Wildflower

by Drew Barrymore

  We had the most fun making it you could ever imagine. And I promise you can tell when people are having fun. It comes out through the celluloid and onto the screen, and it cannot be disguised. Adam’s friends who are his team were the best, and I fell in love with all of them, including Allen Covert, an actor, writer, and producer who is in all of Adam’s movies, and Jack Giarraputo, his producing partner. We played, we partied, and we became real, no-bullshit friends.

  When the film came out, we all rented a bus and went around New York stopping at every movie theater we could. We would run off the bus, buy tickets, run in, watch five minutes of the film in whatever part it was in at that moment, and then scream, run out, get back on the bus, blast Daft Punk’s album Homework, and go to the next stop, all while dancing the entire way!

  At the end of the night, when we got to Elaine’s, a New York institution, the whole studio was there celebrating, looking at the weekend numbers as they came in, and it was all smiles. The movie was going to be a hit.

  And as relieved as I was, I was just happy that Adam believed in me that day at the coffee shop and found us the perfect film to make. I wanted us to be like an old-fashioned movie couple. He was my cinematic soul mate. And maybe I had just proved it to him tonight.

  Many years later, we remained friends. We always talked about doing something again, but our lives had moved on in many ways, and we were not actively pursuing anything. However, I knew that we were always subconsciously looking for things as we read them. But for me it was going to have to top what we did, and that wasn’t coming easily.

  One night, my partner Nan—of course, as she always found the best projects—came and brought me a script. I was busy making a movie with Penny Marshall called Riding in Cars with Boys at the time, and Nan wanted to make this film right away. She said we could just produce it and find another actress. I said sure, why not? Then she asked me if we could stage a table read, and I would read the girl’s part and we would get someone to read the boy’s. It would help her hear the script so that she would know who to suggest for casting when she tried to go and secure the rights to the script. So we did.

  And as I read this script out loud, I realized why she loved it so much. It was a drama that took place in Seattle, and it was about a girl who lost her memory every day. But the guy would try to help her remember who she was. It felt small, deep, and very emotional. But above all, it was beautiful and romantic. I told Nan that she had to go and secure this film immediately.

  A few weeks later she called me: “They are giving the script to someone else, another company, and they won’t say who.” I was sick. There was something about this film that had lit a fire in me that not only wouldn’t extinguish, it burned brighter by the week. I followed it like a hawk. And it very much did go to other people. It kept traveling. Going from production companies to different filmmakers. They even attached other actors at one point.

  But I never gave up tracking its every move. There were huge movie stars and big-time directors attached to it, so it was very hard to even try to get it back. A few years later I found out, once again, it had changed hands. Wondering who got to have it this time, and seeing if there was once again a window for me and Nan to get back in, even though it was never ours, I found out that it had gone to none other than Happy Madison, Adam’s company. OK. I knew what I had to do.

  I sat down at my old Olivetti typewriter. Funnily enough, I was working on the Sony lot, making Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, and his office was there, only a few hundred feet away. But I started typing nonetheless. And it was like conducting a symphony. The tears in me started to swell as I wrote about my history with this script. How long I had loved it. Why I loved it. How I truly felt once again in my bones that I was supposed to have something to do with it.

  And that the fact that it was with him, well, this was a film worthy in every way of our reteaming, and would he please consider doing this with me? Crying, I typed, “This is it. This is the one, I know it!” I hoped I wasn’t being presumptuous, but I meant it when I said to him, we need to make more movies. I took the letter, folded it up, put it in an envelope, and had it hand-delivered to his office. I counted the minutes and hours until I heard a response. It was like waiting to see the lighthouse in a storm. I awaited some kind of closure or my fate.

  Adam walked over from his office to our trailers at Angels base camp. He said, “Of course we can do this! But we want to turn it into a comedy,” and I said, “That’s fine, but it can’t lose its romance,” and he said, “I know what guys want,” and I said, “I know what girls want,” and he said, “Well, then why don’t you produce it with me?” and I said, “That’s what I was hoping you were going to say,” and I jumped into a giant squeezy laughing hug with him! Happy Madison and Flower Films!

  I was able to tell Nan that we were going to get to “tell this story,” as she always said. And so we did. We immediately went into meetings to take this drama into a more comedic world. Adam, Allen, Tim, and Jack were all there. All the same people we worked with on The Wedding Singer. Adam is loyal and consistent with his team. As am I with Nan and Chris. So we all feel like family. We get how important respect is and we all love each other.

  One day Adam said, “Instead of Seattle, how about Hawaii” for where the film would take place. And we all screamed, “YES!” Then the next day I would hand in a set of notes that all said, “Let’s discuss,” after each draft of the script came in. Because you really don’t know what’s going to work or not until you try it, especially with comedy. You have to not hinder that process.

  Nan and I would really fight for aspects of the love story, and it was a tricky one, because you’re dealing with daily memory loss—something that seems so otherworldly—and how that logic feels without losing the magic. It was a very interesting tone we were all trying to weave together. Nonetheless, we all went off to Hawaii, and we had as much if not even more fun than we did on The Wedding Singer.

