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Chapter 11

One afternoon in late 1988, Lisa walked up to me in the dining room and dropped a script on the table. “Buddy,” she said, “you have to read this. It’s incredible.” I looked down at the title page and saw the word “Ghost.”

After Dirty Dancing became a hit, I’d started receiving all kinds of scripts, which were soon piled up on bedside tables, chairs, and coffee tables all over the house. I even got offered money to read some of them, but there just weren’t enough hours in the day to do everything that needed doing, and then have time to read scripts. So although I trusted Lisa’s opinion more than anyone’s, I left the script right where she’d put it.

It was still there a month later. Lisa saw it on the table and said, “Buddy, please read this! It’s a great story, and you’ll love the part!” I promised her I’d get to it, and I really did mean to, but it wasn’t until Lisa enlisted our assistant Rosi to doubleteam me, nagging me in her English accent, “Patrick! Read the script!” that I finally sat down and looked at the first page.

And that was all it took—I didn’t stop reading until I’d gotten all the way through. When I turned the final page, I walked into the kitchen with tears in my eyes. “I have to do this movie,” I told Lisa. The story was every bit as good as she’d said it was, and she was right—the role of Sam Wheat was perfect for me.

Unfortunately, the director, Jerry Zucker, didn’t think so. In fact, his response when my name came up for a possible audition was to say, “Patrick Swayze? Over my dead body!” Jerry had just seen the kickboxing, long-haired, tough-guy Patrick in Road House, and he just couldn’t imagine me in the role of the sensitive boyfriend who gets murdered and comes back as a ghost.

Of course, Jerry himself knew a little bit about going against type. He’d made his name doing a string of off-the-wall comedies, from Airplane to Top Secret to Ruthless People, and Ghost would be his first real foray into drama. He obviously believed it was possible to move successfully between genres. Now I just had to convince him I could do it as well as he could.

Demi Moore had already been cast as Molly Jensen, beating out several other actresses who auditioned, including Nicole Kidman, Molly Ringwald, and Meg Ryan. Anda Who’s Who of leading men were under consideration for the part of Sam, including Kevin Bacon, Alec Baldwin, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, and Tom Hanks, but the role was still open. Zucker was absolutely convinced I was the wrong guy for the role, but he finally agreed to at least let me audition for it.

Sam Wheat is a banker, and I wanted to really look the part, so I dressed in a sharp Kenzo suit and tied my hair—still long from Next of Kin—back into a ponytail. I walked into the audition, faced Jerry Zucker and casting director Jane Jenkins, and said, “Do whatever you need to do to check me out. I’m willing to do this entire script from beginning to end if you want.”

And they almost did. They really put me through my paces, asking me to do six scenes. Jane read the part of Molly, and I put everything I had into the scenes. I wanted this part so badly I could taste it. Jane could feel it, too—as she told Lisa later, she had tears in her eyes at a couple of points. She said it felt so real, and so emotional, it made her miss being an actress. It was an intense audition, and when it was over Jerry Zucker was completely convinced. I’d won the part of Sam.



That left one more role to cast: Oda Mae Brown. When I first read the script, I immediately thought of Whoopi Goldberg for the part of the spirit medium, but Jerry didn’t want to consider her. Whoopi’s career had begun to take off in the eighties, starting with her one-woman show on Broadway, The Spook Show, and soaring higher with her starring role as Celie in The Color Purple. She was an amazingly gifted comic, but she also had incredible range as an actress. She was perfect, but Jerry thought of her mostly as a comic, and he feared her comedic edge would overshadow the relationship between Molly and Sam, which he saw as the heart of the story.

In the meantime, Jerry and Jane sent out feelers to numerous other actresses. Tina Turner, Oprah Winfrey, Patti Labelle, and others got the call, but none of them worked out. I kept telling Jerry that Whoopi was perfect, but he just wouldn’t hear of it. Finally, I insisted. “Jerry, at least just put me in a room together with her,” I said. “We’ll see if there’s any chemistry.”

At the time, Whoopi was shooting The Long Walk Home in Alabama with Sissy Spacek. Whoopi knew she had been passed over for Oda Mae, and that dozens of other actresses had been considered. When she finally got the call, she told Jerry she couldn’t leave the set to fly back to LA for an audition. We would need to come out to Alabama if we wanted her.

So both Jerry and I flew out to meet with Whoopi. She and I had met once, briefly, after her Broadway show, but we didn’t know each other. But as soon as we started going through Sam and Oda Mae’s scenes, you could feel the electricity popping in the air. Whoopi just took those lines and created a fully fleshed, finger-wagging, hip-shaking character all her own.

