Brangelina (13 page)

Despite the stellar reviews, she remained humble and even a little embarrassed that she was being favorably compared to screen legends such as Connery and Burstyn. “I’ve saved the call sheet with my name against all these other actors because I was just so proud to be on the list,” she said of acting with the all-star cast. “I felt like I had crashed the greatest party in history.”

Jolie filled the rest of 1998 and early 1999 with two back-to-back pictures featuring two of Hollywood’s hottest male actors of the moment. First up was
Pushing Tin
, a comedy about air-traffic controllers, in which she plays the wife of Billy Bob Thornton. He had recently turned in an extraordinary Oscar-winning performance in
Sling Blade
, one of Jolie’s favorite films. Then she worked on
The Bone Collector
, playing a rookie police officer alongside Denzel Washington.

“I begged for the part of Amelia,” Jolie later admitted. “I just wanted it so badly. I loved who she was. She was very street, and there were a lot of questions about my accent, about how I’d dress. Denzel had to meet me. He had watched my films, and I was so nervous. I was filming
Playing by Heart
, and I had this pink hairdo that was all spiked up. So I tried to cover it with a scarf, [but] halfway through the dinner I accidentally pulled it off and didn’t realize it. They were all staring at my head, this pink thing. Here I was trying to be like a lady, a cop, and an adult. But he approved me, and I thought that said a lot.”

Asked how she chose her roles, her answer was revealing. “I do my own therapy quite a lot,” she said. “My choice of characters is my therapy, from one to the next. In
Playing by Heart
, there is a need for love, someone who is not very focused on purpose and work. Playing Amelia in
Bone Collector
was next; she’s a cop who is all about duty and responsibility. It was my own way of tapping every side,” she said.

On January 24, 1999, she attended the Golden Globe awards ceremony for the second year in a row as a nominated actress, this time for her role in
Gia
. In a red-carpet interview on the way in, she promised that if she won she would jump fully dressed into the pool of the Beverly Hilton, where the ceremony was being staged. When she was younger, she claimed she had jumped into the same pool while accompanying her father to an event and was kicked out by the hotel management.

Once again, when the envelope was opened, her name was called. When she got to the microphone, Jolie couldn’t contain her tears on seeing her mother beaming at her from the audience. “Mom, I know you wanted to be an actress, but you gave it up to raise me. I love you.” Later that evening, Jolie made good on her promise, jumping into the pool at the hotel in her $3,000 Randolph Duke gown.

“What’s funny to me is that everyone wasn’t jumping into the pool,” she told
Playboy
. “It’s one of those events, and the people in the room are supposed to be free and wild, but everyone is so tame and careful.” The incident only contributed to her wild-girl image; it was portrayed by most media as a spontaneous, drunken lark instead of the planned celebration that it was.

Meanwhile, she was determined not to let the success go to her head. “I’m not going to get used to it too much,” she claimed shortly after the ceremony, when asked how a second Golden Globe award would affect her career. “I’m aware that it will help me get another job,” she said, “and that’s what every actor wants—another job.” There was one in particular that Jolie had in mind at that moment, and it was the job that would define her career.

From the moment Columbia Pictures announced they were filming
Girl, Interrupted
, virtually every young actress in Hollywood lined up for a role. Based on Susanna Kaysen’s best-selling memoir, the film looked like a golden opportunity to those who had been kicking around Hollywood for years, just waiting to be taken seriously. Rose McGowan, who had co-starred in
Scream
, summed up the film’s appeal after she read for a part. “It’s the only decent thing out there that doesn’t involve taking your clothes off,” she said. It was the ideal acting showcase, and Oscar visions danced in the head of every actress under twenty-five as she lined up for a chance to read.

It is doubtful that awards were in Winona Ryder’s first thoughts when she read the book, in 1993, and immediately tried to buy the film option for herself. “It catapulted me back to the first time I read
Catcher in the Rye
, and I discovered I was not the only person who knew what it was like to be lonely and alienated,” she explained. “Since I read the book when I was twenty-one and fell madly in love with it, I’ve wanted to do this.”

