I Blame Dennis Hopper (20 page)

Our other tech advisor, also a survivor, was Roberto Canessa. If Nando was the kind and loving supportive father figure, Roberto Canessa was the tough love father I also needed. Nando was serenity. Roberto was strength. I was complaining to him about something that was happening in my life, and he said, “You'd better grow up, because you're not a little girl anymore.” It was like being slapped in the face. Yeah. Try not to whine to someone who managed to walk out of the Andes alive. Roberto told me I had to be stronger than any of the men on the film. “Lilliana never cried,” he said. “Remember that.” We were filming the avalanche scene. I was buried under the snow, in a specially designed set we called the mausoleum. I had a breathing tube that was about to be pulled from my mouth. From above, I could hear the muffled noises of the crew and the actors. From under the snow I heard the cameraman Dave say, “Illeana is packed in snow! Let's move!” My head had a gigantic ice cream headache going through it, but I had to pretend I was dead. I couldn't scream in pain. I couldn't move. They pulled the breathing tube. All I had now was the trust that the actors would pull me out to safety. We shot it again and again, until my face was scratched with snow and ice. My hands and feet were numb. Each time something would go wrong. Frank would say to me, “Can you do it one more time?” I'd think, I cannot do this. I can't feel my face. But somehow I found the strength to continue. I didn't want to let Frank down. The hardest thing about climbing under again was that you knew how scary it was going to be. In the years since
Alive
, I've been on a lot of sets, and folks have said to me, “You don't complain much, do you?” I've just laughed.

We were shooting a very difficult scene, the one in which we decide that we will eat the bodies of the dead. We had gone on a three-day fast before it to get into character. For two days Frank pumped the soundtrack of
The Mission
over loudspeakers to get us in the mood before we shot. It felt so real, and I had never been more proud of the work we all did over those two days. Saturday night came, and to reward us, Frank said we were all going out to dinner in Invermere. The cast, the survivors, everybody. We could have anything we wanted except for bread, pasta, or dessert. We got to the restaurant—The Windy—before Frank and Kathy and associate producer Bruce Cohen arrived, and we saw pasta with four cheeses on the menu. It sounded incredible. We were so proud of ourselves that we were going to get away with this, and we all ordered it. The waitress looked at us and said, “I'm really sorry, but Frank and Kathy already called ahead. You can't have the pasta.” They knew our every move!

Later that night, Frank pulled me aside and told me there had been something wrong with the focus, and none of my close-ups was usable. They would all have to be shot again. At first I thought it was a joke, but he was not kidding. I slowly walked backed to the table and told my castmates what had happened. I was reeling. How on earth would I be able to re-create that scene alone, without the rest of the cast? Some of the actors gathered around me. Ethan Hawke was kneeling next to me; Josh Hamilton was holding my hand. Jack Noseworthy, Christian Meoli, Kevin Breznahan. They said, “Illeana, we'll be there for you, OK? Don't worry.” If I had climbed the mountain looking for something, I was beginning to find it.

On the day we reshot the scene, every actor in the movie was there for me off camera. It's hard to describe the feeling you have when your fellow actors do something like that. When they let you know, as Jack Noseworthy had said in his thick Boston accent, “Honey, we got your back.” Ethan was doing his same lines again off camera, and he was just tearing it up, drawing everything I had in me out of me again, and shouting at me, “If we want to live, we're going to have to eat!” He'd lost fifteen pounds by then.

Someone recently asked me who the most surprising person I've ever worked with was. Ethan Hawke. Ethan so dramatically affected my life that when we finished shooting
Alive
I wrote him a thank-you note. I told him that knowing him had changed me. And it did. He was an artist. He may have looked like a shaggy puppy, but he was one of the most inspiring people I have ever met. Ethan made me excited and hopeful about music, movies, art, books, you name it. His authenticity and daring to be an artist affected me.

I was doing a film after
Alive
, and I just didn't feel like I fit in in the same way I had on that set. Ethan, who was on his way to Texas, drove sideways to Wilmington, North Carolina, just to cheer me up. “Fuck 'em,” he said. “Stop trying to please everybody. Just do your work.” And he was right. The night he got there I watched Ethan walk into a roomful of strangers, introduce himself, and just start playing the guitar. I'll never forget it. I thought, I want to be like that. Just fearless.

