late ’60s, the memoir depicts the cloudy years in Kaysen’s life between ages 17 and 19 that she spent in a Boston-area mental hospital.

Much of what drew Ryder to the book was that when she was 19, she checked herself into a hospital – or “a place” as she calls it – to confront severe anxiety attacks. “I wish I could’ve seen this film when I was a teenager,” Ryder says now. “I’m not saying I’m problem-free. But it would’ve been very comforting at the time. That sounds so naive, but when you’re that age, you don’t know that other people are going through what you’re going through.”

Ryder met with Mangold two yers ago at the St. Regis, and she essentially handed the film over to him. “She was frustrated; she was ready for someone to be really aggressive and not precious with it,” says Mangold, who had just finished directing Cop Land.

Mangold rewrote the script, giving it a plot, but not so much of one that it would resemble a Mike Wallace investigation of the mental health system. Instead, the film has the feel of ’60s classics like Hud and Midnight Cowboy. It is quite funny and, like Heavy, has the ability to make you cry without being mushy.

“I wanted to make a movie about women,” says Mangold. “But I didn’t want a chick flick, with girls sitting around chitchatting about men, with pop music playing and soft light.”

Ryder finished shooting Girl six months ago, yet the film still courses through her like a bad crush. When I ask her how Autumn in New York is going, she lets out a sigh, gives an exaggerated roll of the eyes and lifts her right hand to her forehead. “Um.. Autumn in New York… I have no idea. It’s the first movie that I did after Girl, and it’s a big movie, and I’ve been reminded of that ev-er-y sin-gle day,” says Ryder, who tends to season her California accent with lots of italics. “Big budget. Acting opposite Richard Gere… I’ve never felt more like an actress for hire. I’m not trying to dis the movie; I’m just explaining the difference from Girl, Interrupted.”

By all accounts, the filming of Girl was an emotional, bonding and, at times, gossipy experience for Ryder, Mangold and the rest of the ensemble cast, which includes Angelina Jolie, Vanessa Redgrave and Whoopi Goldberg.

Filming took place over a 12 week period last winter in a state mental hospital outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The entire cast holed up in an apartment building near the set. And while Jolie and other actresses would escape to New York for the weekend, Ryder never left. “I couldn’t go to New York and party,” says Ryder. “Are you kidding? I was in a certain place, and I had to stay for the duration.”

If it sounds like she’s taking a shot at Jolie, Ryder’s quick to point out she’s not. Jolie plays Lisa, a badass who’s the vinegar to Susanna’s oil. By shoot’s end, rumors circulated that the actors were clashing offscreen as well as on.

“If she was a guy and we didn’t hang out, that would be, like, normal, no problem,” says Ryder. “But because she’s a girl and we’re not best buddies ang giggling, there’s an issue. There’s absolutely no problem between us. I really like her. And Im really in awe of ther talents. She’s raw, and so beautiful.”

Nevertheless, during the shoot at the hospital, Ryder’s anxiety attacks started to recur, and she had trouble sleeping. When she wasn’t working, she was hanging out with 16-year-old Elisabeth Moss, who plays one of the other girls in the adolescent ward, who together make up a kind of psychiatric Bad News Bears.

“We went and saw really bad movies at the mall,” Ryder says of her time with Moss.

“Such as…?” I prod.

“Oh, no, that’d be too mean. But remember when all those teen movies were coming out?”

“Like She’s All That?”

“Yes! [Big laughs] And Cruel Intensions.”

Not surprisingly, watching movies is what Ryder often does when she’s kicking about her modest Spanish-style house in Beverly Hills, where she lives with her friend Brett (her 23-year-old brother Yuri was another roommate until he recently got his own place five minutes away). She likes to cook dinner for friends and then sit down for a few films in front of what she describes as her “relly big television.” “Not to name-drop,” says Ryder, “but it belongs to my first boyfriend Johnny [Depp]. He never took it after the breakup. I always felt guilty about that. I was always like, “I should get a new one, but they’re so expensive.”

Straddling thrift and extravagance is something Ryder’s adept at. On one wrist she wears Buddhist prayer beads, and on the other a slim, diamond-encrusted silver watch. She freely talks about growing up “super poor” in the Bay Area with her alternative, intellectual-minded parents. Yet in addition to her house in L.A., she also owns a Manhattan apartment and a place in San Francisco, in which her folks now live.

It’s there that Ryder is planning to spend the holidays when Autumn in New York wraps. After that, it’s back to work. Lost Souls, an exorcism flick costarring Ben Chaplin, is due out January 14. She’s also planning to produce and star in Roustabout, about the death of the traveling circus, directed by Smoke Signals’s Chris Eyre. Finally, she hopes to make a sequel to Heathers with the film’s original writer, Daniel Waters – but not with Christian Slater. “I wanted the JD character to come back as this Obie Wan kind of thing, kind of fade in and out, and give me advice,” Ryder says. “But then Christian wouldn’t do it, so I was like, ‘Ah, fuck you [Laughs].’”

Right now, though, it’s all Girl all the time for Ryder. And while making the film took her back to a difficult time in her life, Ryder feels she’s emerged from both episodes a stronger person. “I don’t want to be known as the depressed girl,” she says. “I made a conscious choice to live. I chose life over just being miserable.”

Girl, Interrupted opens December 21

TimeOut New York, November-December 1999

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In ‘Girl, Interrupted,’ Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie commit themselves to a different kind of chick flick – the true story of a young woman’s coming-of-age in a mental hospital.

She was suppose to be dead, this young actress hanging – wrists slashed, eyes open – in a bathroom in Pennsylvania. Though she’d been harnessed in that uncomfortable position for some time, she had a bigger problem: Winona Ryder, acting opposite her in this scene, was too convincing. Every time Ryder came into the bathroom and discovered, to her horror, her beloved friend hanging, the dead girl couldn’t help but cry.

No one had suspected that Girl, Interrupted, based on Susanna Kaysen’s best-selling memoir about the two crazy years she spent in a mental institution in the late 1960s, would shake the stability of at least one of its actresses. There had been speculation off the set that with the involvement of such high-powered talent as Ryder and Angelina Jolie and Venessa Redgrave and Whoopi Goldberg – along with up-and- comers Brittany Murphy, Elisabeth Moss, and Clea Duvall – the shoot might be more competitive than cohesive, more hormonal than whole. But not even the actresses themselves, who’d had informed ideas about what they were getting into, could have predicted what was to come: the unusual investment they were about to make, the extraordinary rewards they would receive for having made it.

It was the suicide scene – one of the more gruesome, profoundly sad moments in the film, completed on the third day of filming – that would set the tone for the 12-week shoot. Ryder, playing Kaysen, a teenager caught in the undertow of a severe depression, stepped into her part on that somber winter day and didn’t step out of it until springtime, after the film had wrapped. Similarly, Angelina Jolie, playing Lisa – a charismatic and heartless sociopath with whom Susanna becomes fascinated – also, for all intents and purposes, disappeared during the shoot. Both women seemed to make an implicit pact to forsake appearances, to pull up their anchors and dive head-first into their own dark shadows.

