The Actresses’ Studio

“I feel seasick,” says the featherweight Rosanna Arquette, staring down at her appetizer, orange gazpacho with a dash of pesto served in a shot glass. Although she flew her favorite chef from Los Angeles to cook this, the tethered yacht sways ever so slightly on the Mediterranean, and Arquette blanches.

Why shouldn’t she feel seasick? She hasn’t slept in 48 hours, too nervous before her film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and too revved up to sleep afterward.

She’s ensconced on this boat festooned with what looks like product placements for such cheesy wares as the Original Hollywood Celebrity Diet (looks like juice) and Slender Water (well, looks like water). There’s even a man in the corner cutting artfully placed holes in T-shirts to “customize” them.

They are incongruous accouterments to Arquette’s directorial debut--the earnestly searching documentary “Searching for Debra Winger,” her highly idiosyncratic journey to find why actress Winger, star of such films as “Terms of Endearment” and “Urban Cowboy,” bailed on Hollywood for six years to raise her children. (She returned briefly at the last Cannes in her husband Arliss Howard’s directorial debut.)

In the process, Arquette interviewed a dream roster of celebrity actresses, including Jane Fonda, Holly Hunter, Meg Ryan, Vanessa Redgrave and Gwyneth Paltrow, about how they balance life and work, how they cope with the voracious demands of the fame machine and an industry that jettisons its women as soon as the wrinkles appear.

Although her perfectly flat stomach peeks out from above her white hip-hugger jeans, and a frothy print blouse encases her upper frame, Arquette freely admits that she’s at an age, 42, when Hollywood usually sends women out to pasture. According to the Screen Actors Guild, fewer than 10% of screen roles go to women older than 40. Arquette, who’s best known for the ‘80s hit “Desperately Seeking Susan,” says the age question began to nag at her when she was...36.

“That’s when it really hit me. You go gosh, wow. And it seems to be getting younger and younger, because now we have 19-year-olds on the cover of magazines. The models are 14. It’s getting younger and younger and harder for women. I also gave birth at 35, so I was still breast-feeding. That didn’t help things in the work field either.”

Arquette calls the movie, which consumed the last 14 months of her life and 170 hours of film, a “Rosanna Arquette experience,” which might start a few eyes rolling until she explains, “I never approached the project as a director,” or for that matter as an actress. “I look at the footage sometimes, and I go, ‘Oh, my God, I’ll never work again. I look so bad.’ But I was always worried about them. I was just thinking about these women I was trying to talk to.”

There are undoubtedly more professional interviewers, but the film’s roughhewn quality is part of its charm. Usually outfitted in punky rock star garb, Arquette is a gushy, girlish fan. Her status as a fellow celebrity clearly persuaded a lot of famous women to let down their guard, and the result is a kind of celebrity slumber party. It’s all the issues women complain about to other women, and it delivers on the fantasy that the rich and famous are really just like you and me.

What’s interesting is that a number of the women are more interesting in real life than they’re allowed to appear on screen. Though Whoopi Goldberg can be unctuous at the Oscars, here she’s hilarious and acerbic on everything from the difficulty of living with a man (“Everyone who’s living with you who’s not you is a problem”) to her randy rage on how Hollywood desexualizes older women.

Ryan chafes about the vilification she’s undergone in the tabloids since she dumped her husband, Dennis Quaid, and consequently her image as America’s sweetheart. That wasn’t the end of life but the beginning. “I’ve been under a rock for a long time,” says Ryan, now the proud possessor of a pierced bellybutton. “It’s ironic. I’m the most empowered I ever felt, and if you read about me you’d feel so sorry for me.... As a sexualized woman out in the world, you take so many hits.”

The emotional star is Fonda, both because footage of her actually talking is increasingly rare and because she’s so direct: “On our second date, Ted [Turner, now her ex-husband] made it real clear that if it was going to work, that I would have to give up my career, and I’m thinking, ‘Boy, this guy’s really crazy. I mean, he’s only been out with me once before.’

“I’ve worked all my life and supported my families, but I decided that I’d had a career and I’d won the awards and all that kind of thing, but I’d never really had an intimate relationship. You have to figure out what ultimately will you regret that you don’t have. And I wasn’t going to regret 10 more movies or five more movies, I was going to regret lack of intimacy.”

It sounds reasonable until later in the film, when Fonda describes the high of performing the perfect part at the perfect moment, a feeling better than sex, a moment close to transcendence.

“The Jane stuff is actually very inspiring. The love of her art and her craft--it’s what she misses. The one thing she misses is the best thing ever. That’s what’s so painful,” says Arquette, who says she spent a lot of the interview crying alongside Fonda. “It was an amazing moment, but for the film I thought it would be a little much.”

Arquette does ultimately find Winger, looking beautiful in her suburban backyard, apparently unfazed by nearby train tracks and the sounds of trains whizzing by. Winger encapsulates how Hollywood treats women by an encounter she had with legendary producer Don Simpson on the set of “An Officer and a Gentleman.” She was 23, and Simpson arrived at her hotel bearing a pill that he said would rid her of water retention because he thought she looked bloated. Winger didn’t like how “show business just made me rough and hard.”

Nonetheless, Winger says, it took five years to wean herself off the Hollywood limelight. “It took me that long to really believe that I wasn’t addicted and that my life would be good, because it’s scary, especially if you started early, if you were successful young.”

Arquette says the $600,000 film (financed by billionaire Internet entrepreneurs Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner) is far more personal than any of the more than 50 films and TV shows she appeared in. “It’s the most raw. It’s really me. I never intended to be in it. I wanted Carrie Fisher to do it, but people would say, ‘No, this has to be your journey.’ And I was so afraid.”

She’s also wary about the critical evaluations to come. (She’s still looking for a distributor.) Already this celebrity home movie has its champions and its detractors. Referring to the Arquette clan of actors, which includes her sister Patricia, brothers David and Alexis and their late grandfather Cliff, Arquette says, “As a family, all of us have this street kid....” She doesn’t finish her sentence but lifts her dukes and makes improbably tiny fists. “We’re tough. But when they go after you for something you put out there, it’s hard to have a thick skin.”

She pauses, realizing she’s beginning to walk in linguistic circles. “I actually hear myself contradicting myself. There’s part of me that’s really tough,” she says as if to remind herself, “and part of me going, ‘This is my work. I just wish you’d like it.’”