On
Alive
, Ethan's condo was the hub of late-night discussions with the cast about movies, music, sex, lack of sex, food, lack of food. All I wanted when I got home was cherry pie. We painted pictures. We played music. Wrote songs. Read scenes from plays by Sam Shepard. We were pretty “artsy.” We all talked about wanting to make movies like the ones John Cassavetes had. It was Ethan who said to me, “You need to direct. I'll help you.” And he did. When I got home from
Alive
, I used to joke, the rest of the cast bought cars; I made a movie. I wrote and directed and starred in my first short film,
The Perfect Woman
. Ethan helped me cast it, and he was also my clapper.

We borrowed a camera from Marty—one he had got from none other than John Cassavetes—to shoot it.
The Perfect Woman
was later bought by Miramax. I remember standing backstage at the New York Film Festival. It was playing the closing night before
The Piano
, and I was standing next to Harvey Weinstein, and he said, “I'm going to buy this movie,” and he did. Here's how I thanked Ethan. He had never seen the film
East of Eden
, so I asked Marty if he could screen it for him and some of the cast of
Alive.
Maybe we could even invite Elia Kazan himself to talk about it. Marty had never met Mr. Kazan, but he invited him, and sure enough he came. It led to a lasting friendship between the two masters. Picture the scene: this group of hot young actors, jammed into Martin Scorsese's screening room, watching
East of Eden
with Elia Kazan. There was the emotion of the film. The emotion of watching it with Kazan. Marty watching it with Kazan. The lights came on, and there wasn't a dry eye in the house. It was pretty special. That was all because of
Alive
.
Alive
awakened the artist in us. I've fallen off the mountain a few times since then, but it was on the set of
Alive
that I accepted that I
was
“artsy.” I was an artist. I would die for my art. Well, almost.

For three days I had been starving myself in an attempt to be “in character” to shoot a part of a scene that had never been completed. The problem was the weather would change so rapidly on the mountain that many times you would be in the middle of shooting a scene when the weather suddenly wouldn't match what you'd been shooting. So you'd have to start to shoot another scene. The call sheet, which lists the day's scenes, was six pages long! It read, “Under cloudy conditions to be completed: list of scenes. Under sunny to be completed: list of scenes.” I needed sunny conditions to complete this scene in which I was supposed to be very hungry. The sun kept going down before we got to my scene. It had been five days of Frank's telling me, “I promise. We'll get to it tomorrow.” It was my own idea simply to stop eating. We had done one fast already, but I wanted to take it further. Starve for my art! And I was starving.

The sun went down, and I was sitting in the snow on what they call an “apple box”—there were no chairs—and Frank came up to me that fifth day shaking his head, grinning with the usual “Sorry, Illeana; we'll definitely get to it tomorrow.” We had been there so long, I forgot what civilization looked like, and I guess the conditions finally got to me. I stood up and said, “That is it. That's it! I'm leaving.” And I walked off the set. Problem was, we were on a mountain. I still remember the look on Bruce Cohen's face as I just started to walk past the plane set and out into the snow. I mean, we were forbidden from walking away from the boundaries of the set. It was quite dangerous, but I was walking somewhere, stomping off in the snow. Pretty soon Frank Marshall was told what was happening, and he and Bruce came after me in a snowmobile. I'm stomping along, and I could hear Bruce talking in hushed tones, explaining, because clearly I had lost my mind, “Frank, she hasn't eaten in three days.” And Frank's saying, “Can we get her some food? Is there anything here?” And Bruce's saying, “I think we have some baked potatoes left over from lunch.” The next thing I knew, they were radioing base camp. I heard the second assistant director tell Bruce, over the walkie-talkie, that the potato was on the way. Then the second assistant director came snowmobiling out to Bruce and Frank with the potato. Handed it to him. The second A.D. said to Bruce, “This is all that was left.” I saw this shriveled, burned little baked-potato half. Frank shook his head as Bruce handed him this measly little thing. But he's the director; he's in charge. He is going to get me to eat. He starts pushing this potato at me, saying, “Illeana, eat the potato. C'mon. You have to eat something.” He had the little shriveled half a potato in his hand, and he was saying, “Please. Illeana, please eat the potato.” And I was starving, and I wanted that potato so bad, but there was another part of me that was so stubborn; I just did not want to accept that fucking potato because it was like accepting that I was wrong, that I needed help. I was so tired. I was so hungry. I was looking into Frank's eyes. He was holding out the potato, and I was like a wounded animal as I took it from his hands. I put that cold, hard, shriveled potato in my mouth and started to chew. Much-needed blood sugar started to flow to my brain. Frank walked out to the snow, and I just collapsed in his arms crying. “We won't tell Marty about this,” he said, and I started to laugh. My director was holding me in his arms. Holding me till I felt safe. And eventually, true to his word, we did get that scene.