Studios did not want to touch Girl, Interrupted when it first came to their attention. The memoir is a journal, essentially, very black (and very funny), with no real plot and difficult female characters – anorexics and catatonics and botched suicides – who come and go the way sick people do. But Ryder’s connection to the book – which was given to her in galley form by her father, writer Michael Horowitz, in 1993, when she was 21 – had been immediate and personal.

Ryder had been having anxiety attacks for years. And one of the worst things about them was that she couldn’t explain what she was going through to the people closest to her – not to her brother, not to her sister, not to her friends, not even to her therapist. She found solace, then, in Kaysen’s clear-sighted, beautifully written book, the first she had read – since William Styron’s Darkness Visible – that spoke articulately about what it’s like to “feel like you’re going crazy,” she says. For Ryder, no book had ever been as on-target about the hole that girls in particular sometimes fall into at childhood’s end.

“I’ve never been a suicidal person, ” Ryder says. She is sitting in L.A. at a large table, under an even larger white umbrella. Behind her is the open back door of her shady two-story house; to her left, a sparkling swimming pool. “But there have definitely been times when I’ve thought, I’m too sensitive for this world right now; I just don’t belong here – it’s too fast and I don’t understand it. Those were times when I would hibernate. And it wasn’t healthy – I would get very lonely and feel very helpless,” Ryder is wearing a tight white T-shirt, and her short dark hair, veined with blond, is pulled off her face with a thin black headband. She is even lovelier in person than she is in movies – even more fragile-seeming, more present and still.

“I spent some time in a psychiatric ward when I was 19,” she continues, recalling the period in her adolescence when she was already a veteran of nine movies, including Mermaids and Heathers. “I really thought that I was losing my mind. I’ve always been an insomniac, and I was really, really overworked and overtired and not sleeping. I was convinced I was having a nervous breakdown, and I checked myself in.” There is a copy of The New Yorker’s fiction issue on the table in front of here, and clippings about the auction of the love letters that Salinger wrote to Joyce Maynard. There is the reissue of her parents’ book, Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady. “I don’t know how much playing other people for my whole adolescence had to do with what I was going through.”

It was a real hospital that Ryder checked herself into in 1990, not a high-class hotel for rich and weary actresses, and she found it scary. She left after a week, without having been helped.

“I debated whether to ever talk about it,” she says gently, her head tilted, her shoulder moving up to meet her ear, “but it is true, and I’m not really ashamed of it. I think everybody goes through these times in their lives – I think you’re very weird if you don’t.”

At 21, Ryder wanted more than anything to play Susanna Kaysen. But when she investigated optioning the book, she learned that producer Doug Wick (Working Girl) had bought the rights two weeks before, out of his discretionary fund at Columbia (the studio had not wanted to pay for it, Wick says, even though every young actress who’d been coming through the Columbia gate was bringing the book with them). So Ryder called Wick and told him she wanted to come on board. With Ryder attached to star (she is also one of the film’s executive producers), Columbia suddenly got interested: Wick was now in a position to look for a writer and a director.

That process, it turns out, took five years – three writers took stabs at a script, and several directors came in to discuss their ideas. But no one seemed able to work their way around the project’s inherent problems.

And then Ryder saw Heavy – an independent film about a quiet, obese cook who falls in love with a girl he could never have – and, floored, she got in touch with a young writer-director, James Mangold, who was then working on his second film, the not-so-independent Cop Land.

Mangold (whose wife, Scream producer Cathy Konrad, is also a producer on Girl, Interrupted) did not like the adaptations that Ryder had sent him, but he was moved by Ryder, who could talk endlessly about his beloved little gem of a first movie. And he felt a connection to the questions posed in Kaysen’s memoir. “The book is about a mystery,” he says. “About questions like, What happened to me? What’s crazy, and what’s not? Those questions are very inviting for any reader, male or female, because we all have moments when we wonder about ourselves.”

Having completed Cop Land, his “dark, male dirge,” Mangold was looking forward to direction a cast of women. He didn’t want to make a movie just about “a lot of attractive girls in smocks, bonding,” but instead “a movie about women that had some balls.” He also knew that the film needed to stand on its own, say something new, and avoid replicating One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Awakenings.

Then he read an essay by Salman Rushdie about The Wizard of Oz, and it dawned on him that the old MGM musical would be the perfect blueprint for Susanna Kaysen’s story: Young girl, trapped in a humdrum life and alienated from her parents, is hit by a twister and thrown into a parallel universe where everyone is childlike and literally missing some part of themselves. It is only the girl herself who seems to have nothing wrong with her, and yet she knows that that’s not quite the truth. Mangold wrote for a year, showing Ryder the pages as he went.

“He got it,” she says, referring to the book that she had so deeply connected with. “A lot of people didn’t. And he make a beautiful movie.”

“I’ve had enormous respect for directions I’ve worked with. Certainly people like Martin Scorsese – [that] was one of the best experiences of my life. But maybe being older” – she is now 27 – “and Jim really treating me as a partner in the movie, with just absolutely no condescension…” She looks shyly away, momentarily flustered. “He’s a great ally and friend.”

It was Ryder who suggested Angelina Jolie for the part of Lisa, having seen her all-out performance in the HBO movie Gia. Lisa is “a firecracker,” according to Konrad, “lobbed into the scenes with Winona”; Mangold says he had imagined a kind of “Jack Nicholson in drag” when he was writing the part. Although many famous young actresses in Hollywood wanted the edgy, explosive role – the “show-off part,” as Mangold puts it – no one who auditioned could bring Lisa to life. Until Jolie.

“Angie walked in one day,” Mangold says, “sat down, and was Lisa. I felt like the luckiest boy on earth.”
When the 24-year-old Jolie dug Kaysen’s book from her shelves afterward, she discovered that everything she’d previously underlined was about Lisa. She’ already identified with the girl.

“One of the passages in the book that introduces Lisa,” Jolie says, sitting in a closed cigar bar in L.A., with a giant bubble of red wine in her long, thin-boned hand, “is about her ‘wild eyes that had seen freedom.’ ” Jolie doesn’t smile, but you see her large, straight teeth flash and her eyes dart to the side, remembering. “And there’s this tattoo I got that’s a Tennessee Williams quote.” Jolie holds out her skinny arm and slides her gray sleeve up to her small bicep. In the crook is a black couplet in tiny block letters. She read it, upside down: “‘A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.’ That’s Lisa,” she says “and that’s what I loved.”

Jolie is normally not, she says, a social person on movie sets. Living the life of charismatic Lisa, though – a psychotic magnet, a not-quite- right ringleader – she found her trailer always full of people. She played loud music for them, and had a dartboard and balloon animals. She and some of the other young women on the production cut pictures of people having sex out of pornography magazines and stuck them all over the trailer walls. She invited “transpo” (the transportation guys) in, pointed to the scissors, and told them to “go for it.”

“Lisa is somebody who lives completely on impulse,” Jolie says. “She’s very angry at people for not being who they are – for living with masks on, in love with their own problems. She just wants to shake everybody. So the character allowed for a certain amount of freedom on my parts.” She smiles, knocks a cigarette out of a nearly empty pack, and lights it with a paper match. “you could tell certain people were offended by the pictures, but I didn’t mean to offend them.”

