Cut to darkness

She’D take Manhattan -- if she could.

“I find it kind of rough being here,” says Meg Ryan.

She’s not referring to the specific Venice restaurant where a shaft of harsh midafternoon sun has just intruded. She’s speaking of the literal and figurative urban sprawl that goes only two blocks west to meet the Pacific but goes so far in the other three directions that it legendarily makes human connection strained. She’s just pointed out that the crucial thing anchoring her here is that her 11-year-old son, Jack -- from the marriage with Dennis Quaid that ended in a tabloid cataclysm two-plus years ago -- is happily in his seventh year at the same Westside school: “He’s so clear about wanting to be here. I don’t think he’s gonna go for moving to New York.”

Anyone who’s seen Ryan’s forthcoming film for director Jane Campion, “In the Cut,” might question why she’d want to reenter a New York City where seemingly every man her character Franny meets is a candidate to be revealed as an especially bloodthirsty serial killer. It’s a city where sexual encounters tend to be unloving (if fervent) jousts, and police and ambulance sirens wail against a backdrop of ad hoc shrines to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

Yes, Ryan says, Franny “is up against a male-dominated, chauvinistic, misogynistic world of sexual predators” and “completely marginalized, living in the East Village on the fringes of everything.” But Ryan was able to reach back to her days living downtown as a New York University journalism student. “Whenever we were shooting there it was great, because it was such a vibrant place and really eclectic, passionate neighborhood.”

Her face is no less intriguing for its familiarity. The much-discussed and emulated blond bird’s nest of hair still sets off her highly mobile mouth and eyes, and when she laughs, as she does easily and often, or squints to ponder a question, she’s still the movie star next door.

Ryan, an engaging if sporadically restless talker who uses all the territory on her side of the table as she gestures, grapples with her thought: “Maybe I’m really talking about feeling a real sense of community. I have a really hard time doing that here -- I have it, but it’s a real effort for me ‘cause I’m from the East Coast and it occurs a little more organically for me there.” She gestures over her shoulder to where the airliners groan out over the ocean as they begin their flights from LAX. “I guess my community is the people at 33,000 feet, ya know?”

Yet so many people on the ground below have a curiously intimate view of the very public changes in her personal life.

Some have judged her harshly for them. “I never defined myself as ‘America’s sweetheart,’ ” she says a bit wearily. “I got assigned an archetype. And then I betrayed it,” she adds, not without a mildly bitter laugh.

LURID INK

Though she’ll issue the customary disclaimer that she knows how privileged her life as a movie star is, Ryan has, over the past few years, lived an unenviable odyssey through divorce, a very public love affair with Russell Crowe that led to a public lashing in the tabloids, and a career-hobbling pair of less-than-boffo films.

Even with all the lurid ink about her and co-star Crowe, 2000’s “Proof of Life” stalled at $33 million, and “Kate & Leopold” (2001) was only about a third as lucrative as the average take for the triumvirate that made her America’s somewhat reluctant sweetheart: “When Harry Met Sally ...” (1989), “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993) and “You’ve Got Mail” (1998). Films such as those made her a $15-million-a-movie actress, but she’s cut her price considerably for her recent edgier efforts.

The best-known fact about “In the Cut,” which opens in Los Angeles on Oct. 24, is that Ryan is seen in full-frontal nudity in love scenes. Tie that in with her career worries and the easy equation is that a 41-year-old actress is somewhat desperately looking to cause a sensation. (Never mind that Nicole Kidman, who was originally slated to star and served as a producer, is a white-hot personality who’s appeared undraped in the service of various roles.) When Ryan turned up to promote the film at the Toronto Film Festival with noticeably fuller lips, the British and Canadian press had a field day, calling the look her “trout pout.”

The film’s reviews and audience reactions were mixed, but Ryan drew many good notices. The Hollywood Reporter summed up the film as a “cop-out” (Susanna Moore co-wrote the screenplay with Campion, changing the ending from that of her novel on which it is based) but praised Ryan’s “fearless, emotionally raw performance.” A Denver Post reviewer called her “a revelation.... Campion drained every gram of cuteness from Ryan. In its place is this weighty performance.” And England’s Guardian said Ryan “thoroughly reinvents herself.”

Ryan was in no mood to accept left-handed compliments. Perhaps wondering if the press had forgotten her turns as Jim Morrison’s drug-addled wife in “The Doors” (1991), the alcoholic spouse of Andy Garcia in “When a Man Loves a Woman” (1994), a pathetic stripper in “Hurlyburly” (1998), a sociopathic criminal in “Promised Land” (1988) and even a disrobed lover in “Flesh and Bone” (1993), she took on the festival media at a press conference: “You all can say what you want.... I’ve done 30 movies and I’ve done seven romantic comedies. So I don’t know what the typical Meg Ryan movie is.”