When
Alive
was over for me, my knees buckled under me as I tried to walk away from the plane. I knew things would never be the same in the real world as they had been on the mountain. Love. Trust. Safety. We had distilled everything that was good in one another. I had learned so many life lessons. I was wearing a plastic T-shirt designed to give me some protection from the snow. On the back one of the cast had written,
I TASTE LIKE CHICKEN.
I weighed 112 pounds. I had worn the same filthy dress for four months. I hadn't bathed or showered in weeks. I had cried over a baked potato. Frank Marshall hugged me. We had all become these great huggers. Kevin Breznahan said, “Illeana was our wife, our girlfriend, our sister, and our mother.” Nicest thing anyone ever said to me. The last night I was there, Ethan and Josh Hamilton and I rolled downhill together outside Ethan's condo. There was no more snow on the ground. It was spring. We decided that if there was a heaven, it looked like the stars above us.

In the morning, I boarded a single-engine plane to Calgary. I eventually flew for sixteen hours, no sleep, one plane to another, finally landing in Wilmington, North Carolina. I had become what I had always wanted to be, but there were sacrifices.
Alive
went over schedule, and now I was flying straight to another movie,
Household Saints
. I hadn't seen Marty in four months. He said to me, “What do you want to eat when you get home?”

I said wistfully, “Cherry pie.”

I was on the set of
Household Saints.
And it was hot. Close to a hundred degrees. I missed the snow and cold of the mountain. The movie took place in the '50s, so they had cut my hair, dyed it black. I was in a black '50s dress. We were shooting a wedding scene. It was supposed to be in Greenwich Village. Someone handed me a baby to hold. I was trying to ground myself, but nothing seemed familiar to me. I had no idea who I was or what had happened to me. I was a cannibal.
No
, I was a housewife. I was standing next to Tracey Ullman, who was the lead in the film. She was the star of
The Tracey Ullman Show
. I idolized her, but I was so disoriented that I was still searching for something to say to her when she said, “Someone just told me you were shooting a movie on a fucking iceberg?”

“Something like that,” I said quietly. The days went by. I was so lonely, but there was no one around who could hug me until I felt safe.

Now, I don't remember this—it was told to me after the fact—but when I finally did make it home, apparently I ate an entire cherry pie, by myself. Marty planned this special dinner for me, and invited Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, who were in
The Age of Innocence.
We were at the dining room table and everyone was laughing, and I said, “What?” and Marty said, “You just ate that entire pie!” I looked, and the pie plate was empty.

I said, “Oh, my God. Why didn't you say anything?” And Daniel said, “You seemed to be enjoying it.” Now I started laughing. We were all sitting at the table, laughing. I looked at the empty pie plate. I looked at Marty. I was home. We were going upstairs. Marty was screening
Sullivan's Travels
for Daniel and Winona. They had never seen it. I think I laughed more at
Sullivan's Travels
than any movie I had seen. “There's a lot to be said for making people laugh” learns the director, played by Joel McCrea. I had climbed that mountain, and attained that missing something I would be able to talk about for the rest of my life. I was, as Nando had hoped, “happy just to be alive.”