Jolie had come to the set of Girl, Interrupted – an actual, though mostly defunct, mental hospital in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania – after shooting The Bone Collector, in which she plays a cop who spends a lot of time alone in sewers and stockyards, looking for dead bodies. She welcomed, with this new film, the sudden and unexpected infusion of new friends. But it didn’t turn out to be a simple as that.

“Some of the girls,” she says, “I didn’t get very close to. I don’t know how anybody felt about me. I think at some point they all thought that I wasn’t being nice to people.” There is a certain wariness that comes over Jolie when she talks about Girl, Interrupted. Whereas Ryder seems to view her experience on the film with some distance, Jolie seems a bit left behind – lost in the narrow world of Lisa. “One day, they thought that I was upset with Winona – that we had gotten into an argument. And we never did, we never had a problem. But there was this scene where she comments on all the girls – makes a little criticism about them – and I’m supposed to laugh about that. But in my opinion, my character doesn’t find that funny, because they’re my family. And sometimes that production people would translate that as, I’m being mean, or I’m not smiling at Winona or being funny with my fellow actors. I remember hearing that they thought there was tension on the set. And I remember thinking” – and here Jolie slips into character – “I’m a sociopath.”

Because of her role in The Bone Collector, Jolie turned, afterward, into her own private forensics specialists. (“You can’t help it,” she says. “You’re in a bathroom at some guy’s house, and you go, ‘Okay, I don’t want to pick it up, but I swear I see a red hair in that brush…’”). On the set of Girl, Interrupted, then, Jolie-Lisa found herself sitting back and watching the other actresses-inmates for clues.

“Analyzing to solve things in Bone Collector,” she says, “became, in Girl, Interrupted, me sitting in a room with people going…” – she sits back in her chair at the cigar bar, squints, and points, literally, at all the flaws of an imaginary girl in the middle of the empty room – “‘… You’re wearing that outfit because you have an identity problem, and you’re trying to be sunny, so you’re wearing all pink ’cause you’re depressed.’” Jolie laughs wickedly. “I got just really free, testing boundaries.”

Though she didn’t make friends with the other leads, Jolie would still say things to them in passing. To Brittany Murphy (Clueless), who played Daisy, a girl with a ’60s-style “flip” hairdo who lives on a strict diet of chicken and laxatives, Jolie once said, “Your hair flips up because it’s scared of your shoulders.” Murphy laughs, repeating the comment. Then she remembers that Jolie bought her a backpack for Valentine’s Day (she bought all the girls something), a giant Disney dog’s head, with ears that flipped up at the bottoms like Daisy’s hair.

“Lisa would rip on Daisy,” Murphy continues. “There was one night when I saw [Jolie off the set]. We were actually talking for a while. And then she said, ‘Wait a minute – what am I talkin’ to you for?!’” Murphy roars with laughter. “I said, ‘Can’t we take a break for a while?’” Jolie just laughed, Murphy says. The implicit answer was, No.

“As Jim and I began to get to know all [the actresses] personally,” Konrad says, “we would laugh, and say, ‘Yeah, everybody’s in character.’ But in a lot of ways, they are in characters – which is why the casting is so brilliant.”

Ryder doesn’t quite see it that way, although she didn’t ask Jolie what kind of experience she was having. “I think Angelina went through a lot on the movie,” she says. “But I don’t know, because I don’t know her that well. We weren’t exactly talking about it, because our characters have this strange relationship. But I know that Angie puts herself through a lot when she works. I would love someday to do a movie with her where we play really close friends, because I’d love to get to know her.”

Jolie agrees that she and Ryder never really got acquainted, and that neither actress was inclined to step far enough out of her character to be able to ask a question like, “how’s it going?” “In a lot of the scenes,” Jolie says, “we would be against each other, so we would kind of come into it from opposite sides of the room, and we’d leave at opposite ends of the room.”

There was something else about the characters that made it almost impossible for Ryder and Jolie to connect socially: Jolie had come to Girl, Interrupted expecting, as Lisa, to become very depressed; but she discovered, to her surprise, that what Lisa felt was nothing. Not a thing. Ryder, on the other hand, felt everything.

Murphy tells a story about how she was waylaid coming to the set on her first day – there had been an ice storm, and her plane was rerouted to Baltimore, where she stayed in a hotel instead of continuing to Harrisburg that night. And Ryder was waiting for her in the production office the next morning. “Popping out from winter-white fluff,” Murphy says, “were these bright, sparkly eyes, and the most welcoming, heartfelt hug. That was the first time I met her. She said she had lost sleep the night before, because she was worried about me being alone in Baltimore. And she meant it.”

Elisabeth Moss – who was 16 during filming, the youngest member of the ensemble – also felt watched over by Ryder, whom she calls her “little protector.” Moss plays Polly, and adolescent in so much pain that she had lit herself on fire to try to burn her feelings away. Ryder opened her life to Moss, the younger actress says, so that Moss would have somewhere to go to get distance during takes, someone to talk to when the others were working. Whereas Jolie would take off late on Friday nights with some of the other actresses, to New York City for a little R&R, Ryder would stay in Harrisburg with Moss.

“Since we were all cooped up in that hospital every day, all day,” Moss says, “everybody would scatter on Friday. You’d just kind of show up Monday morning, and nobody asked any questions. But me and Noni always got stuck staying in our little rooms, going to see bad movies at the Harrisburg mall.”

“I wanted to go to New York,” Ryder says. “It looked like so much fun. But I stayed. Oh, boy, did I stay.”

During production of Girl, Interrupted, Ryder began to lose sleep, and her anxiety attacks returned. Part of it was that the hospital, where 80 percent of the film was shot, felt like a prison, even though it looked more like a college campus. A third of the hospital was still running – there was a drug-rehab center and a section for homeless families- and over the three-month shoot, the actresses got to know some of the people there. It was impossible to step out of a scene and be rid of the setting. “Filming at this hospital with people who were suffering,” Ryder says, “was a humbling experience.”

And a disorienting one as well. Since the movie was shot out of sequence, but almost always in the same clinical setting, Ryder had to find a way to chart the continuity (or lack thereof) of Susanna’s roller- coaster inner life over the tow years covered in the story. She taped index cards all over her trailer, indicating where she was supposed to be emotionally that day – as opposed to a day or week before – and she watched dailies every night so that she could remember the scenes she had already shot, which she would have to connect with the next day.

“I had to stay in this heightened state,” she says, “because if I kind of let it all go at the end of the day, it would be too exhausting to work myself up the next day.”

Like many on the set, Ryder caught a flu bug during the shot, and she told cinematographer Jack Green (The Bridges of Madison County, Twister) that between the illness and her debilitating work, she sometimes felt “so frail,” Green remembers. He took extra care of Ryder, playing cop to the technicians, making sure that interruptions for lighting checks or hair touch-ups were kept to a minimum. Ryder grew so comfortable with Green, Looking forward to his hugs and daily “I love yous,” that when it came time to do a love scene with Jared Leto, who plays her boyfriend, she slipped naked under the covers – something she had never done before on a movie set – confident that the camera would not capture anything too revealing.

