The director Winona Ryder owes her entire career to: “I really mean that”
There are a lot of rough stories out there about the relationships between actors and their directors, especially in the case of new names or young actors on the scene.
The power dynamic between a fresh face and an established director who is also their boss can get dark and distressing, which is why Winona Ryder was so overjoyed to experience the flip side.
Ryder was absolutely no stranger to the weird world of creatives when she made her entry to Hollywood. She’d already grown up in a household full of them as her parents were both writers who kept iconic company, with her godfather being Timothy Leary, the man who coined “turn on, tune in, drop out” in the acid age, and she got her middle name, Laura, from Aldous Huxley’s wife, who her parents were friends with.
At any given time, her family’s dinner table was full of fascinating people, from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Philip K Dick, such that she spent time living in a commune of artists, then moved to start acting classes in San Francisco. Thus, not only was Ryder used to being around artists, she was specifically socialised to be able to bond with them and hold conversation, but then, when she got her start in Hollywood as a mere teenager, she was baffled to find that the creatives there were nowhere near as chatty as the ones she’d grown up around.
Instead, elitism and superiority complexes seemed to keep everyone quiet and make things feel sinister and scary, seemingly offering a grim view of a lonely world, until one fateful party.
Ryder had specifically heard about Tim Burton and went to an event knowing he’d be there. As she waited, she got chatting to someone and had the kind of real, flowing, interesting conversation she’d been craving. “25 minutes later, I was like, ‘When is this Tim Burton guy coming?’ And he was like, ‘That’s me!’ And I was like, ‘Oh!’,” she recalled to Flicks and Bits.
Already in her first few years in Hollywood, she’d forgotten how nice people could be, stating, “I had no idea that a director could actually be so cool and I could easily hang out with them, you know?”
From then on, sparked by that initial connection when Ryder was only 15 years old, Burton cast her as Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice, giving her the breakout role that would start a powerful, decades-long career that is still going strong. A bunch of bigger names were considered, including Sarah Jessica Parker and Molly Ringwald, but after that party conversation and then seeing Ryder in her debut movie, Lucas, Burton fought for it to be her.
It was the start of her success, but it was also the start of an enduring collaboration between the two. She’d get another boost in notoriety later when he brought her back for Edward Scissorhands, and the pair would stay friends ever since. “I’ve known Tim Burton for 25 years, and I credit him with my career. I really mean that,” Ryder said, laying everything that came after at his feet as that one great conversation not only opened the doors, but kept her hungry and excited in an industry that so often beats young stars down.