Angelina Jolie had much the same reaction. She wanted in. The book spoke to her in many ways; certain parts of Kaysen’s life hit really close to home: in 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist, Boston prep-school girl Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital, in nearby Belmont. Reality had become “too dense” for the eighteen- year-old. Kaysen spent most of the next two years living a nightmare on a ward for teenage girls at McLean, a psychiatric hospital famous for treating the mental frailties of the privileged. It was an experience that she captured in a gripping memoir more than two decades later.

Kaysen was raised in the upper academic echelons of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the daughter of famed economist Carl Kaysen, a professor at MIT and former advisor to President John F. Kennedy. When her stifling Cambridge upbringing became too much to bear, Kaysen made a half-hearted attempt to kill herself by swallowing fifty aspirin. The suicide attempt brought her to McLean, whose patients have included Sylvia Plath, Ray Charles, and James Taylor, all of whom spent time there after their own famous breakdowns.

Once at McLean, Kaysen was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and was quickly divested of any control over her own life. After a dental treatment under general anesthesia, she panicked when she awoke and nobody would tell her how long she had been unconscious; she believed she had “lost time.” On another occasion, in an episode known in psychiatry as depersonalization, she bit open the flesh on her hand because she was terrified that she had “lost her bones.”

“Lunatics,” writes Kaysen, “are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can’t go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside.” She believes she was the family scapegoat, sent to an institution to spare her loved ones the inconvenience of having to live with her.

Nearly a quarter century after she was finally released, Kaysen documented her experiences at McLean. In the interim, she had rarely mentioned her hospitalization, “I didn’t know what to say,” she recalled. When she did bring it up, “it was a good way to irritate or frighten people.” But the memories of McLean kept surfacing, and finally she felt she had to record them.

In the years after her release she had discovered a significant talent for writing and had published two acclaimed novels,
Far Afield
and
Asa, As I Knew Him
. Her autobiographical account of her days at McLean was a surprise bestseller that was frequently compared to Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
. As poignantly as she captured her own experiences, she managed to capture the foibles of her fellow patients, including a number of memorable and fascinating characters who had been committed for a variety of reasons.

One of these characters is a manipulative sociopath named Lisa, who, unlike Susanna, probably needed to be in an institution. Lisa was the maverick of the all-female ward, fighting for justice and defying the system. She devised diversions from the strict routines and drew escape plans and rallied the other girls to question authority—in short, she was a female version of Jack Nicholson’s character Randle P. McMurphy in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. This is the role Angelina Jolie wanted, and she was determined to do whatever was necessary to land it. “Lisa was a very coveted role,” recalled producer Cathy Konrad. “We had the pick of all the young actresses out there.”

In contrast, Winona Ryder knew right from the beginning that she wanted to play the lead role of Susanna, the part she most identified with. She wanted it so badly, in fact, that she was willing to buy the rights to the book in order to land it. To her chagrin, she was beaten to it by Douglas Wick, who had produced
The Craft
.

Still, the dark, depressing story wasn’t seen as bankable by most studios, and Wick was having no luck getting the film financed. That’s when Ryder, in those days still a hot commodity and a bankable actress, made him a deal. She would come aboard as a producer and use her clout to get the story made. In exchange, she would be guaranteed the role of Susanna, which could be her ticket to the pantheon of serious actors that had so far eluded her.

But it wasn’t mere vanity that motivated Ryder to make
Girl, Interrupted
. When she was a rising young actress, she suffered what she later called an “extra-large breakdown” and checked herself briefly into the sleep-disorder unit of a psychiatric institution. She attributed the crisis to “the pressure of working and then going through adolescence onscreen.”