“I felt so trusting of everybody that I wasn’t paranoid,” Ryder explains. “I explored stuff that I’ve never explored onscreen before.”
It was the real-life Susanna Kysen, visiting the set for a couple of days that winter, who noticed that Ryder – no matter how sick or anxious or sleepy – was the one performer who was always on the set, always working. She saw that Ryder had taken on the burden – physically, emotionally, creatively – of her life story.

“I felt that her attachment was so… she had claimed it,” Kaysen says. “My claim on it was gone.” (She laughs when she recalls how Ryder, showing her dailies of scenes with the actors playing Kaysen’s parents, was very disappointed to learn that they didn’t look at all like Kaysen’s real mom and dad.) She spent one 16-hour day with Ryder, watching her being Kaysen with all the energy she could muster. “I thought, Boy, you know, she’s good. That air of fragility, which I think she cultivates, belies a very resilient character. I don’t mean pigheaded – I mean I just don’t worry about her.”

Jolie’s life had an interruption of its own a couple years ago. The daughter of actor Jon Voight and actress Marcheline Bertrand, she’d left home when she was 16 (moving across the street from her mother’s apartment); she’d gotten married at 20 (to the “second man I was with,” Jonny Lee Miler, with whom she starred in Hackers); and then, at 22 after refusing the role four times because she knew instinctively the toll it would take, she accepted the part of the self-destructive model Gia Carangi in the award-winning HBO biopic Gia. It was during that production that Jolie’s life fell apart: She moved into a hotel without her husband and lost touch with all her friends.

“It happened that I became exposed at the same time that I was playing a role about somebody being exposed,” she says. “I felt beaten down. I didn’t feel like a good person. I felt pretty bad.” Her memories of that time are, at best, bittersweet. “Jonny came the day I died,” she says, “and he was with me when I shaved my head.” (Gia had had AIDS at the end of her life, and he hair had fallen out in clumps.) “We went home, and I still had all these glue spots, and I got into a dress and high hells, and he took me to dinner on Sunset Boulevard. He just went arm-in-arm with me into the restaurant.”

After Gia had wrapped, Jolie gave up acting and moved to New York City, where she bought an apartment and registered at New York University’s film school. Miller moved to London, and the two, who never got together again, eventually divorced in August of 1999.

Jolie began to miss acting, though, and after a year she came back to Hollywood to play a wayward wife in Pushing Tin, and a lovelorn club kid in Playing by Heart. “I surfaced,” she says, “and was so much stronger. I’m not hard on myself anymore. I simply don’t ask much of anybody but just to be who they are.” Jolie smiles, and takes a sleepy sip of wine. That’s what she wants most – to be who she is. And what might that be? “Everything,” she says.

You’d think, talking to some of Girl, Interrupter’s younger players, that Ryder and Jolie had invented the craft of acting. The admiration is stunning. Murphy says that Ryder “changed the molecules” in the ten feet between them when they were doing a scene together – that it was not about acting, it was about “believing.” Moss says that with Jolie, you “were constantly watching, waiting for whatever she might throw at you. It was exciting.” Murphy agrees. “Angie is a very giving actress.” She says, adding that Jolie passed on some advice that her own mother had given here: “‘Be brave, be bold, be free.’”

Neither Moss nor Murphy stayed in character throughout that winter in Pennsylvania. Moss believes that if she hadn’t dropped Polly every night after shooting, she would have “ended up in a mental institution.” Murphy too says she would have “gone crazy.” But these are actresses who, unlike Ryder and Jolie, are still relatively unfamiliar with the dark recesses of their minds – with loss, sleepless nights, unfathomable anxieties, and paralyzing responsibilities. These things will undoubtedly come to them, but not yet. For now, they are reveling in having been part of an intensely female, intensely emotional, intensely personal movie. “I would have held the boom for this one,” Murphy says. “I haven’t experienced anything like that before, and I don’t know if I ever will again.”

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Clutching a cup of tea, Winona heads outside to sit at a table under a big white umbrella on her red brick patio next to an inviting oval-shaped pool. “I live at this table,” she says, and it shows. There are piles of yellowing newspapers, an old candle with cigarette butts in it, a sketchbook, Time magazine, The Paris Review, a copy of Richard Ford’s Wildlife, and the book she’s currently reading, An Underachiever’s Diary, by Benjamin Anastas. Over the next two days, I, too, will live at this table while Winona variously sips from a can of Coke and a little bottle of water, smokes my cigarettes, and chatters away about everything but Matt Damon, who is off limits.

Modest by Hollywood standards, Winona’s house is of the typical two-story Spanish variety; she bought it last year for $2.5 million (“a steal”) from Renee Russo’s sister, who is also the ex-wife of Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s lyricist. There’s a lot of rock-’n'-roll history in these walls–a selling point, and a fact that thrills her. “Neil Young’s Harvest was written here,” she says as only person who lives and breathes music could. “That was one of my favorite albums.” Winona recently launched Roustabout Records, an independent label that her older brother, Jubal, and his best friends are running. She lives with her roommate of six years – Brett Brooks, a tall, handsome black man who’s a menswear buyer at Fred Segal – and her little brother, Uri, a 23-year-old actor/writer. “It’s my first real house,” she says. “I have a pool. I have gardeners. It’s an adult house. I definitely couldn’t live here alone.”

She stops suddenly; her eyes widen. “You want to go on a tour now?” she says as if suggesting that we open our Christmas presents a day early. And we’re off on an exhaustive walk through all ten rooms, complete with meticulous narration of each and every tchotchke–the provenance of every piece of art revealed, the story behind dozens of framed snapshots told. She uses the phrase “my prized possession” three times, referring to a W. Eugene Smith photograph of a little black boy climbing up a street sign, circa 1950; a snapshot of herself with her hero Tom Waits, taken at a concert a month ago; and a Sullivan’s Travels poster featuring Veronica Lake.

Scattered about the house are memorabilia and artifacts from nearly every movie she’s been in–proof, perhaps, that the unreal, out-of-time life she leads with an ever-changing cast of characters has actually happened. There, behind the bar, is a foot-high bronze statue from Alien:Resurrection; just off the kitchen ,on a shelf, a framed page of her narration from Heathers, signed by the director and editor. Next to it, a Polaroid of herself, Glenn Close, and Meryl Streep from The House of the Spirits. Upstairs in her messy bedroom (a mountain of beauty products, right next to the bed; many, many pairs of shoes) we find a snapshot that her mother took of Winona and Daniel Day-Lewis in full period costume on the set of The Age of Innocence. And, of course, there’s the requisite photo of Winona and Marty (Scorsese to you). “My show-off thing,” she says. Most endearingly, she has framed Arthur Miller’s bank-deposit slip on which she wrote his home phone number during the filming of The Crucible. Under his number, he had written, “Call!” This gives her no end of joy.