Once again, Jerry admitted that his first instincts had been wrong. Whoopi was perfect. He offered her the role, and I couldn’t wait for us all to get back to LA to start shooting. But first, as with all my movies, it was time to do some rewrites.

In the first draft of Ghost that Lisa and I read, the character of Sam couldn’t communicate with the living after he died, so he just hovered around in scenes, with no more lines. Maybe that seems logical for a ghost, but both Lisa and I felt the scenes would play out a lot better if Sam continued to be an active character.

That’s a pretty major change to suggest, but fortunately the writer, Bruce Joel Rubin, is not your ordinary writer. We forged an instant bond with him, and he was always open to whatever changes we suggested. Of all the writers I’ve worked with over the years, I felt the closest connection with Bruce—he really became like a brother to me. And as I learned later, he was the one who suggested early on that Jerry consider me for the role of Sam.

I knew that if Sam was relegated to being just a silent apparition in the corner, we’d miss out on all kinds of dramatic and humorous possibilities. “The humor comes from this guy who refuses to accept that he’s dead,” I said to Bruce. “He keeps trying to participate with the people who are alive. So let’s make him part of the scenes, give him dialogue.” Fortunately, Bruce agreed.

All three of the main characters needed some rewriting, and we worked on them throughout the first weeks of the shoot. But with Whoopi, it didn’t really matter what was on the page—what came out of her mouth when the cameras were rolling was whatever the hell popped into her head.

This is Whoopi’s genius: She just goes wherever her instinctual wild-ass world happens to take her. She has so much trust in herself, so much trust in her own instincts, that it freed me up, too. The one thing I knew about comedy was, you shouldn’t play things for laughs. The best comedy is born out of reality. So when Whoopi was doing her free-form thing, I played Sam’s natural reactions to her—and those funny moments were some of the best in the film.

This also played into an acting technique I’d been using for years. I like to look at every other relationship and every other character before I really look at mine. It keeps me out of my own ego when I approach my character, and also, you learn a lot about people by looking at how they relate to others. Playing Sam straight up, responding to Whoopi’s comedy riffs, was the most honest and direct way to bring out his true character.

Demi and I did the same thing when we shot the pottery scene—we played off each other and really made up the scene as we went along. It was pretty sexy playing in all that clay, so all we had to do was go with it, let our imaginations run wild, and then touch each other’s arms for the sparks to fly. The best love scenes don’t require what I call “humpage”—in fact, that often takes away from the tension. You don’t really want to see the characters jumping each other’s bones. You want to see them looking intently into each other’s eyes, in an intimate, personal moment that conveys desire. That’s what I feel is sexy.

Shooting love scenes is really difficult. It’s such a private thing, and you’re on a set with camera operators, director, lighting technicians—sometimes a dozen or more people milling around. You’re trying to make a moment look sexy, in just about the most unsexy environment there is. And I always felt extra pressure, since I was supposed to be Mr. Sexy, if you believed all the magazines. Of all the scenes I ever shot, I probably felt least confident about the love scenes. So it’s ironic that the clip of Demi and me at the pottery wheel is one of the best known of my whole career.

You can’t really choreograph or script love scenes. You just have to have a conversation between the actors and the director, talk about what you want the viewers to feel—and then dive right into it, nerves and all. Luckily for me, Demi was really good in these situations. She was very warm—much warmer than she’d been in the other scenes we shot together. She showed a vulnerability that was very attractive, and that really came through onscreen. When Lisa and I saw the finished film months later, I was happy—and relieved—with how it turned out. Demi and I had managed to capture a moment between these two people that made everything that happened later in the story feel that much more wrenching and emotional.

And speaking of wrenching and emotional, there was one scene that nearly tore me apart when we shot it. I didn’t have any idea it would be so devastating, but I could hardly even get through it while the cameras rolled. The scene that broke my heart was when Sam looks down on his own bloody body in Molly’s arms and realizes he’s dead. A lot of people assume that scene was done with a camera trick—that the body lying on the ground is me, and that we shot the scene twice. But Demi was actually holding an incredibly realistic life-size dummy of me. In the scene, Sam sprints after the guy who’s just killed him, then walks back slowly toward Molly, realizing as he draws near that he can see someone in her arms. As the cameras were rolling, I walked up to Demi holding the dummy, but when I looked down at the body a terrible chill shot right through me.

I suddenly flashed back to the moment when I was looking down at my father’s body in his casket, eight years earlier—a moment I had completely blocked out. I don’t look particularly like my dad, but somehow the dummy in Demi’s arms just became him right then.

