The Time of My Life (19 page)

Lisa kept pushing and working, though, and she got a recurring role in the TV series
Max Headroom,
playing a character named Janie Crane. She went out for auditions whenever we were in Los Angeles, but much of the time she was working with me on my movie sets—rewriting and helping me with my scenes and performance. Every movie I’ve ever been in, Lisa has had a significant role in fleshing out my character. She also started learning the tools of the director’s trade, spending time with the director of photography on each set and asking about the how and the why of a shot, becoming savvy about the inner workings and process of making a movie. Some spouses came to movie sets to relax, but Lisa always came to work and learn.

Liam Neeson and Bill Paxton were both in
Next of Kin,
and we became great friends. Liam and I enjoyed hitting the town together, a couple of Irish guys going to Chicago’s blues clubs and pounding the beers. He was a wild man with a sweet, gentle side, and as my dad used to say, he could charm the rassling suit off a pissant. Years later, when his wife, Natasha Richardson, died at age forty-five after a freak skiing accident, I felt for him like a brother.

With
Next of Kin
and
Road House,
I’d now done two macho action flicks in a row. I didn’t mind showcasing that side of myself, and of course I’d had a blast making those movies. I also had original songs in both those movies, so even though I was playing the action star, I still got to show some versatility behind the scenes. But I was feeling the itch again to get a deeper, more fleshed-out role, so I could stretch myself more as an actor.

The next movie I auditioned for would give me exactly that—but I’d have to get past an extremely reluctant director if I ever hoped to get cast.

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.