There are other, more personal effects in her bedroom worth mentioning: A two-inch-by-two-inch framed picture of a three-day-old Winona. “My mom’s a Buddhist and I’m in this position that the Buddha is in, and she’s, like, ‘Noni, I know that you’re special because of this…’ I’m like, ‘Mom, you probably positioned me like that.’ But this is what’s really cool.” She takes the picture out of the frame and turns it over. “My dad was on the lam with Timothy Leary during this time and he showed this picture to him while they were in Switzerland skiing, and that was when he asked him to be my godfather, and Tim wrote, ‘Love to the beautiful, newest Buddha girl from…’ – I think he meant to write ‘Godfather.’ They were probably really high.”

Also: A tiny hinged silver Tiffany frame that snaps open and shut like a locket. It was given to her by one of her dearest friends, the interior designer Kevin Haley, a one-time actor whom she’s known since she was a baby. On one side of the frame is a picture of a teenage Winona slumped on a couch, dressed in black, wearing movie-star sunglasses, giving the camera the finger. On the other side is the page from The Catcher in the Rye where Holden Caulfield sees FUCK YOU written on the wall. “I was in Paris promoting Mermaids,” she says, “and I was a total insomniac and going nuts and having the worst time of my life, and Kevin took this picture and gave me this. I just treasure it. I take it with me wherever I go. It’s a very adolescent me, but it reminds me of that time so much, and that book was like my bible.”

There’s one framed picture that’s lying facedown on a shelf. She turns it over and panicky giggles issue forth. “That’s…that’s…Matt!” It’s a picture of Damon, the boyfriend. “Trying not to talk about it,” she singsongs, putting the picture back, facedown. The final stop on our tour is a room that she says is – with air quotes – “the ‘office’ I never go into; this is the embarrassing room.” The source of her embarrassment is two framed Academy Award – nomination certificates – one for Best Supporting Actress in The Age of Innocence and one for Best Actress in Little Women – hanging on the wall. “Totally mortifying. Don’t look in that direction. Brett talked me into putting those up.” Embarrassment, you will come to see – usually about issues to do with fame – is a recurring motif in Winona Ryder’s life.

Some facts about Winona: She has never been on a late-night talk show (except for Charlie Rose). She has never been to a fashion show. She does not sign autographs (except for children) because she thinks it’s just weird. She has taken a vow not to repeat negative gossip, though this remains a struggle (I caught her once telling me that she heard Britney Spears has breast implants). She has never heard a Britney Spears song. She does her own hair and makeup for premieres and award shows. She swore she would never get a tattoo but broke down two years ago after dreaming about one every night for six months. The result is dime-size and elegant and exists on the top of her left forearm. It’s the combination of the Indonesian symbol for compassion and the Tibetan symbol for enlightenment. She turns 28 this month and has had only three serious boyfriends thus far: Johnny Depp for four years, Dave Pirner of the band Soul Asylum for four years, and now Matt Damon. She is a natural blonde but dyes her hair dark brown.

Is Winona all grown-up? Yes and no. She clings to a kind of spacey, lazy California teen-girl cadence, still uses words like totally and awesome and like and lame. She smokes each cigarette as if she were thirteen and it were her very first one: awkwardly (in Woody Allen’s Celebrity, she was quite good as a sexual predator and, at long last, seemed like a grown woman – until she smoked a cigarette). A few times in conversation, as we were on her patio that first day, I found myself wishing she would get to the point, answer my question, stop drifting away, be more articulate. Apparently she had read my mind, as the next day, out of nowhere, came “I’ve never been that good with interviews, and I know that I’ve probably been really inarticulate. I was reading this interview with Sharon Stone last night, and she’s really great at it. And I was like, ‘Man, Jonathan’s gonna think I’m sooo lame.’ I wish I could talk like that. This is me, but I just wish I could be more…like…Sharon Stone!”

On the other hand, Winona is very obviously a woman in control of her career and, in some ways, always has been. “Right from the beginning she chose what appealed to her,” says Kevin Haley, who used to take Winona to her auditions before she could drive. “And she’s done that all along. She always had her own taste, and she sticks to it.” At fourteen, she did Heathers against the advice of everyone around her, and she was right. The recent landslide of dark teen dramas are in many ways the progeny of Heathers. She seems to have a knack for choosing offbeat or dark or literary material that exists just this side of mainstream, like Beetlejuice, Mermaids, Edwards Scissorhands, Reality Bites, Little Women–classics, really. But even her big mistakes–Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Alien:Resurrection–are interestingly camp (though she continues to be mortified by both films).

After the long and demanding shoot of Alien:Resurrection in 1997, Ryder, exhausted, decided to take some time off. Her career went into a slump, and a few months turned into almost two years. “The stuff I was being offered was like The Rookie Cop!” she says, laughing. “And I was just, like, ‘I’m not The Rookie Cop. I can’t be The Rookie Cop.’ Or this whole craze of superviolent independent movies that I thought were ridiculous. They were just excuses to show the most disgusting images and people shooting up, and I was just so repelled by them.” When she finally went back to work she made a film called Lost Souls, directed by Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer she had worked with on How to Make an American Quilt. “I wanted very much to work with Janusz, who’s a friend,” she says haltingly. I had heard through the buzz machine that she hates the film, won’t promote it. “I’ll just say that I haven’t seen it,” she says, batting her eyelashes.

This past winter, she began filming Girl, Interrupted, based on the best-selling memoir by Susana Kaysen, the rights to which Columbia Pictures bought for producer Douglas Wick. Ryder had been attached to star from the beginning, but after her display of canny instinct on Little Women–she single-handedly persuaded a reluctant Gillian Armstrong to direct and handpicked much of the young cast, including Claire Danes – Columbia made her an executive producer. “I don’t think I’m going to be some great producer,” she says. “My main reason for wanting to produce was to not let anyone fuck up the material–and there were a lot of people who wanted to make it something else.” After six years, several prospective directors and many drafts of the script, Girl, Interrupted opens at long last in December, with Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Whoopi Goldberg, and Vanessa Redgrave. “Her act as a producer was pulling together a great vehicle for herself because the world wasn’t doing it,” says James Mangold, the director and screenwriter, whose previous credits include Heavy and Cop Land.

Girl, Interrupted, published in 1993 to much critical acclaim, is an intense and surprising little book about eighteen-year-old Kaysen’s two years on the ward for teenage girls at McLean, a psychiatric hospital in New England, in the late sixties. Kaysen’s prose is spare, elegant, and at times, darkly funny. Through her eyes we meet a bizarre cast of characters – the doctors, nurses, and other girls on the ward. The book raises more questions than it answers – about what it means to be “crazy,” who is and who isn’t – and yet it manages, through Kaysen’s clearheaded and egoless insights, to be deeply satisfying.

“I read that book when I was 21 and freaked,” says Ryder. “It was like, ‘Oh, my god, my whole life I’ve tried to say that and I’ve never been able to.’” Ryder’s connection to the material came through her own unraveling at an early age. She started making movies when she was only twelve. By seventeen, she was having “horrible” anxiety attacks. Over the next few years, things quietly got worse. “I was working constantly,” she says. “I didn’t take any time off. When I did, I was really stressed out. I went through my first breakup with a longterm boyfriend [Johnny Depp]. It was really difficult and weird and it was amplified because it was in the press. I really thought I was losing my mind. I became a terrible insomniac. I lived on airplanes and in hotels. I really didn’t have a home.”