  A few days into shooting, I thought, this is paradise, and I just wanted to stay here forever. I have had a lifelong love affair with Hawaii, but I had never worked there. Cameron came to visit me; she wanted to escape a little, so she got the hotel room next to mine, and we had a little middle living room in between. Adam introduced her to his surfing instructor Hans, and when I would leave in the morning for work, she would grab her board and go surfing.

  Then we would all meet up at the end of the day. Our two friends—Lona Vigi, who does hair, and Robin Fredriksz, who does makeup on many of Cameron’s and my films, and are part of our “girl group”—worked on the film as well, and obviously Nan was there, and let’s just say that for three months, life was perfect. Cameron decided to stay a little longer, then she never left, so we rented a Ping-Pong table to put in our living room, and it turned into headquarters. All the guys would come over and play. It was fun, wholesome, communal, and a moment in my life that felt so safe I can’t even begin to do it justice.

  And we were making a film I truly believed in, and the message of the film is “How do you make love stay?” Because it doesn’t matter if someone has a memory or not, you have to reinvent love every day. It’s why I chose the book Still Life with Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins, as the book my character, Lucy, reads every day, because that book asks that question and then goes on a wild ride just like the film. Love is the one uniting, relatable thing in everyone’s life. It’s what we all want and struggle with and fight for. And I loved the version of that we were telling here, in paradise.

  We decided to open the film on Valentine’s Day, which is when we put The Wedding Singer out, so we thought, stick with tradition. I was hosting Saturday Night Live again, and because Nan and I were producing this one, I wasn’t as carefree about the weekend as I was with The Wedding Singer.

  Weekends have become so important that it is very stressful, and you lose some of the feeling of what you intended, because it’s business a
t the end of the day. Did it work? Will you get to do it again? Those are always my questions because those are the facts.

  So I didn’t want to know what the money numbers were until Monday. I wanted the weekend to be pure and for the movie to just be what it was, a story I really wanted to tell. But Adam showed up at SNL, his stomping grounds. He came into the dressing room with the whole gang, Allen, Jack, etc. I looked up at him. He knew I didn’t want to know. We made small talk, but the cloud of success or failure hung in the air like a giant thunderstorm that would strike me dead or be the rain dance of joy.

  I knew by the look in his eye that he knew what I didn’t want to know yet. But he couldn’t help himself: “Don’t you wanna know?” His face was pokerish enough that I said, “Do I want to know?” with a face that just ate a lemon. “Forty-five million. We just broke records”—and the whole room started screaming. And I started doing my rain dance and we all celebrated. This was one in a series of perfect moments. And above all, I was relieved.

  Years later, I called Adam one afternoon and said, “Can you meet me for lunch?” and of course we did sometime the next day. We talked about how it had been another ten years again—twenty in total since The Wedding Singer—and should we find something again? Adam has two daughters now, Sunny and Sadie, and I had my little Olive. We ate burgers and talked about what to do next, and that we would go on the hunt again to find something. And we hugged good-bye on the street. A few months later Adam found Blended, a film about the modern state of families. Now that we both had kids, I liked telling a story about, literally, families and what that means and “what kids need” and “what kind of parent do you want to be?”—all of those themes had never been more important in my life, and it just came together, and our Frank Coraci, who did The Wedding Singer, directed it, and it felt like home.

  We were off to Africa, and we all brought our families and made the film. I took Olive on safari almost every weekend and just made an amazing life experience and adventure out of it all. I knew that my film life was winding down, the hours are so hard with kids. But with this group, the balance was there. I can be a mom and work because they celebrate their wives and their kids. It is very conducive to real life, and not all films are like that. But this was, and once again, we just had a wonderful and cozy and fun time making the film.

  At the end, we went to Georgia to shoot the part of the film that doesn’t take place in Africa. We all lived on a lake, which is my favorite thing in the world, and after work I would go and kayak by myself and take in my whole new life. I would acknowledge how I felt different. All that passion and drive I used to have toward movies was now dedicated to my kid, and yet I was still lucky enough to do all of this with old friends.

  This odd man across the lake from me blasted “Rainy Night in Georgia” on a loudspeaker, and I just became still, right there in the middle of the water, happy with where my life had taken me.

  As we were preparing ourselves for landing after another round of very epic months of being together every day, we came to our last day of shooting. Adam and I had made another movie, and we just hoped people liked it. I was content. Calm. Happy. And then came the best news ever: I found out I was pregnant. I was going to have another baby. It was the perfect moment to be introduced to the notion of Frankie.

  So our film ended, and my new adventure began. And I was amazed that Adam and I both have two daughters. It’s incredible how life works. When Adam and I met, we were basically kids. But now we were in the same place in our lives again, but a very different place from where we started. We’re not all playing Ping-Pong. We are going to our kids’ birthday parties. Adam’s beautiful wife, Jackie, and I talk about being moms, and that’s the conversation.

