Meg Ryan didn’t mean to be a movie star. In the early 1980s, the Connecticut-raised ingénue was studying journalism at New York University when the part-time job she stumbled into—acting—became too fruitful to ignore. The delicate, wide-eyed blonde had spunk and spark in spades—and after landing a role in the prophetically titled George Cukor film Rich and Famous, the world immediately took notice. It’s not that she wasn’t complicit in her career—although she has said, that film offers “just kept coming at me,” a deluge of on-screen options that ultimately led Ryan to drop out of college. But the celebrity element that accompanied her career was never something with which Ryan was comfortable. Her zippy, lovable charm electrified the best romantic comedies of the modern era, including When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail. Just because she played those parts so well, though, did not mean that Ryan was that bubbly in real life. “I understood it was a compliment about being lovable,” Ryan told In Style, in 2008, of the public’s perception of her. “But it also felt like ideas were being projected onto me that had nothing to do with me. The girl next door to what? I never felt like a very conventional person.” Now, 35 years after her film debut (and 15 years after slowing her breakneck movie pace), the reluctant celebrity has settled into a more natural role for herself—motherhood. And she has let it guide her into another facet of filmmaking where she is finally free to be herself: directing.
Ryan has long prized privacy over publicity—even if that meant going for nearly a decade without correcting an unflattering tabloid rumor about the dissolution of her marriage. But with Ithaca, the period drama she directed that is available in theaters and On Demand on September 9, Ryan volunteers her most personal work yet. Based on William Saroyan’s 1943 novel The Human Comedy, Ithaca is a coming-of-age film sweetly interwoven with the coming-of-age of Ryan’s own son, 24-year-old Jack Quaid. And in talking to Ryan, as V.F. Hollywood did by phone late last month, you can’t help but get the sense that the film also marks Ryan’s own graduation into an exciting new phase.
Ryan first discovered The Human Comedy during a painful chapter in her personal life, while divorcing ex-husband Dennis Quaid. Their son, Jack, was only about eight years old at the time, and suddenly, he was being hurtled towards a heartbreak of his parents’ making. Saroyan’s novel resonated with Ryan in that rare and beautiful way books can sometimes poignantly capture the pain you’re feeling at the exact right moment. The story follows a young protagonist, Homer, who suddenly becomes the man of the household when his father dies and his older brother is shipped off to war. Ryan praises the novel as “sophisticated in the way that To Kill a Mockingbird is sophisticated, but also very simple.”
“There’s so much wisdom in there, and heart, and it’s not a cynical novel, at all. . . . I don’t really read things and think, ‘Oh, maybe I could do something with this.’ But it felt like a very filmic novel,” she continues. “It’s a simple story about complicated things, and I felt like, given my lack of experience, I could serve it that way. I could tell it simply, in tableau mostly: ‘We’ll make the pictures work, and the light beautiful, and these actors are incredible, and that beautiful music, and keep it simple and spare, and the story will carry it.’”
By the time Ryan decided to direct the story, commissioned a script, and acquired financing—partly by agreeing to co-star as Homer’s mother—her son had enrolled at New York University and established himself as one of Hollywood’s most promising up-and-comers while in his young 20s—just as his mother had done decades earlier. Already in his nascent career, Quaid has appeared as Marvel in the nearly $3-billion-grossing Hunger Games franchise, starred in the Martin Scorsese–produced HBO series Vinyl, and been cast in Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming movie Logan Lucky.
Between those big-budget projects, Quaid took a break to fly to Virginia and join his mother on the set of Ithaca, which shot in 23 days with a cast including Alex Neustaedter (as Homer), Sam Shepard, Hamish Linklakter, and Ryan’s longtime screen sweetheart Tom Hanks (the last of whom flew across the country to film a quick cameo). Ryan’s adaptation was born over a decade earlier, out of her desire to impart the novel’s wisdom onto her son. And in the film, in a full-circle coincidence, Quaid ended up playing Ulysses, the older brother who imparts said wisdom on Homer via voice-over.