One morning she woke up and felt “too sensitive to be living in the world” and checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. “I stayed only a week because no one was talking to me,” she says. “They basically were just trying to medicate me. I was like ‘No, I need to address my life right now; it’s a mess.’ It was a very dramatic move, and my friends really made fun of me. But I needed help.” Ryder started seeing a therapist she met at the hospital, and eventually her life evened out. “Right as I was coming out of it,” she says, “I read the book. I realized that what happened to me is not unusual. I had the money and the time and a lot of people don’t. Part of what the book says is ‘Everyone’s crazy; they just pretend to be OK so they can get by.’”

Ryder loved Heavy, and when she met Mangold a couple of years ago, she knew she had finally found her director. “It was really obvious that he was the perfect person and he really got it,” she says. “Other writers and directors over the years were way too verbal and cerebral about the whole thing. You either get it or you don’t. It’s like a weird secret handshake.”

Despite some early hesitation, Mangold decided to take the project on because, he says, “directors are opportunists. We look for people and moments that are about to blossom. And what I couldn’t get past was that I had the feeling that Winona was someone who was really ready to reach someplace. There are tremendous parallels between Winona’s experience and Susanna Kaysen’s. I love when I find actors who are ready to address larger issues about themselves and their choices in the material. She operates very much from the gut. She’s very free that way. And she gets the architecture of film on a profound level.”

“I’m very proud of my performance,” says Ryder. “I just trusted Jim so much. This is the first time, aside from working with Martin Scorsese, that I really let everything go. I was incredibly raw. I delivered myself on a platter to him. There’s stuff that I did in this movie that I’ve never done before. I did a scene where I’m in bed with [a guy] and I’m naked, and I was the most comfortable. I did a couple of scenes in a bathtub, naked.” She pauses. “And it’s certainly not a beauty-shot movie for me.”

“She’s phenomenal in it,” says Mangold. “She reaches farther than she’s reached in other pictures. But she also carries with her the strength we know and love. Some people have criticized her for playing young women too often, and here she plays a younger woman, but grows this girl up in a way we’ve never seen. After we passed some point of trust or friendship, she was very clear with me that she expected me to push her past what she thought was her bullshit. She gave me a note on the first day of production reminding me that she really expected that I would not be satisfied with just her big brown eyes. It was not only the actress speaking but also someone who’s been shepherding this movie for six years.”

Other Winona facts: She was born in Winona, Minnesota. She’s Jewish. Ryder is a stage name. Her real last name is Tomchin, but half the family goes by Horowitz because of a snafu at Ellis Island. Don’t ask. It’s complicated. She has an unnatural fear of being separated from her family, which she believes comes from having lost relatives in the death camps. She is obsessed with World War II. Ethel Horowitz, her 99-year-old Russian-immigrant grandmother, lives in Brooklyn and enjoys a friendship with Daniel Day-Lewis. The flapper pictures on these pages are a tribute to her. David Pirner, her ex, is her best friend. She still loves Johnny. She gets asked about her “falling out” with Gwyneth Paltrow every day. It’s not as dramatic as you think, but it’s complicated. Don’t ask. Most of her friends are gay. When she was twelve years old, she was beaten up and called “faggot” by a group of kids who thought she was a boy. When she got home from school with a bloody bandage on her head, she went into the bathroom, lit one of her father’s cigarettes, and did a Jimmy Cagney imitation in the mirror. She was discovered by a casting director at Salmagundi (“very Lana Turner”). She has a substantial collection of vintage Hollywood costumes, including Russ Tamblyn’s jacket from West Side Story, Leslie Caron’s dress from An American in Paris, Claudette Colbert’s gown from It Happened One Night, Olivia de Havilland’s blouse from Gone With the Wind, and Sandra Dee’s bikini from the Tammy movies. She has worn a much-altered Ava Gardner dress to three different Hollywood events, for which she has caught some grief from the press.

One evening, Winona, Brett, and I pile into Winona’s brand-new black Mercedes and drive to the Beverly Center on La Cienega to see The Thomas Crown Affair. She’s wearing a dark-denim jacket over a blue hoodie, black chinos, black T-shirt, DKNY sandals. When we arrive in the parking lot, she pulls a funny little black hat over her head. As we escalate through the mall, she avoids making eye contact with shoppers. Earlier in the day, I asked her about fame, how she experiences it. “I am as famous as I will ever be,” she said. “I will never get more famous than I am. Everyone knows me, but it’s more mellow because I was never in a big overnight-success movie. I appreciate that. I’m not a big target. I’m rarely in the tabloids. It’s not a huge intrusion in my life. It is annoying to get followed and photographed when you’re not prepared, like in airports. More than anything, it’s just…embarrassing!”

Back at the mall, we find our seats in the theater and wait for the movie to start. When not working, Ryder goes to the movies every single day. Or she and Brett rent movies, open a bottle of champagne, and make a night of it. “I’m at the point where I’ve seen every movie in the video store,” she says, “and I’m not kidding. I can’t find a movie that I haven’t seen – except the really cheesy eighties teen movies.” The American Film Institute sent Ryder its 100 Greatest Movies collection on video as a gift. “I was so excited because I missed the special.” Pause for effect. “I’d seen every movie in it! That’s 100 movies, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When I was growing up, my mom kept me home from school to watch movies. Kept me home. Like, I would want to go to school. I remember trying to explain to my teachers: “I saw Imitation of Life, and it’s this incredible story!’ And they were like, You missed school.”

In conversation, Winona refers to movies constantly. Clearly they were an unusually important and formative part of her childhood. Now that’s she’s an adult, movies are her job, her lifeblood. And if she has been criticized, as she says, “for playing one too many brown-eyed waif girls,” who can blame her? That’s what the movies – that’s what we – want her to be. But perhaps playing a teenager well past her teens slowed her progress in real life, because she has seemed, for so long, to exist in some strange lacuna between girl and woman. In a few weeks, she will fly to New York to begin work on Autumn in New York, directed by Joan Chen. Richard Gere plays a New York restaurateur/playboy who falls in love with Winona – the much younger woman – who only has a year to live. “It’s a love story with a lot of humor,” says Winona. “Very moving.”

One afternoon, we sit in her living room in front of a gigantic television watching dailies from Girl, Interrupted. As she runs through take after take of a spooky, emotional scene, her face filling up the entire screen, she says, “I learned a lot about my face on this movie. My eyes are kind of big, and I can express more than I want to. I do that in real life.” She turns to me, makes her eyes huge, and cracks up laughing. “See what I mean?”

Girl, Interrupted begins and ends with a cab ride. “When you look into Winona’s eyes in the beginning and end of this film,” says Mangold, “going to and from the hospital, there’s such a tremendous difference in this woman. Indescribable and lyrical and powerful in terms of the girl you’re seeing arriving, and the woman you’re seeing entering the world.” Ryder can no longer play the little girl with the big brown eyes. And if, as James Mangold says, she “grows this girl up” in the movie, perhaps Winona, too, has finally grown up.

Jonathan Van Meter, to Vogue Magazine

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Sigourney Weaver is reborn as Ripley in Alien Resurrection, and she brings Winona Ryder along for the ride.