My whole body started shaking, and my heart pounded. I felt as if I was having a panic attack. I couldn’t believe how strongly I felt my dad’s presence in that moment. Jerry Zucker kept the cameras rolling, but he couldn’t use this cut—it was too real, too intense, and audiences would have had a hard time switching back to the lighter feel of the movie. When Jerry finally yelled “Cut,” I staggered away from Demi and tried to collect myself. We shot it again, and the second time I managed to play the scene. But I’ve never forgotten that sickening feeling of horror I felt.

And that wasn’t even the first time I freaked out in connection with that scene. The first time came when we actually made the dummy. Jerry wanted it to look exactly like me, which meant I’d have to get a plaster likeness made. It’s not a pleasant experience, believe me.

The special-effects department sent me to a makeup room, where they asked me to take off my shirt and sit on a stool. The dummy needs to be made with the exact pose and expression required for the shot, which in this case meant I’d have to mimic lying dead on the street. We figured out the best facial expression and how I needed to hold my arms, and then a couple of guys got to work.

They started layering me with wet plaster strips from the waist up, creating the dummy’s torso. Then, they created a jig system to prop my arms in place, since I’d have to hold them still until the plaster was applied and had dried. Theykept laying those plaster strips on me, working their way up my body to my neck, then my chin, then my mouth. Then suddenly I realized, Wait a minute! They’re going to bury me in this shit! At the last moment, they stuck a couple of straws into my nostrils so I could breathe—but already I could feel some of the liquid from the wet plaster seeping into my mouth and inching down my throat.

I felt as if I was about to suffocate. I’d never been claustrophobic in my life, but being completely encased in this plaster cast, I was seriously freaking out. I couldn’t see, smell, or hear, I could barely breathe, and foul-tasting liquid was seeping into my esophagus.

As panic rose in my chest, I started clearing my throat loudly, hoping the guys would realize what was going on. Finally, one of the guys asked, “Are you okay, Patrick?” I groaned, and he must have realized what was going on, because he poked a tongue depressor through the plaster covering my mouth, to let me get a little air in. I calmed down enough to sit still while the plaster dried, but once I got that cast off I swore I’d never do anything like that again. Ever since then, I’ve had little moments of claustrophobia, when scuba diving or in an enclosed space. I flash right back to that feeling of being trapped.

Ghost was the most high-tech movie I’d ever done. It wasn’t easy back in 1989, when CGI technology was so new, to shoot a realistic-looking ghost scene. But we used a new technique that made the ghost scenes look real, even though some of the effects do seem dated now.

First, the actors would do a run-through of the scene, getting an idea of where each character would be. In the scene where Willy, the Bronx bad guy, breaks into Molly’s house, we walked through the whole sequence: Sam sees him come in, realizes who he is, and tries in vain to stop him from going through the house. Sam still doesn’t understand that he can’t touch living people, so he takes swings at Willy, but his fist goes right through him. And when Willy tries to go upstairs, to Molly’s bedroom, Sam hurls himself at him, desperate to find a way to stop him. But Willy never knows he’s there.

Once we’d walked through the scene, the crew taped little numbers on the floor, showing us exactly where we had to be at each point in the action. I had a specific spot for every tiny moment, and not only did I have to be right on that spot, but my timing had to be absolutely perfect, because Jerry was going to shoot the whole sequence with each actor separately, and then layer them together to make it look as if we were in the room at the same time.

This would have been just about impossible to pull off, but we had a computerized camera that ensured the timing was perfect. When we first shot the scene, the camera recorded its own position, angles, and length of shots. It could then re-create the shoot precisely again—but with a different actor going through the scene. Using this camera meant that whatever the actors did, it would look as if they were together while the scene was being shot, since the camera angles were identical. So the only thing we had to do was make sure we hit our marks exactly—otherwise it might look like Sam was swinging at air, rather than throwing his fist through Willy’s jaw.

Of course, hitting those marks so precisely is easier said than done. For the sequence where Sam chases Willy up and down the stairs, I was throwing myself all over the place, diving, falling, rolling. It’s hard enough to throw yourself down a staircase and make it look good, but try throwing yourself down one and then hitting a tiny piece of tape at the bottom. It’s tricky.

The other tricky thing was trying to do all this while acting. With all the focus on hitting those pieces of tape at exactly the right time, it was easy to forget about playing Sam’s emotions. Besides, there was no one acting opposite me—I was acting and reacting based on what I knew Willy’s character would do. But he wasn’t there, so I was running around this set, yelling at nobody, swinging at nobody, throwing myself down stairs to grab nobody. It was a very strange experience.