The film, which Campion had begun adapting from Moore’s book as another entry in her oeuvre of interesting women’s stories (among others, “Sweetie,” “Holy Smoke,” “The Piano” and “Portrait of a Lady”), had been headed for its early summer start date in New York when Kidman’s marriage with Tom Cruise broke up. Mark Ruffalo, a seasoned if boyish-looking actor who came to the fore at age 33 with “You Can Count on Me” in 2000, recalls being cast in the part of Detective Malloy, who becomes Franny’s lover but is an object of our suspicions in the film: “I met with Jane and she said, “Great, I want you to be in my movie -- but first you’ve got to get Nicole to OK you. So I met with Nicole the next day. She said, ‘Great, I OK him.’ Then the next day Nicole dropped out of the picture. So everyone was scrambling.”

At that time, revered acting teacher Sandra Seacat, a disciple of Actors Studio legend Lee Strasberg and coach to stars such as Jessica Lange, Harvey Keitel and Laura Dern, had been working with Ryan on the Charles Dutton film based on the true story of female boxing manager Jackie Kallen (the yet-to-be-released “Against the Ropes.”)

“Meg has great courage and discipline and commitment,” Seacat says. “Her talent is large, and her potential is vast.”

She said much the same thing in a phone call to Campion in Australia, the director recalls: “Sandra said, ‘Look, I’m working with Meg Ryan. I’ve never done this before, but she’s doing amazing work. You should audition her.’ And I said, ‘Audition Meg? Do you think she’d audition?’ She said, ‘Sure, she would.’ Sandra was like a fairy godmother that takes the mists away and helps you see that Meg is emboldened by material she loves.”

Campion quickly got on a plane for Los Angeles and met with Ryan and Ruffalo at the Bel-Air Hotel. “I can remember her saying how excited she was to read a script that dealt with so many grown-up issues for her about love, relationships, honesty, trust, paranoia, and in the form of a detective genre piece,” Campion says. “It reminded her very much of a film like ‘Klute’ that she -- that we all -- loved.”

“She came in and we did two hours of work,” Ruffalo recalls, “basically, this scene where Malloy shows up at Franny’s apartment.” In the film’s scenario, Malloy and his homicide cop partner, Rodriguez, played by Nick Damici, are on the hunt for a serial killer who may threaten Franny and her beloved half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). When Malloy meets Franny, who’s a language professor but spends much of the movie silent other than muttering the odd, zinging retort, they have a wordless testing of wills.

“We knocked [the scene] around,” says Ruffalo, who ramped up to hammering intensity until Ryan, as Franny, visibly broke down. “I realized I didn’t know Meg Ryan,” he says. “She earned this part the old-fashioned way.”

CHARACTER’S STORY

Because the story involves a good deal of mystery and narrative misdirection as to who may be the killer and what kind of risks Franny is taking, Campion demanded the actors work without familiar crutches. “I’ve observed that where [actors] communicate in tics and winks and turns to punctuate their behavior in films, to make it easy for the editors to cut -- it starts to become a mannerism which keeps you away from the character.”

Ruffalo wanted to bring out Malloy’s “authority,” he recalls, but met his match in Ryan’s Franny: “She wasn’t pulling punches -- you’re really fighting for it, which makes Franny’s character come alive.”

To Ryan, Franny’s back story of emotional abandonment by her father and ill luck in romance has made her “such a remote person, so far inside herself that I thought of her as somebody in a kind of remission. She’s so heartbroken and so disappointed, she’s so given up on love and romance, particularly romance. She’s just sort of shrunken into her refuge of language and books. And she does this really heroic thing, which is reach out from that distant place and connect with another human being.”

Campion wanted the early, abrupt scenes of lovemaking to be as romance-free as possible. “She didn’t want anything coy,” Ryan recalls. “That was really a pretty simple thing to say but eliminated a lot of behaviors and encouraged other ones. She encouraged me to watch ‘Don’t Look Now,’ with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, all that sexuality. Jane’s idea is completely take romance out of the picture, all the lies that come with that, and get down to the real power. Their sexual relationship in the movie begins with that and sort of evolves, or devolves, into a kiss. Jane just turned it all on its head.”

Though Franny and Malloy’s story moves in time from raw intimacy to something more tender, Campion saved the rawest scenes for late in the shoot.