  Recently, at Adam’s daughter Sadie’s birthday party, Adam and I found ourselves in a corner. “What are we going to do next?” I asked. “I don’t know. I have some ideas,” he said. Then I turned to him and said, “Maybe it should be something really crazy? And different?” But then I thought about the heaviness of a drama, and would that make people happy? I don’t know. Then I said, “Well, whatever it is, it’s gotta be good!” and he said, “We’ll find it.” We both joke about how old we are going to be in the next one. We both are truly dying to remake On Golden Pond because it takes place on our favorite lake in New Hampshire, funnily enough right where Adam and Nan both grew up. Small world.

  I think we also like the comfort of thinking we will be together when we are really old. Whatever it may be, and wherever it takes place, I know this . . . I once knew a boy named Adam. And I hoped that we could be a team, but what I found was a true partner. I now know a man named Adam, and trust me when I say, he is as great as you want him to be.

  Steven and me, 1981

  THE ACTING LESSON

  I learned the two most important things about acting by the time I was six.

  From 1976 to 1983, while my mom was trying to become an actress, she had us hanging out at the Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles. Lee Strasberg was one of the most important and famous acting teachers ever to live. And he and his wife, Anna, were running the school. He had taught everyone from Al Pacino to James Dean, Dustin Hoffman to Marilyn Monroe, and many other icons of our time. Anna would soon become my godmother, at my mother’s request, a relationship that would become so important to me as a kid because she was so kind and so nurturing. She put the mother in godmother, and helped shape me for the next seven years, mostly by just letting me live in her home and feel safe.

  Anna’s home was like a beautiful commune in that the door was always open and people were always coming in and out. There was every famous actor you could think of and great writers and directors. It was a salon type of place. There would always be several people watching movies or sitting in the living room, having conversations. It was truly the most fluid, creative energy I had ever seen in a house. It was like a stimulating heaven. There were also Anna’s two sons, Adam and David, who became like big brothers, and they helped me not become a wuss and turned me into a bit of a tomboy, which I greatly appreciated.

  Some nights, after Lee passed away, I would crawl into bed with Anna and she would just let me sleep. It was so peaceful, and I felt like nothing bad could happen there. Anna had lost her soul mate, Lee, and I could not imagine what that feeling was like. I couldn’t actually fathom it yet. But what I did see was that life went on in this house. And I mean LIFE. The house literally buzzed. It glowed with love and whimsy and acceptance. A sense of family. This home formed me, but not until many years later would I try to replicate it. Now I have a beautiful welcoming haven myself. Anna taught me this.

  Back in 1979, my mother was doing a play at the Strasberg Institute called Playing for Time about women in a concentration camp. My mother was playing one of the women in the camp, and they ended up giving me a small part as well. I was to play a girl who walks across the stage and says good-bye in German as she is taken off to be executed. I had two words to say, “Auf Wiedersehen.” And then I waved and that was that. So absolutely heartbreaking but important was this play. These stories needed to be told. The lead actress, who carried us through the story, was a tall, androgynous woman who had to be in the greatest turmoil throughout the whole play, every night. Crying, screaming, fighting for her life.

  I didn’t know how she did it. I was in awe of the fact that she could be this emotional every night. What did she do to prepare? What was her ritual and where did she go? So one night, I started looking.

  I would walk through the darkened theaters that were empty, with all the ropes and curtains. I would follow the cables on the floor that wound around like snakes as they powered the bright lights that would illuminate the actors. These rooms were scary at night. Hundreds of empty seats. Ghosts and dust. A silence that felt like something could jump out and come alive at any minute—think the-anticipation-of-a-giant-jack-in-the-box feeling. When a play is going on,
it is alive. Now this theater was just a den of secrets waiting to be let out. But I braved these rooms in search of the crying woman.

  And then one night, I found her. I had gone into a different little theater in the building, and I hid behind a curtain so she could not see me. She was just lying down on the stage with her legs dangling off the edge. Crying. And she would beat her chest and conjure up these monumental tears. Then it would subside a little. Then she would beat her chest again, and moan as if she was dredging up the ocean floor of her own personal painful memories. And like the waves, her sobs ebbed and flowed from loud war cry to vulnerable smaller tears. And I realized that when she went out there every time, when she entered the stage, she was already in some truthful-beyond-upset, flipped-out state, and that was what she would provide to the audience of people. But it had come from such a private place in her, a place that she had summoned next door.

  Now that I knew how to find her, I spied on her, night after night, watching her drum up the pain and start to wail. There were no actor tricks. No stepping into character at the last second. She was willing to unzip herself and get to a truth I’m sure most people would prefer to avoid. She gave herself fully. She intimidated me, but I could not stop watching her.

  Lesson one: Make it personal.

  I was four years old.

  The second lesson came when Steven Spielberg, on the set of E.T., said something to me when I was six years old. He said, “Don’t act your characters, BE your characters.” I thought back to my nights of watching that woman cry in the empty room. She wasn’t acting, she was being.