Only good movies
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NEW YORK — The night before I’m scheduled to speak with Winona Ryder in a restaurant on Central Park South, she did some arts and crafts. In red thread, she embroidered the name “Gena” over the left breast pocket of her gothic black suit with a high collar designed by Elena Dawson, who also made a jacket she wears in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (in theaters Sept. 6).
Ryder sewed the name as a tribute to actor Gena Rowlands, who had died the previous day and who Ryder had performed alongside in Jim Jarmusch’s 1991 film “Night on Earth.”
“I had to,” Ryder says, her eyes wet. She’s not sure she could make it through the day if she didn’t.
She knows she’s not supposed to take up our time talking about Rowlands, but she needed to find some way to acknowledge a loss she felt deeply. Even before she worked with Rowlands, Ryder idolized the star of films like “A Woman Under the Influence” and “Opening Night.” She remembers first being introduced to Rowlands’ work when she was around 8 years old. Ryder’s mother would project John Cassavetes’ movies onto a sheet hung in a barn on the 380 acres they shared with seven other families in Northern California, surrounded by redwoods. When Ryder takes out her phone to show me a photo, I notice her home screen’s background is a collage of Rowlands.
It’s not until about 25 minutes into our interview that I actually get a chance to directly ask a question about the project that Ryder is ostensibly promoting: Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” In it, Ryder reprises her role from 1988’s “Beetlejuice” as Lydia Deetz, the sullen teen who meets a pair of ghosts in her attic and is eventually pursued by the title demon played by Michael Keaton in a now-iconic striped suit. In the long-awaited sequel, a grown-up Lydia makes a living as a TV host who talks to ghosts and is haunted by memories of Beetlejuice. She is also in a relationship with a manipulative manager (Justin Theroux) and has a glum, antisocial daughter herself (Jenna Ortega).
“Just seeing her on set, I almost started crying,” director Tim Burton says. “I can’t even put it into words.” Ryder and Michael Keaton return to roles they originated in 1988.
(Warner Bros. Pictures)
It’s not that Ryder doesn’t want to discuss the subject at hand — she’s happy to — it’s just that she has so many stories that seem to burst from her, in long paragraphs filled with sentence fragments. Sipping a chai at a steakhouse downstairs from where a row of hotel rooms have been converted into colorful versions of the new movie’s afterlife for the purposes of the junket, Ryder holds court for an audience of me.
“My parents are archivists and writers and I think I inherited that archivist-slash-hoarder gene,” she says. She keeps phone numbers from the days people used to write them down. “I have Gena’s from when I did ‘Night on Earth.’ It’s really a beautiful thing to have all this stuff.”
Her enormous brown eyes shining through a thick rim of eyeliner, Ryder drops names constantly, but those names are the incredibly cool kind that a cinephile craves. She discusses how she’s been texting with Jarmusch. She explains that she has two friends with whom she still exchanges handwritten letters: Keanu Reeves and Daniel Day-Lewis, her co-stars from “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and “The Age of Innocence,” respectively. She reveals how Laura Dern, who she met during her first-ever screen test for the 1986 movie “Lucas” (which would become her film debut at the age of 14), once encouraged her to call up her crush. That guy was Elias Koteas, who turned her down. They are now pals.
At 52, Ryder is in yet another transitional phase of a career that began in the 1980s when she was in high school. After decades of speculation as to whether it would ever come to pass, a “Beetlejuice” sequel has finally been made and is set for a world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Meanwhile, “Stranger Things” — the Netflix series that ushered in a career revival for Ryder when it debuted in 2016 — is finally wrapping up after five seasons. With its 1980s period setting, the streaming juggernaut was a fittingly retro platform for Ryder’s resurgence, but she never expected to be playing fearless Joyce Byers, the mother of a boy drawn into the Upside Down, for as long as she has, an experience extended due to pandemic delays.
“I’m very much aware [of] what that did for me,” she says of the show.