On Day 45, Ruffalo recalls, “You walk out, and now it’s time to take your clothes off. There was a surliness, pretty quickly followed by just playfulness. I had to wear a sock, so we drew a face on it -- whatever we could do to keep it light. We’d choreographed a lot of the scene; you had Jane yelling directives to us like, ‘Be a man, take control, Mark! You’re confident, you’re confident!’ ”

Ruffalo mimics his own response through gritted teeth: “ ‘I know, Jane, I’m confident -- leave me alone!’ It’s odd, but I think what makes it all kind of beautiful and intimate and adult is the sense of humor that was carrying us during the love scenes.” Ryan had agreed early on to the nudity, Campion says. “Meg said to me, I’m not that concerned. I haven’t done a lot of nudity, but I’ve got a perfectly good body and I’m not ashamed of it.” The actress says the day itself “wasn’t that hard; there was a great circle of trust and love that Jane was able to construct -- you want to have a little of that, trust me. It’s not the day you look forward to on the schedule, but she made it fantastic and so did Mark, and we laughed a lot.”

END OF A MARRIAGE

With the film launched at Toronto and distributor Screen Gems is poised to use it to enhance its own profile as Sony’s genre label, Ryan is poised to leave her bad patch behind. The waiter in the Venice restaurant that seems made for Volvo owners has asked after her son Jack -- he used to serve the family at another spot east of here -- and when she shows Jack’s picture, she unhesitatingly points out how much Dennis Quaid is in Jack’s look “and even the way he stands.”

She’s more aware than even her fiercest detractors that the residue of l’affaire Crowe could linger. Yet Ryan doesn’t regret making “Proof of Life” (“I think he’s really good in it,” is all she’ll volunteer about her co-star and onetime lover). Nor would she cancel out the changes in her life.

“Would I have done anything different? I wish that the end of my marriage wasn’t so dramatic or public. I don’t talk about the reasons my marriage dissolved, but they could fill in the blanks. I wish it wasn’t messy, but it was.

“All the while I thought I was just living my life. I think the tabloid press is getting worse ‘cause there are more venues that they have to provide for; they’ve got a whole system worked out to shake you down. I feel sort of dopey complaining about it because it’s such a nothing part of your life ... [but] to think that there’s rooms full of people going, ‘That’s a good story, that’s a good story’ -- it’s unbelievable that that exists. It’s quite enough to go through a divorce -- you don’t need it billboarded.”

Longtime friend Michael Hoffman, who directed Ryan in “Promised Land” and “Restoration,” sees the media flap this way: “Everybody was interested in that because there was a fable going on about the bad boy and the good girl; it was all about everyone who wants to project onto her this notion of being America’s sweetheart, and then punish her if she doesn’t live up to their mythologizing.”

“I think we’re glad we’re divorced,” Ryan says, “but we’re good parents. We’ve got it together, and we both adore Jack. But you know, that marriage is done.”

Ryan went straight from the Canadian shoot for “Against the Ropes” to her grueling summer of 2002 making “In the Cut” and has not taken a job since. “I’ve been hanging out with Jack, with my friends, taking a lot of photographs, trying to be an L.A. person.” Looking ahead, “I honestly have no idea what I’m going to do.”

And the vicissitudes of her last few years -- could those have fueled the creative streak she’s on?

“I don’t know,” she considers. “I don’t think you want to cultivate dramatic and traumatic experiences in your life in order to be an artist. I think that’s all wrong. But you can use them.

“I also think there’s a redemptive power in your own life when you go through hardships. We all have a story of personal transformation that involves trauma and drama. And I just choose to look at it like, ‘It served something.’ ”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Ryan and her projects

At least one critic has called Ryan “a revelation” for her turn in the drama “In the Cut,” but she notes that only a few of her movies have been comedies. Her portrayals include Jim Morrison’s drug-addled wife in “The Doors” and an alcoholic in “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Summing up, the actress says, “I don’t know what the typical Meg Ryan movie is.”

‘IN THE CUT’: With Mark Ruffalo in the new film directed by Jane Campion.

‘FLESH AND BONE’: Opposite Dennis Quaid, from whom she now is divorced.

‘ADDICTED TO LOVE’: The comedy paired Ryan with Matthew Broderick.

‘PROOF OF LIFE’: Co-starring with Russell Crowe resulted in a romantic affair.

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Making a name in romantic comedies

Ryan’s irresistibility in lighter fare brought droves of fans to theaters and helped raise her fee to $15 million per film. She returned to the genre after making the drama “Proof of Life” with Russell Crowe, but “Kate & Leopold” proved far less lucrative than her top comedies. As for salary, Ryan has cut her price for roles in her edgier films.

‘KATE & LEOPOLD’: The 2001 effort matched her with Hugh Jackman.

‘YOU’VE GOT MAIL’: In ‘98, Tom Hanks and Ryan reworked their earlier chemistry.

‘SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE’: Also with Hanks in a hit film from 1993.

‘WHEN HARRY MET SALLY ...’: A notable deli scene with Billy Crystal from ’89.