The day before Halloween 1992, Winona Ryder sits in a hotel room in New York City with her hands squeezed between her knees. She has just seen Dracula for the first time and she feels "shaky." Suddenly the doorbell rings and it's Anthony Hopkins, stocky, suited, and freshly shorn, who takes the tiny 21-year-old actress into his arms and twirls her around the room in a massive hug, her feet swinging, as daintily as feet can in combat boots, several inches above the carpet.
''Did you see the movie?'' he says, smiling madly, setting her down.
''I just did,'' she says, and bends slightly and shakes her arms in front of her and makes a kind of quivering sound like a paid mourner hovering over her own grave.
Hopkins protected Ryder, she says, in a scene where the older English actor, as mad Dr. Van Helsing, builds a ring of fire around the young actress, playing the nearly undead Mina, to ward off Dracula's vampire brides. Ryder has a fear of fire, and she'd been dreading that scene for the entire shoot.
''The flames were sweeping in, and we're in the middle, and he's doing this whole performance, and I was crying,'' she recalls. ''At one point his leg caught on fire, and I was putting it out. But Anthony was very protective; every time they cut, he would lift me up and hold me.''
Hopkins says, "Remember the rats?'' and laughs uproariously. ''I did well with the rats,'' Ryder says of the scene in which Dracula escapes the bedroom where Mina has holed up by turning himself into an extended family of rats. ''When it was over I stood up on that bed and I said, 'Yes!''' Ryder puts her thumbs up in the air, victorious.
''Winona has a fear of everything,'' Coppola says when he hears her stories about the fire and the rats. ''But she did get on the bed and there were rats on it — that was her greatest day, and she was very proud.'' Then he smiles and says, under his breath, ''The rats were a mile away.''
Early 1991: Having just finished The Godfather, Part III, Coppola began to hear from a variety of sources that Winona Ryder thought he didn't like her. The young actress, you'll remember, had been scheduled to play Mary Corleone in Godfather III but dropped out at the last possible minute, leading the director to cast his daughter, Sofia, a move that subjected both father and daughter to what surely was devastating criticism.
So Coppola invited Ryder to his office, just to let her know he wasn't angry. The meeting must have gone well, because on her way out, she handed him a script of a movie she was interested in doing: a new version of Dracula, which Hook screenwriter James V. Hart had adapted from Stoker's novel. Three days later she got the call. Coppola was interested in doing it too.
There is great, meticulous method in Coppola's madness. After agreeing to direct Dracula, he started right in on storyboarding the thing — having an artist draw each shot in the film until there were about a thousand images that together told the story: how the vampire Dracula comes to 1890s London, 400 years after his beloved wife committed suicide, only to find her reincarnated as Mina, the innocent young fiancée of Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) and best friend to Lucy (Sadie Frost), a wild, libidinous girl whom Dracula ravishes and destroys while courting the woman he has crossed oceans of time to find.
Coppola took the artist's drawings and filmed them, creating a crudely animated version of the movie he wished to make. He set this to music, and added clips from movies like Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast as well as reproductions of works by such symbolist painters as Gustav Klimt, so that when he was ready to sit his designers down, he'd have some way to communicate the tone and mood and world he was hoping to capture. He asked the people designing his sets and costumes and makeup to think "weird."
'''Weird' became a code word for 'Let's not do formula,''' says Coppola. '''Give me something that either comes from the research or that comes from your own nightmares.' I gave them paintings, and I gave them drawings, and I talked to them about how I thought the imagery could work.'' In one of the art books that he showed his cast and crew, Dreamers of Decadence, he had underlined the sentence, ''Our century is not moving towards either good or evil: it is moving towards mediocrity.''
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