“People talk about the disposability of especially women in this industry,” says Ryder. “Even well-meaning, great people talk about it.” (Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Ryder, however, is concerned about the future. Not about her own career, exactly, but for the continuation of the medium of film, which she holds dear. The nights she spent with Rowlands driving around in a cab for Jarmusch’s movie represent the kind of art she loves.
“I’m not a religious person,” she says. “I’m not anti-religion, but I feel like the closest is film and it’s to me a very sacred thing. I feel so protective, but I’m not in any place to be in control. It’s not up to me.”
Her personal reverence for the art is arguably why Ryder’s run in the ’80s and ’90s still looms so large in the shared cultural consciousness. The “boxes” (her term) Hollywood tried to fit her in drove her crazy, and she did her best to avoid them. Thus, she ended up with a résumé of titles that made her an icon of Gen-X rebellion, whether she was in period skirts or sunglasses: “Heathers,” “Little Women,” “Reality Bites,” as well as her collaborations with Burton, including “Edward Scissorhands” and, yes, “Beetlejuice.”
As he lounges on a hotel couch in New York, his hair typically askew, Burton, 66, recalls identifying with Ryder when he first considered her for the role of Lydia, who wears a black veil over her face and intones, “My whole life is a darkroom — one big dark room.”
“There was a sensitivity and an artistic quality, but also an otherworldliness that I remember feeling as a teenager,” he says. “I remember how I felt, and she just had that.”
Ryder also related to Lydia as a budding goth herself. “She wasn’t that different from me,” she recalls. “I was sort of like that as a teen.”
She recently found a photo taken before she even knew the script for “Beetlejuice” existed, in which she looked like she could have been in costume. Again, she reaches for her phone to show it to me and it is striking: She even had Lydia’s bangs. (The texts that pop up on her screen are in an extremely large font. “The kids are making so much fun of me because of my font,” she quips, self-deprecatingly.)
When Ryder signed onto “Stranger Things” she was still in a period of reemergence that began six years prior with a scenery-chewing role in Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 “Black Swan.” But even within the much-publicized ebbs and flows of her career, including a brief retreat from the spotlight, Ryder held out hope that she would get to reprise Lydia. A provision was built into her “Stranger Things” contract that if a “Beetlejuice” sequel ever went into production, she would get the time off required to complete it. Lydia was that close to her and she wanted to reunite with the cast and Burton. She says she was shocked when there was finally a script. But there were also nerves.
“Honestly, I was terrified,” Ryder says. “We all were.”
She also had to get used to the idea of who Lydia had become: a widowed mother with a surly unfun daughter who doesn’t believe in ghosts, dating a suspiciously doting hanger-on. “I never imagined she had kids,” Ryder says of her creation. “To me, she was still up in the attic.”
Justin Theroux plays Lydia’s manager, also something of an exploiter. “You’re at a weird spot in your life and you let someone in and before you know it they’re taking advantage,” Ryder says of his character. “That made sense to me.”
(Parisa Taghizadeh / Warner Bros. Pictures)
Her co-star Theroux brought her around to the idea that Lydia would find herself in a codependent relationship with someone who doesn’t necessarily have her best interests at heart. “When he said that, I was like, ‘Oh, that is true,’ ” she says, having found herself in similar positions. “You’re at a weird spot in your life and you let someone in and before you know it they’re taking advantage. That made sense to me.”
The visceral nostalgia hit Ryder once they got Lydia’s look right. While she knows that there have been some complaints online about how Lydia hasn’t changed her hairstyle in nearly 40 years, Ryder dismisses those nitpicks. “I feel like I dress the same,” she says. “I still have the same stuff.” I can even see it in her current ensemble, which is very Lydia-esque, with its high collar and intentionally frayed sleeves.
For Burton, Lydia’s journey was about showing how the contours of life change a person. Watching Ryder embody the role again was profound for him.
“Just seeing her on set, I almost started crying,” he says. “I can’t even put it into words. It was just such an emotional experience.”
