The scene Winona Ryder hated shooting: “The worst experience of my life”
When she was only nine years old, Winona Ryder watched a motion picture that changed her little life. For some ungodly reason, her parents decided she was old enough to see Ridley Scott’s Alien, famously one of the most bowel-looseningly terrifying movies ever made. Thankfully, the young girl didn’t run screaming from the room, cursing her parents’ negligence. Instead, she loved the film so much that she spent the rest of her childhood with a poster of Sigourney Weaver’s heroic Ellen Ripley above her bed.
Fast-forward more than a decade, and Ryder’s family eagerly anticipated the release of Alien 3. By this time, she had already become a Hollywood star thanks to her seminal roles in Beetlejuice, Heathers, and Edward Scissorhands, and so had a good idea of how the industry worked behind the scenes. Despite this, her fandom for the Alien franchise never stopped burning brightly, which is why she was so disgusted when a shaven-headed Ripley plummeted to her death at the end of David Fincher’s grim sequel.
“We were all pretty pissed off,” Ryder confessed in 1997. “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.'”
Little did Ryder know, however, that only five years after Ripley’s untimely demise, she would star alongside Weaver in the movie that brought the character back to life. Ryder giddily signed up for Alien: Resurrection, which posited that Ripley was brought back from the dead as a part-human, part-alien clone derived from some DNA left behind on the prison planet Fiorina ‘Fury’ 161 in Alien 3.
However, to Ryder’s chagrin, her Alien: Resurrection experience wouldn’t be entirely the fan dream she imagined. You see, before she was able to get into the meat of the movie and work with her childhood idol on dramatic scenes, there was the small matter of a ludicrously complex, highly perilous underwater sequence that director Jean-Pierre Jeunet insisted on shooting at the very start of the schedule.
This was bad enough for most of the cast, but especially difficult for Ryder, who had a deep-seated water phobia caused by a near-death experience as a child. She nearly drowned when she was only 12 and had to be resuscitated by rescuers, so from that point on, she was too afraid to ever go underwater again. Despite this, Jeunet insisted he wanted her in the 548,000 gallon tank on the Fox lot just like everyone else, submerged in 12 feet of murky water. Amazingly, Ryder managed to face her fear head-on – but it wasn’t easy.
“Hands down, the worst experience of my entire life,” the frightened actor admitted. “Like, literally. I thought I was gonna die. I had a really bad anxiety attack, actually. We were all pretty miserable.”
Weaver backed Ryder up on this, saying that although the idea of an underwater set-piece with the xenomorphs chasing their human victims was a superb idea, it was a truly horrible scene to shoot for everyone involved. With a wry smile, she revealed, “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.”
Indeed, the scene, which is by far and away the best thing in Alien: Resurrection, took two long weeks to shoot, and over that time, debris and various bodily fluids inevitably accumulated in the water. Couple that with the fact that stunt coordinators and cameramen had to coordinate the scene with eight actors, one of whom was carrying another strapped to his back, and it quickly became a logistical nightmare that resulted in more than a few close calls.
Ultimately, Ryder and company were able to get through the scene, and the results speak for themselves. However, it’s unlikely she looks back upon it with any fondness, and certainly would never want to be put in a situation to face her fears in such a drastic manner ever again.
