Keanu Reeves couldn’t bring himself to make Winona Ryder cry.
In a new interview with The Sunday Times, the actress recalled working with Reeves on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film “Dracula”.
During a pivotal scene in which Ryder was meant to shed tears, the director hurled insults at her, saying, “You w**re!” in order to get her to believably cry.
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“To put it in context I’m supposed to be crying,” the actress said. “Literally, Richard E Grant, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu… Francis was trying to get all of them to yell things that would make me cry.”
She added, “But Keanu wouldn’t, Anthony wouldn’t… It just didn’t work. I was, like, ‘really?’ It kind of did the opposite.”
Ryder also said that she and Coppola are “good now,” and talked about the long working relationship the film spawned between her and Reeves.
The two actors have gone on to star together in three more films, including “A Scanner Darkly”, “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” and 2018’s “Destination Wedding”.
Looking back on the latter film, Ryder said, “It got the worst reviews. That movie, for some reason, every reviewer was like, ‘This is the worst movie in the world,’ and it was really rough.”
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Coppola has a very different memory of production.
“While I think Winona is a wonderful actor, the incident she described is not how it happened, and shouting or abusing people isn’t something I do as a person or as a filmmaker,” the director told People.
“In this situation, which I remember clearly, I instructed Gary Oldman — in character as Dracula —to whisper improvised words to her and the other characters, making them as horrific and evil as he could,” he explained. “I don’t know what was said, but improvisation is a common filmmaking practice.”