It’s another soggy, post-apocalyptic afternoon on the set of Alien Resurrection, and Sigourney weaver is slipping Winona Ryder a little tongue. Actually, it’s a huge tongue. “Actually,” says Ryder, “it’s a disgusting, slimy, uchhh…”

Weaver’s star-trekking alter ego — Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley — has just blown away another pesky alien, and now, with a fierce battle cry, she reaches into the creature’s mouth and rips out the offending licker.

“Here,” Ripley says, handing the tongue to Annalee Call, the pirate android played by Ryder. “It would make a nice souvenir.”

The scene ends and Ryder walks away, slime on her fingers, totally grossed out. Her on-again, off-again beau Dave Pirner, the Soul Asylum frontman, makes goo-goo eyes at her from the edge of the set. Ryder, scampering toward him, scrunches up her pixie nose and lets out a giant “Ewww!” Wiping off her hand, she asks Dave, “Was I terrible?”

It’s easy to understand Ryder’s insecurity. The last time humans battled this pack of goo-gurgling extraterrestrials, a major Hollywood franchise was nearly destroyed. The Alien saga, which began so brilliantly with Ridley Scott’s elegantly macabre 1979 masterpiece, Alien, and which exploded into a full-on action epic in James Cameron’s 1986 sequel, Aliens, was nearly sucked down a black hole five years ago with David Fincher’s depressing Alien 3. That third installment took a to-the-pulp beating by critics, grossed a disappointing $56 million at the North American box office, and delivered an ending that didn’t sit well with many Alien devotees. To refresh your memory: Realizing she was pregnant with an alien queen, Ripley sacrificed herself by diving into a cauldron of fire. Understandably, most people thought the series had fallen prey to Hollywood’s third-movie franchise curse (see also: The Godfather Part III, Jaws 3-D, and Beverly Hills Cop III).

“I certainly thought it was over for me,” says Weaver, 48, who reportedly earned $11 million — and got a coproducing credit — to tango with aliens again. “The idea of a fourth Alien movie just seemed ridiculous.”

But never underestimate the power of slimy interstellar creatures in Hollywood, especially the kind that rake in nearly $312 million dollars at the box office. “Even Alien 3, for all that’s been said about it, was successful internationally,” says Tom Rothman, Twentieth Century Fox’s president of film production (it took in $103 million overseas). So screenwriter Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), acting on the soap opera axiom that dead doesn’t necessarily mean dead, brought Ripley back to life. After sacrificing herself to save mankind 200 years earlier, Resurrection’s Ripley is revived from a blood sample by misguided scientists who want to breed the creature she’s carrying inside her. When space pirates, including Ryder, board her ship, they see Ripley for what she really is. As a result of fusing with alien DNA during the resurrection, the new Ripley turns out to be part human, part acid-bleeding insect.

All of which seems to have Weaver herself a bit confused.

“I don’t quite know how to put this,” she says, “but I’ve developed a warm spot for that alien. There’s something really, I don’t know, sensuous about him. He’s kinda sexy.”

The Resurrection soundstage on the Twentieth Century Fox lot in Los Angeles is fogged in by liquid nitrogen, giving an eerie glint to every shaft of light. Weaver and the rest of the cast — including Ryder and Ron Perlman, of TV’s Beauty and the Beast fame — mill around the dank spaceship set in their skintight Army pants, knee-high combat boots, and leg warmers, carefully stepping over alien tails, limbs, and guts. It looks like an aerobics class at the Hiëronymus Bosch Health & Racquet Club.

At the helm is Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the latest “unknown” director recruited into Alien service. Like his predecessors — Scott, Cameron, and Fincher — Jeunet had only a few offbeat credits (several TV commercials and the darkly inventive French films The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen, which he codirected with Marc Caro) before getting the call from Fox.

Unlike the other directors, Jeunet didn’t speak much English and had to dispense most of his direction through a translator. “We were nervous at first,” says Weaver, who speaks some French, “but by the end of shooting, he could yell and curse along with the best of us.” Says Ryder: “Everybody always got kissed on both cheeks. It was fabulous.”

Besides, it just wouldn’t be an Alien movie without a Hollywood outsider in charge. “It’s the Alien tradition,” Weaver says. “You take a brilliant young director with not a lot of experience, give him a ton of money, and say, ‘What’s your vision of this crazy world?’ ”

Directing Resurrection was an $80 million proposition Jeunet accepted without hesitation. “David Fincher told me, ‘Run like hell, man,’ but the movie was actually a dream to do,” he says through a translator. “I realized there’s no difference making a small film or a blockbuster. Either way, you’re creating a universe. This one just happens to be in outer space.”

The first big scene Jeunet shot required the Resurrection cast and crew to spend approximately two weeks filming a complicated alien chase sequence in a 548,000-gallon water tank on the Fox lot.

“Hands down the worst experience of my entire life,” says Ryder, 26. “Like, literally. I thought I was gonna die. I had a really bad anxiety attack, actually. We were all pretty miserable.” Adds Weaver: “Going underwater with an alien was a fabulous idea. But, man, being in a dark, submerged kitchen with lots of boots in your face and guns going off and everybody’s gunk all around can get really ugly.”

The underwater scenes actually have a Hollywood precedent. Says Whedon: “Halfway through writing the movie, I thought of The Poseidon Adventure, which I’d seen nine times. Little did I realize how tough the scenes would be to shoot.”

Back on dry land on this particular afternoon, Jeunet’s goal is to get his cast to react to an alien they can’t see. Such is life when computer-generated effects must be added. Ryder and Perlman do their best to act surprised, but Jeunet doesn’t buy it.

“Ah-lyen! Ah-lyen!” the director yells. The translator steps in: “It’s supposed to be the first time you are seeing the alien!”

“Wait a minute,” says Perlman. “You mean we’re supposed to pretend we haven’t seen any of the other Alien movies?”

Unless you’ve spent 20 years under a meteorite, you probably know something about those other Alien movies.

Scott’s original Alien was one of the most acclaimed films in science-fiction history. The magic was in its simplicity: A crew of a spaceship investigates a transmission from a desolate planet. A fierce life-form there hugs John Hurt’s face, sneaks into their craft, and kills off every member of the crew except one–a steely, high-haired heroine named Ripley. In many ways, it was a classic horror movie, and a bit of a horror for its untried star. Weaver’s most prominent movie role previously was as Woody Allen’s movie date in Annie Hall.

“I attacked the role like an Off Off Broadway play,” Weaver says, “because that’s really all I’d done before. I used to look directly at the camera, and Ridley, who could be so intimidating, would say, ‘You can’t do that!’ and I’d say, ‘But it’s so big!’ ”

Whereas Alien was quiet and spare, Aliens was a rip-roaring intergalactic romp, a full-fledged action movie with pumped-up GIs engaging in high-tech combat. “It made the first Alien look like a cucumber sandwich,” Weaver says.

It’s not really nice to say what Alien3 looked like. The production was a nightmare from the start. “We didn’t have a finished script, Fox was already having budget issues, and the studio was unsupportive,” says Fincher, who went on to direct Seven and The Game. “It wasn’t a time I look back on fondly.”