Burton adds that it was also “very special” to watch Ryder and Ortega interact. “To me, there’s a vibe about them that is always very strong,” he says. In many ways, the film is a passing of the torch from one breakout star playing a strange teen girl to another.
As for Ryder, she was immediately impressed with her younger co-star after Ortega mentioned “I Am Cuba,” the 1964 film by Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov, during one of their early scenes. They were working in a crypt and Ryder says she almost wept hearing Ortega reference specific shots from the classic.
Ryder appreciates getting to interact with the up-and-coming generation of film lovers who remind her of herself, excitedly telling me how her “Stranger Things” co-star Finn Wolfhard is obsessed with Elliott Gould. Still, she gets frustrated when there is a lack of curiosity among her more junior colleagues.
“I don’t mean to sound so hopeless,” she says. “There are a few that are just not interested in movies. Like, the first thing they say is, ‘How long is it?’ ”
Ryder’s professorial advocacy is undercut by the way she just seems to want to gab. She’s got a casualness about her that’s true to her status, but she also has always existed somewhat out of time, a quality that allowed her to play the offbeat loners of Burton’s world as well as heroines invented by Louisa May Alcott and Edith Wharton, in films from Gillian Armstrong and Martin Scorsese.
Ryder worries about the future of film, “a very sacred thing” to her. “I feel so protective, but I’m not in any place to be in control.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
These days, she is consciously a bit of a relic. She doesn’t use social media and waxes poetic about the days when you would hear about an interview with an actor like Al Pacino coming out, and you’d have to wait months to be able to read the piece. She mourns the transition to digital cinematography. She reminisces about the time when you would hear the flapping of a reel running out during a take. She wants to turn back the clock just a bit.
“I don’t know what could happen, but if there’s some sort of detox and reset,” she says, trailing off and wishing for a do-over. “Because you have to build character.”
Ryder has been wondering what she wants to do next, in part because she feels the pressure of aging that is all too common for actresses.
“People talk about the disposability of especially women in this industry,” she says. “Even well-meaning, great people talk about it.”
She remembers running into Meryl Streep a decade after they made the 1993 Isabel Allende adaptation “The House of the Spirits,” and Streep telling her she was only getting offered parts of “witch” or “mom.” She was in disbelief that even someone like Streep could feel so sidelined.
Ryder would like to work with screenwriter David Simon again, with whom she made two TV series, “Show Me a Hero” and “The Plot Against America,” but she still worries that this kind of dense, intellectual material doesn’t have a home anymore. Still, whenever she’s feeling too down she sees a movie like “Tár” or “Uncut Gems” and it lifts her spirits.
Five years after “Joker” won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, filmmaker Todd Phillips is returning with the sequel.
I ask whether she’ll have time to take in any cinema when she’s at Venice, but she explains she has to do the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” premiere in London the next day. It is, however, a question that prompts her to start reminiscing about her time on the Cannes jury under Scorsese.
“I loved the ‘watching five movies a day’ thing, but to have to choose …” she says, her voice tightening to imply how hard the actual act of judging was. “It was also the year of the Dogme movie and there were like 100 terrible Dogme movies.” Her jury ended up awarding one: Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Celebration,” the first and, ultimately, best feature to emerge from the ascetic, anti-effects movement.
Our time is running out, but we keep chatting about movies and festivals as she is whisked away to her next obligation. Just before she is ushered out the door, she shares yet another incredible anecdote about how she used to have dinners every weekend with Roddy McDowall, Karl Malden, Jessica Tandy and Carol Kane.
“That was like my posse,” Ryder says as if that was a totally normal group of people to have as a posse.
Ryder’s old-soul quality is what made her the perfect choice to play Lydia all those years ago, and the quality still surrounds her like an aura. When I ask if she feels any pressure because of how meaningful her work is to so many people, she just calls herself lucky. She eventually brings us back around to Gena Rowlands.
“You just have to not compromise and I want to live in that world where artists stay really true,” she says. “I feel like that’s what John and Gena did.”
