Inside Out(30)

I had a deep interest in the spiritual aspect of the story, the connection we all have with what is beyond our ordinary senses, so I was over the moon about that aspect of the script. But I knew that with so many elements in play, it was a risky film to do. When I read Ghost I thought, This could be either an absolute disaster or it could be amazing.

I didn’t have to audition for the part of Molly Jensen, the female lead; they’d seen my other movies and they wanted me for this one, which was flattering. I met with Jerry and the producers, once in L.A. and once when Bruce, Rumer, and I stopped in New York on our way to Paris, where we were going for our first real vacation as a family. I was determined to get my hair cut short while I was there—I had a picture of Isabella Rossellini looking boyishly chic in my wallet to show my fantasy Parisian stylist. I still hadn’t made up my mind whether to do Ghost, so I felt free to do whatever I wanted with my look.

I’d never been to Paris before, and I didn’t speak a word of French. But I was a woman with a mission: I walked around the corner from the apartment we were renting on the Left Bank to the first salon I saw, and showed them the picture of Isabella in all her sophisticated, short-haired glory. This was Paris, after all, I figured—they knew about style, of course they could do it.

Turns out they couldn’t. The cut, though short, was not at all what I had in mind. Funnily enough, when we got home, I went to see a hairdresser a friend recommended: he took one look at the picture of Isabella Rossellini and said, “I did that haircut.” And then he fixed me right up. I loved it. That haircut did exactly what I’d hoped: it gave me a whole new look and made me feel revived and emboldened. There was something fresh and unexpected about it.

Jerry Zucker was shocked—and, I’m pretty sure, horrified—when I met up with him after we got back and told him I had decided to make the movie. He had cast Patrick Swayze to play the protagonist Sam Wheat, and as his girlfriend he’d chosen an actress with long, flowing dark hair: instead, he suddenly had someone with practically no hair at all. But Jerry went with it and didn’t make me wear a wig, and personally I think the short hair suited the character perfectly.

Molly was supposed to be an artist, living a bohemian life in Tribeca—the old Tribeca of the eighties, a land of artists scraping by in lofts, though, presciently, her boyfriend, Sam, was in finance, as so many of Tribeca’s inhabitants are today. Jerry had a very particular vision in mind. He took Patrick and me to see the loft he was picturing in New York; he felt it said everything about this couple’s relationship and their style. The set designers at Paramount re-created that loft down to the last detail for us back in L.A. To me this has always been one of the most miraculous parts of the movie industry: that a director can show his team his mom’s kitchen, for instance, and tell them “This is what I want,” and then off they go and create its double as if by magic. When we got to the set and saw the “loft” they had constructed, it was exactly like the one Jerry had found in Tribeca, from the creaky floorboards to the tall windows.

Molly’s primary art form was ceramics, and they hired a potter to teach me how to use a wheel. I went quite a few times to practice throwing these teeny, tiny little pots, which I still have. They are very amateurish, of course, but they remind me of what a singular experience it was, meeting the artist whose work we used in the movie as Molly’s. She had such passion about her craft, and a real ease with the clay. I soon discovered that the smallest pressure could transform—and destroy—the shape you were making on the wheel, and there I was, faking it on film. It was especially challenging pulling off the scene when Patrick joined me behind the potter’s wheel, and both of our hands were molding the clay as it grew taller and taller, until it was basically a giant clay erection—in danger of collapsing.

The other anxiety-inducing aspect of that movie was much more profound. Reading the script, I’d recognized the level of emotion that was going to be required: not hysterical sobbing kinds of scenes, but rather scenes that were quietly intense, the hardest kind. I remembered Emilio and his family talking about actors crying, and how they often scrunched up their faces, which made their tears seem forced and fake. But I didn’t know if I could cry at all—and I don’t mean just as an actor. I didn’t cry off-screen, either. Ever. I had learned to bottle myself up to get by, and I wasn’t sure I could suddenly uncork that kind of emotion. How could I access tears on demand when I didn’t even know how to muster them for myself? I had a lot of anxiety about whether I’d be able to do it, the kind of anxiety that tells you: I need to conquer this.

That was the gem that film gave me—it pushed me to figure out how to access my emotions, particularly my pain. I worked with an acting coach named Harold Guskin, who started by talking to me about breathing, and how we use breath to control our feelings. He walked me through an exercise that mimicked what we tend to do naturally when we start to feel emotional—which is, basically, to hold our breath. The goal of the exercise was to help me understand how to take whatever emotion was in the scene and connect it with my physical being. As I was sitting there with him, I became aware of how much I held my breath. A quick breath out, then in, and hold it: I’d been doing that for years whenever I was pricked by fear or sorrow or rage. I’d shut down my emotions by using my breath to literally keep my feelings inside.

That information alone was liberating. That flash of awareness was so simple and yet so revelatory, knowing that those emotions were there, in me, that I wasn’t missing a chip. Because of Ghost, I learned how to breathe, and that helped me begin to unlock my feelings, to connect to them in a healthier way. It had a huge impact on me, and how I looked at myself. There were definitely some blocks (and there still are), but it was one of those great moments that not only opened things up for me personally but also was very powerful in the film. I was amused, recently, when I was at Sundance promoting the movie Corporate Animals, and a young journalist told me his favorite moment from any movie was when a single tear rolled down my cheek in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle as I said, “I was never good: I was great.” Then he mentioned Ghost, and asked, “How does it feel to be the most iconic crier in cinema history?” That tickled me: to think I went from not crying ever to being known for my weeping.