Weaver, who shaved her head for Alien3, agrees the studio bailed on Fincher after another director, Vincent Ward, left shortly after taking the gig: “As soon as Fox hired David, they lost confidence in him and tried to undermine him. They started off telling him they wanted Hobbit in Space. Midway through, they’re saying they want an ‘E’ Ticket ride of a movie. It was a mess.”

“To say I lost confidence in David isn’t really accurate,” says Roger Birnbaum (now chairman/CEO at Caravan Pictures), who hired Fincher while head of production at Fox. “The production itself was chaotic. If David had a finished script prior to shooting and had producers around him who could manage problems [that] he ended up dealing with himself, he could have made a really great movie. Unfortunately, those things didn’t happen.”

The biggest trouble came at the end: Fincher, trying to spice up the finale, reportedly added six seconds to his nearly finished film (at a cost of $500,000) to soup up Ripley’s death scene. “We were all pretty p – - – ed off,” says Ryder, speaking for a generation of Alien watchers (she was 9 when she first saw Alien and grew up with a poster of Ripley over her bed). “The idea of Ripley dying wasn’t received well, especially in my home. For fans, it was a big disappointment. I was like, Goddamn it.”

But with a new executive team in place — Joe Roth (now Walt Disney Studios chairman) and Birnbaum were out; Rothman and Bill Mechanic (head of Fox Filmed Entertainment) were in — Fox decided to break open the Alien sleeping pods one more time. “We said if we could get a great script and the right cast, it could bring back the franchise,” says Mechanic.

Weaver, whose character wasn’t included in Whedon’s first plot treatment for Resurrection (“We just thought we’d go with another hero,” he says), was cynical at first. “My question was, How are they going to bring me back in a way that I won’t laugh out loud?” recalls Weaver. But after flying to Paris to meet Jeunet, who stepped in after Trainspotting director Danny Boyle backed out (he got cold feet because of the special effects), Weaver agreed to play undead.

“All the elements I cared about were there again,” she says. “The story seemed smart, the studio was behind it, J.P. seemed like a genius. Even the alien was cool again. It wasn’t a creature that eats you like a big tiger, which gets so boring.”

Weekly World News would kill for this interview. Sitting in a director’s chair on a quiet corner of the soundstage, Resurrection’s lead alien has agreed to chat for a few minutes.

You’ve got to pity this poor wretched creature with the sea-horse snout and cockroach pallor. His mammoth head, weighing in at 18 pounds, must be supported in front and back by two metal T-stands, each topped with a roll of paper towels. His lacerated chest moves up and down with every breath. And although he is one of Hollywood’s most menacing villains on screen, the alien is clearly a pushover off camera, taking the time to pose for pictures with set visitors and sitting patiently while a team prepares him for his close-up. “I just hope I don’t have to pee,” comes the muffled voice of Tom Woodruff Jr., the alien’s costume codesigner and the man encased within the sculpted full-body foam-rubber suit. “There’s no escape hatch in this thing.”

The alien, originally designed by H.R. Giger, has evolved gradually in two decades. “Each movie has its own kind of alien,” Woodruff says. “The first one was almost catlike, the second was more surreal and space creaturey. The third was a jaguar that moved like a locomotive. And this one feels much more like a dog. It’s got dog legs, a more pointed nose, and a more vicious mouth.”

Woodruff is called to the set. The scene requires him to sniff around a corpse the alien’s just killed, before getting shot by Ripley. Steam jets pump smoke from his nostrils. Drool dribbles from ducts in his jowls. The mushroom head weighs on him like a bad loan. The scene, after a few takes, runs perfectly.

“The alien wouldn’t be the same if Tom wasn’t in that suit,” Weaver says later. “Working with him is like working with Lon Chaney Jr., only Tom’s usually covered with K-Y jelly.”

Weaver’s seen plenty of goo in her day too. And at this moment, if she’s not careful, she might just wind up knee-deep in alien afterbirth. The slithering, tentacled alien queen is ready to bear a soupy offspring, and Weaver’s got a front-row seat.

The scene is a pivotal moment near the end of Resurrection, and it introduces an all-new alien creature: the Newborn, a pale, almost human-looking monstrosity that winds up being Ripley’s biggest nightmare yet. It’s an awful birthing room, with fleshy extremities flailing everywhere you look. Overhead, half-decomposed humans, some still able to talk, hang in gooey cocoons awaiting their death.

And yet it’s not disgusting enough. “We need more slime,” says cinematographer Darius Khondji. “Really slime that thing.”

A man in a faded red Disneyland T-shirt rushes into the nest and slimes the queen with a hose that feeds to his backpack slime tank. “In every Alien movie,” says Woodruff, “the slime quotient gets higher and higher. In this one, we went through sixteen 55-gallon drums of the stuff.”

Weaver is used to it. “I’m so comfortable sprawling in these pools of glomp,” she says. “I think slime is the one product I’d feel comfortable advertising.”

Jeunet walks around the queen, telling the 11 puppeteers who control it to make the thing writhe and convulse more violently. “I want to see it bobbling,” he says (“bubbling” is what he actually means). He pulls the queen’s tail toward the center of his camera shot, then runs back to film the scene. The cameras roll; he makes more adjustments; they roll again; he adjusts again.

With Jeunet’s obsessive eye for such detail, it’s hardly surprising that Resurrection’s principal photography dragged on weeks over schedule, according to a source close to the production. That wasn’t the only problem. Early on, 19 crew members required medical treatment after some noxious gas spread through the soundstage. There were also reports a fistfight broke out between an assistant director and a special-effects coordinator near the production’s end, and that Weaver and Jeunet clashed.

“There was a week when things got heated,” Jeunet admits, “but when you have creative, outspoken people working together, it can be a pressure cooker. You need to let off steam.”

Though he says he loved directing a huge American movie, Jeunet says he would not do another Alien. “It needs to continue to be a job for new directors,” he says. “I’ve gotten older in this process.”

And what about a fifth Alien? The final scene in Resurrection shows our intergalactic heroes hurtling toward the third rock from the sun.

“All I can say,” says Fox’s Rothman, “is that the end of Alien Resurrection points you toward the locale of Alien five. We firmly expect to do another one; Joss Whedon will write it, and we expect to have Sigourney and Winona if they’re up for it. But if I tell you any more, I’ll have to kill you.”

Says Whedon: “There’s a big story to tell in another sequel. The fourth film is really a prologue to a movie set on Earth. Imagine all the things that can happen.”

If there’s that much material, would Fox ever consider broadening the franchise into TV or other areas? “I don’t think you’ll ever see Aliens: The TV Show or Aliens: The Cartoon,” says Rothman. “It’s a filmmaker’s franchise. And you just can’t dilute this material. The edge is a vital part of the franchise’s success. Could Sigourney have sex with an alien on Saturday morning? I don’t think so.”

Besides, Weaver would be more than happy to stretch her legs on Planet Blue for a while.

“I always wanted to go back to the original planet to see how it’s evolved,” she says, “and at this point, I don’t think Ripley’s going to argue. If they tell her she’s going to Earth, she’ll say, ‘I’m ready to get the hell off this spacecraft once and for all.’ ”

Entertainment Weekly

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