tribeca film festival

Reality Bites Reunion: All Hail Winona Ryder and a Surprise from Lisa Loeb

Ryder, Ben Stiller, Ethan Hawke, and Janeane Garofalo came together to celebrate 25 years.

May 6, 2019

For onetime Gen X urbanites, there are few things more poignant than 1994’s Reality Bites and its breakout single by Lisa Loeb, “Stay (I Missed You).” So you can imagine the gasps and cheers that broke out when Loeb herself stepped out, unannounced, to perform the song after the Tribeca Film Festival’s 25-year anniversary screening of the Helen Childress–penned, Ben Stiller–directed cult classic. Phones were grabbed in tandem with tissues while she played through the film’s rolling credits.

That all-too-brief acoustic performance set a high bar for the sold-out Saturday afternoon crowd at the Stella Artois Theatre—but it was one that Childress, Stiller; stars Ethan Hawke, Winona Ryder, and Janeane Garofalo; and producers Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher gamely met. From high-flying recollections (in the case of Hawke, literally—“My memory at Sundance is being on the ski lift, with Steve Zahn smoking a bowl and saying to him, ‘Wow, don’t you feel like this is a big deal?’”) to revelations (Ryder always thought her Lelaina would end up in a lesbian relationship with Garofalo’s Vickie after Troy’s novelty faded), their sprawling, 50-minute conversation covered it all.

The main takeaway, though, was that the film simply wouldn’t have gone from the “Untitled Baby Busters Project” to the classic it is today without Ryder. With a résumé that at that point included Beetlejuice, Heathers, Edward Scissorhands, Bram Stroker’s Dracula, The Age of Innocence, and many more, Ryder was the poster girl for young Hollywood at that time, and, as Stiller said, she had “all this power to make a movie.”

“I wasn’t aware of that,” Ryder quipped.

“Yeah, it never felt like you were aware of it,” Stiller replied. “You just were like, ‘I love this, and I just want to empower all of you to do the best you can and to have a good experience. I want to be a part of the experience.’ That was so important.”

Childress was grateful for Ryder’s desire to embolden an original script by a woman, something she cited as a “handicap,” especially in the early 90s. “Winona was so empowered, and she empowered another woman, which means a lot to me,” the screenwriter said before Stiller added: “Really, it changed the trajectory of my career, and none of it would’ve happened if Winona hadn’t said, ‘I wanna do this movie.’ It just wouldn’t have happened.”

Hawke also believes the film, and by extension Ryder, revamped his acting career. Reality Bites was one of the first opportunities the Dead Poets Society breakout had to play a leading man, and Ryder was the one who “brought us all together,” he said.

“We all are indebted to Winona using her strength and her power at that moment to care about another woman’s voice, to really caring and giving it a chance. I’m indebted. Winona believed in me, Winona got me this job, and this job changed the trajectory of my career entirely,” he said.

For her part, Ryder remembered calling Hawke from the set of The House of the Spirits to convince him to do the film as well. “I was in Portugal, and I was playing a Chilean prisoner. I had all these fake bruises and cuts,” she said. “I was like, ‘Ethan, man, you gotta do this!’” Hawke, meanwhile, was surprised she was interested in the film’s then-little-known creative team at all: “I was like, ‘Who is Ben Stiller? Didn’t you just work with Scorsese?’”

Hawke wasn’t the only part of the film that Ryder’s involvement actualized. Sher and Shamberg were prepared to travel to Ireland to beg Bono to let them use U2’s “All I Want Is You” on their soundtrack, Sher said, but their trip was canceled at the last minute. “We were going to have to carry the cans of film to Ireland, and we got a call in the middle of the screening [in the airport] that Bono had said yes because he knows Winona!”

Ryder was self-effacing in the face of all of the attention and praise. “I feel like the lucky one, and I feel like it couldn’t have been made without every ingredient up here,” she said. The two-time Oscar nominee signed on to the film in the first place because she thought it was “this great little story about these friends,” and she saw bits of herself in the film’s fledgling, early-20s film director, Lelaina. “I always sort of—because I started so young, I wondered maybe [if] that had been what I would’ve possibly done if I hadn’t gotten into acting. I felt a connection.”

Other highlights of the May 4 event included Garofalo admitting that she was fired from the film before Stiller took her back (“Apparently, I was—as was my wont back then—behaving in a rather immature manner on set and was not respecting the authority”); Sher revealing that the original ending was an even bigger middle finger to the Man (“When I first read the script, they had blown up the BMW to literally topple capitalism”); and Hawke recounting how his improvised rendition of Gregory Corso’s poem “Marriage” helped relieve the beat poet of his mounting medical bills through his final years.

“A couple years after [Reality Bites] came out, I’m in New York City, and Gregory Corso is doing a poetry reading, and I’m there, and he comes up and he hugs me and he introduces me in front of the group,” Hawke said. “He says, ‘This is an angel,’ because he’d been getting residual checks!” Hawke said that those checks offset Corso’s medical bills before his death in 2001: “This movie saved a beat poet’s last few years.”

When asked to name his favorite memory of working on Reality Bites, Stiller waxed about editing the film alongside editor Lisa Churgin (“I just feel really lucky that I had that process on this movie”) before adding that the day’s 25-year anniversary event would definitely go in the books as a personal highlight.

“One of my favorite experiences associated with the movie would be today, watching the movie today with this audience here, and having the opportunity to share this with you guys,” Stiller said. “We’re all having this one experience here. It’s not on television. No one else is going to experience it. We’re having it. It’s emotional for me to be here and to hear the movie with an audience, to hear your reactions, to feel it together—and to still be here 25 years later. I’m very grateful for that.”

Benjamin Lindsay