Doing all that in the confines of a closed set was one thing, but doing it outside in front of a crowd of gawkers was another. We used the computerized camera technique for the scene where Sam follows Willy to his apartment building and then sees his former buddy Carl there. We shot those scenes up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a rough part of New York that was even rougher back in 1989. Not a whole lot of movies get shot there, so a crowd of people had gathered around to watch.

This was a big, emotional turning point in the movie. It’s the first time that Sam realizes his own friend Carl was the one who set up his murder. Sam follows Carl out onto the street and swings wildly at him, furious and hurt at his friend’s betrayal. It’s a very intense moment.

I got really geared up for this scene, summoning all the emotion I could to convey Sam’s hurt and anger, and when Jerry yelled “Action,” I stormed out of Willy’s apartment screaming and swinging. But of course, because we were shooting with the computerized camera so that Sam’s punches would go right through Carl, I did this scene completely alone. There was no Carl there. So the crowd of people who’d gathered to watch just saw me coming out yelling and swinging like a maniac. And they started laughing.

Looking back, I’ll admit that it probably looked pretty funny doing that scene alone. But at the time, I definitely didn’t see any humor in it. I stopped and turned to the crowd, furious.

“Shut the fuck up!” I yelled, my adrenaline pumping from the emotion of the scene. “You want to get out here and do this yourself? You think this is easy?” People looked startled, but they shut up. And when we went back to shoot the scene again, you could hear a pin drop. Nobody made a peep until we finished the whole take. When Jerry yelled “Cut,” the whole crowd broke into applause.

After we wrapped on Ghost, I did a 180-degree turn for my next role. I went from playing the straitlaced, Mr. Nice Guy banker Sam Wheat to the Zen-surfer-bank-robber Bodhi in Point Break.

Bodhi was a once-in-a-blue-moon character, the bad guy whom you love because you believe what he believes in—until he believes it too far and breaks the law and kills someone. I loved Bodhi because I identified with his quest for perfection and the ultimate adrenaline high. In fact, when I was first approached about Point Break years earlier, they asked me to play Johnny Utah, the FBI-agent-turned-surfer. But Bodhi was the only role for me. He’s a complex character who can read people instantaneously and knows exactly how to play them. I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into that role.

I also was excited about getting paid to be a beach bum. Point Break is a surfing movie, so going to work meant hopping into my Range Rover at dawn, heading out to the beach, and being on a surfboard as the sun came up. Both Keanu Reeves and I got surfing lessons, but we had world-class stunt doubles for the really big waves. When you get out there in the ocean, you realize quickly that serious surfing takes huge amounts of both skill and courage.

To be a really good surfer, you have to start when you’re a flexible little kid and have no fear, because you’re trying to pop up on a wave that’s lifting you higher and higher, sometimes up to the height of a three-or four-story building. Then, just at the moment you have to be functioning at your highest level, the fear kicks in, and you go over the top and get your brains pounded in. I had surfed in Galveston growing up, so I knew the basics, but this was different. Messing around in these big waves was dangerous, so I just focused on being able to paddle out, pop up onto the board, and do a cutback on the wave. I just wanted to be good enough so that when they cut from a shot of me to a shot of my surfer double, I didn’t look like Bobby Darin on the soundstage of a fifties beach movie.

Keanu and I also got to skydive for Point Break. I had never done it before, even though my brother Donny had gotten seriously into skydiving. I knew it was only a matter of time before I decided to throw myself out of an airplane, too, and Point Break finally gave me the perfect opportunity to do it.

The funny thing was, the first time I jumped I felt no fear at all. I stood at that open airplane door looking down, knowing there was nothing between me and the ground but air. I should have been terrified. But it’s such a sensory overload that I couldn’t really take it all in, so I just jumped. It wasn’t until the second jump that I suddenly found myself scared—because my brain had a chance to catch up and figure out what was going on. On the videotape of that second jump, I’m smiling, but you can see the jump master having to rip my hands off the bar to get me out the door.

The movie’s insurers didn’t want Keanu and me skydiving, even though they seemed to have no problem with us going out and getting pummeled by giant waves. I couldn’t believe they were so shortsighted about it, since we were much more likely to get injured or die in those waves. I can’t count how many times I ended up getting caught in an impact zone and sucking in water, unable to get up for air. But the insurers insisted that skydiving was just too dangerous, so we actually spent two days shooting skydiving footage after the film had officially wrapped.