Because of the breakdown she had had to turn down the role of Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary in
Godfather III
, which was subsequently given to Sofia Coppola. It was not a decision she had taken lightly. “I thought I was losing my mind,” she later explained. “You know, when you are just so tired that you can’t sleep? … It was a really tough year. It would be for anybody, regardless of what they’re doing, whether it’s cramming for exams or their parents driving them crazy or breaking up with first loves. It’s the year where life is going crazy, and everything was going crazy in mine. It was amplified because it was in the papers. Every step I was taking was being written about.”

During her brief stint in the institution, she recorded her innermost feelings in a journal, much like Susanna Kaysen had done two decades earlier. “I didn’t get anything from that place,” Ryder said. “I was so tired and just wanted to sleep. They didn’t help me at all … I was nineteen, and I learned that no matter how rich you are and how much you pay some hospital or doctor, they can’t fix you. They can’t give you a certain answer. You have to figure it out for yourself. I finally realized I’m not supposed to understand everything. Life is just weird and messy, and I had to get through on my own and do my best. Choose to move on or stay miserable. I chose to move on.”

Like Kaysen, Ryder had never had a chance to come to terms with the episode. But after reading
Girl, Interrupted
, she realized she wasn’t crazy for reeling under so much stress. “One of the things I thought for years is that I am not OK,” she said convincingly. “I thought people would think I was a brat if I complained about anything. If I said I was depressed, they’d attack me. Now I know I’m allowed to say, ‘Wow, I had a hard time.’ I am learning to be me.”

For a long time it looked like
Girl, Interrupted
would never be made. But once she finally got the green light from Columbia to turn Kaysen’s memoir into a film, Ryder personally approached her director of choice. James Mangold had just won the best director award for his first feature,
Heavy
, at the Sundance Film Festival and was making a big-budget crime drama called
Cop Land
, starring Sylvester Stallone, Robert DeNiro, and Harvey Keitel.

“[Ryder] came to see me in New York while I was making
Cop Land
in 1996,” Mangold recalled. “
Girl, Interrupted
had already gone through two writers, and I got the sense it had gone aground. It was a hard story to tell. I was so enthused by her enthusiasm that I agreed to do it, though I didn’t have a clue as to how I’d get the project right, because much of the story had been told from inside the author’s head. It took a while, but then, the ideas started coming.”

By the time auditions began in 1998, Ryder had been working closely on the project for almost two years. It had been a constant touch-and-go with the studio about whether production would ever begin. Eventually, they were ready to cast the film. The role of Susanna was already spoken for by Ryder. To her credit, she chose the lower-key role, likely because she so identified with the character. She must have known the other roles would overshadow it and possibly attract the attention of the Oscar nominating committee. Her decision left open the roles of the other inmates. Among the most coveted were the part of Daisy, a schizophrenic victim of incest, and, of course, Lisa.

A number of high profile actresses had already publicly expressed interest in these parts, including Katie Holmes, Christina Ricci, Gretchen Mol, Kate Hudson, Reese Witherspoon, and even the singer Alanis Morissette, who had just played God in Kevin Smith’s drama,
Dogma
. At that point, the only actress the producers knew for sure they wanted was the Canadian Sarah Polley, who had just impressed Ryder in Atom Egoyan’s independent film,
The Sweet Hereafter
. Polley, however, passed in favor of another project, leaving the field wide open.

For the role of Lisa, Mangold didn’t have anybody in particular in mind. “All I knew was that the person had to be dangerous, highly verbal, and sexy—a kind of female De Niro,” he said.

Jolie had called in every favor she had owing to get a reading, but she needn’t have bothered. The producers already had her on their short list. Still, nothing had been decided by the morning Jolie walked in and, without saying a word of dialogue, sat down in the chair in character as Lisa. When she opened her mouth, Mangold says, he knew he had found his sociopath.

Mangold described what he saw as one of the “greatest moments” of his life. “It was clear to me that day that I was watching someone who was not acting. There was someone speaking through her; it was a part of herself,” he said. “The power coming off her, even in that cold reading, is something I will never forget. I never had someone come in and blow the walls down. She just entered the skin of the character … I felt like God had given me a gift.”