How Winona Ryder’s filmmaking “fantasy” turned into a nightmare
Not every project that an actor takes on is going to be as good as they’d quite hoped. In fact, a movie can often reveal itself to be genuinely awful and nothing like the script at all, leaving an actor wishing they’d never signed up for it.
It’s happened to the best of actors, like Winona Ryder, who found herself regretting a film that had initially been a “fantasy” of hers. Some things just don’t work out the way you want them to, and that’s just the way of Hollywood; many movies are simply gambles that actors risk attaching themselves to.
Following the success of Girl, Interrupted, the tale of a mentally ill young woman which Ryder felt incredibly proud of, Ryder opted for something a bit different. The early 2000s saw the continued boom of the romance genre, and while it was rom-coms that were particularly popular, Ryder wanted to be part of something a little more dramatic.
Talking to the New York Post, Ryder explained, “It was always a fantasy that one day I would do a big sweeping love story, a tear-jerker. Not that those are my favourite movies, but I want to try everything. I’ve never seen Love Story, which I’ve heard some people compare the plot to. It was just an opportunity for me. I never get offered these kind of movies.”
So, with the chance to take on a role in a movie unlike any she’d been in before, it didn’t exactly have the quirkiness of Heathers and Beetlejuice or the period appeal of The Age of Innocence and Little Women, Ryder accepted. What transpired, however, was far from what she had pictured, and she and her co-star Richard Gere were even nominated by the Golden Raspberry Awards for ‘Worst Screen Couple’.
The film follows Ryder’s character as she begins a relationship with an older restaurateur who happened to date her mother before she passed away, but when he expresses his doubts over the longevity of their relationship, she reveals that she is terminally ill. It’s an emotional film, that’s for certain, with the pair’s affection for each other inevitably growing as Ryder’s character becomes progressively more unwell.
While the film was directed by Joan Chen, MGM took over much of the post-production and tainted her vision entirely, and the results were disappointing. Additionally, the fact that Ryder wasn’t initially meant to be cast in the role had an effect on her performance, and she later told Cinema, “I was just an actor for hire on Autumn in New York.”
“I wasn’t part of the artistic collaboration because I was hired last. The role had been tailored with someone else in mind. I’d just come off Girl, Interrupted, which was a labour of love for me, so it was a difficult adjustment,” she added.
It’s incredibly clear that her desire to star in an epic romantic story that would have audiences unable to hold back tears didn’t go quite as well as she’d imagined. It was a tearjerker, mission accomplished on that part, but it was also a bit of a mess, and she doesn’t exactly hold the film close to her heart.