That didn’t include the big, climactic skydiving scene, though, because that one didn’t really happen in midair. It couldn’t have. For one thing, Keanu and I are supposedly talking to each other throughout a free fall, which is impossible. And he supposedly leaps out of a plane without a parachute, catches Bodhi, and the two of them successfully deploy Bodhi’s chute and float down. This couldn’t happen in real life either, as Johnny Utah would have flown right off him when Bodhi deployed the chute. So we shot the scene with giant rigger fans and a contraption that held us in place in midair, to look like we were falling.

With all the skydiving, surfing, chase scenes, and fight scenes, Point Break was one of the most fun movies I’ve ever worked on. It was also one of the most painful, as I cracked my left wrist and a couple of ribs, and tore up my shoulder and elbow. The worst injury didn’t come while we were shooting, though. It came when I was bored out of my mind back at the trailers.

I’d been hanging around a parking lot all day, waiting to be called to shoot a scene. I walked over to the prop truck and said, “Hey, you guys got a skateboard?”

“Sure,” said one of the guys, and grabbed one from the back. “Here you go,” he said. “Don’t kill yourself.” I just laughed and said thanks, and then hopped on the board. It shot out from under me, and I fell straight down onto my elbow, which drove my arm bone right up into my shoulder, tearing tendons and my rotator cuff. I was dizzy with pain, but knew that if I let anyone know I was hurt, there would be repercussions with the movie’s insurers. So I just acted as if everything was okay.

Whether I’m dancing, playing sports, acting, or anything else, I try never to allow pain to derail me. Pain is a constant companion when you make action movies. It’s also just a part of living with a serious knee injury. But I learned how to put the pain elsewhere, how to compartmentalize what was happening in my body.

Pain is nothing more than a sensation, and you can choose to give in to it, or choose to control it. It’s how I managed to sustain my career for this long, and even how I’ve managed to fight cancer. Pain, like fear, can even be your friend if you let it. It sharpens your focus, and lets you know you’re alive.

But Lisa and I had to deal with another kind of pain during this period, one that had nothing to do with physical aches. This one had to do with heartache.

Lisa and I had been together for fifteen years now, and despite some ups and downs over that time, our relationship was strong. We both loved children and definitely wanted to have a family of our own. With my career going so well and both of us in our thirties, this was the perfect time to go for it.

To our excitement, Lisa got pregnant. I couldn’t wait to become a dad, to have a child with this woman whom I loved so dearly. The idea of having a family together with her made me happier than anything. And I wanted to be the best father I could be—the kind of father my dad had been to me.

About three months into her pregnancy, Lisa went in for her latest ultrasound. She’d gone into the exam room before me, and by the time the nurse showed me in, the ultrasound had already begun. As soon as I walked into that room, I knew something was very wrong.

Lisa was crying. The technician still had the ultrasound wand on her belly, but she already knew the baby’s heart wasn’t beating. She didn’t even have to say anything to me—one look at her face, and I knew the worst possible thing was true. “Oh, my God,” I said, fighting to control my emotions. I looked from the ultrasound machine to Lisa’s face and back, struggling to stay composed.

I felt completely crushed with grief. I’d been so excited that day, so thrilled at going in to see my baby’s heartbeat. And he was dead. I couldn’t handle it—when we got to the parking lot, Lisa and I both wept bitterly, holding each other tight. I grieved as I hadn’t done in years, since my father died. Even now, neither of us can talk about that day without tearing up.

We wanted to try again, but the loss had been so devastating that we just couldn’t do it right away. At that point, we figured we had plenty more years ahead of us. Eventually, we did start trying again, and we kept at it for many years, hoping Lisa would get pregnant again. But she never did.

When she became perimenopausal, our doctor told her we could try in vitro fertilization with a donor egg. But when Lisa suggested it to me, I knew I didn’t want to do it. “I wanted it to be us,” I told her, feeling the tears come again. And I really did. I wanted a child, but what I really wanted was to create a child with this amazing woman I loved.

We always knew we could adopt, and we talked seriously about it. While I was shooting a movie in Russia, Lisa even took a trip to a Russian orphanage to do someresearch on adopting there. But somehow, as the years went by, we never did it. I’m not sure either Lisa or I could even explain why, except to say that it must be tied somehow to the shock and grief of that terrible day in the doctor’s office. But if there’s one thing I regret in my life, it’s that we didn’t have children. It makes me sad for myself, but maybe even more so for Lisa, who would have been a beautiful mother.

 


Date: 2015-04-20; view: 679


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