While Ryan says she learned about directing “by osmosis” from the filmmakers she’s worked with—including Nora Ephron, Rob Reiner, Lawrence Kasdan, and Tony Scott—she adds that motherhood was actually her most helpful preparation for wrangling an entire film crew.
“Being a mom was the best experience that I could’ve called on,” explains Ryan, who also has a daughter, Daisy. “You call on that, you call on understanding. You’re very fierce. You’re very protective of all the other artists. You’re making sure everybody feels good and everybody is contributing their best towards this film. The little things, I knew from being an actor.”
Fans of Ryan’s acting, be warned, though: she is in no rush to return in front of the camera, especially in a film she directs.
“I’ll never do that again,” Ryan laughs of what was perhaps her biggest lesson while making Ithaca. In addition to the pain of watching yourself over and over again in the editing room, Ryan explains, “you’re in the scene, you’re acting, and you’re still aware of what the camera’s doing, and kind of going, ‘That crane is moving so slowly.’ You have this split attention. I don’t know how people do it.”
Minor miscalculation aside, Ryan says the experience of making Ithaca was a real “confidence builder, even if the movie stinks. You just feel like, ‘Wow. I actually did that.’ You do feel like you have a place at the table [after directing] a movie.” And she has modest expectations for its release.
“It’s a quiet little movie in a shoot-em-up, blow-em-up kind of world, you know?” she says. “I hope there’s a Sunday night that somebody clicks on the icon on their Video on Demand, and it’s a satisfying night for them. . . . I feel like the news is so de-sensitizing. If we’re not careful, we’ll lose our sensitivity about what a life means. I think that this movie, hopefully, you feel the value of that soldier, in his family, in his community, and what one life means. . . . I hope that it can awaken that sensitizing.”
Ryan still wants to affect movie audiences . . . just without subjecting herself to the masochistic movie-star publicity cycle that entrapped her in the 90s. Earlier this year, Ryan called, herself “a terrible celebrity.” She said, “If I started my career today, I wouldn’t have a chance. It’s a totally different experience. Social media has changed things. I couldn’t handle the constant attention and the judging.” In a separate interview with CBS, she admitted, “I always felt like that attention is just too weird to metabolize. So it’s nothing I ever chased.” These days, she is on Twitter, but rarely uses the platform. During our phone call, she politely declines to discuss celebrity and shies away from other Hollywood-related subjects—perhaps retreating even further from her former actress role now that she’s taken a seat behind the camera.
It may be hard for the public to separate Meg Ryan, star of beloved romantic comedies, from the person she is at present—especially when she happens to deliver a line that sounds as though it could have been written by Nora Ephron. (She compares Ithaca star Alex Neustaedter, who was on the cusp of becoming a teenager while filming, to “that perfect day in the beginning of autumn, where you look left and it’s the fall, you look right and it’s the summer.”) But Ryan may never have been that girl so much as she was the canvas that girl was projected on. In our interview, the most telling proof that Ryan has permanently shut the door and thrown away the key on that chapter comes when she changes the subject from her rom-coms to her favorite romantic comedies—His Girl Friday, My Man Godfrey, and other titles from the 30s and 40s—and discusses them from a directing rather than acting perspective.
When I mention that I watched His Girl Friday over the weekend, she bubbles over with excitement and behind-the-scenes trivia.
“Howard Hawks made Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell talk and rehearse with pencils in their mouth, because they had to speak so quickly. And if they could get the words out around the pencil, then once it was out, they could talk really fast,” Ryan gushes. “The whole romance of language and words in that movie, I love it so much. I love that Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, they spoke the same language, you know what I’m saying? They had the same rhythm. Then, Ralph Bellamy’s in there, and he’s like [speaking at a different pace]. That was all on purpose. The rhythm of how those people spoke indicated who was right for each other.”
If Ryan’s enthusiasm indicated anything during our phone call, it’s that acting is not right for her at this juncture of her career. But directing is, and Ryan is already busy searching for a next story to bring to the screen. After years of playing parts in someone else’s vision, whether it was a character for a director or a celebrity for a celebrity-crazed world, she is finally taking a step back and, for the first time in her career, she’s controlling the canvas.
