There are certain people that fill up a television screen.
Patrick filled up a movie screen.
I mean, there's never been anybody quite like Buddy.
By the way, I was never able to call him that.
He was always Patrick to me.
I may be the only person in the world. "Call me
Buddy" and I just couldn't.
I just couldn't do it.
He was passionate and intense about everything.
Everything.
He was this macho guy, but he truly had the soul of a poet.
I think he had a beautiful balance
between strength and softness,
his vulnerability and then his pure strength.
He wasn't a tough guy, even though he was a very tough guy.
He was just an open book,
and that's, again, the best actors are like,
"Here's my heart. You want some?"
Patrick was super hungry for connection.
His heart and my heart got along really well.
He spoke to people. He was that kind of guy.
He spoke to people. He resonated with an audience.
He was a movie star.
He had the qualities. He had them all.
He was the type of guy that wanted to make a dance movie
and made the best dance movie.
He wanted to write his own song. His song goes number one.
He would tell you almost immediately
all the things that he's done.
You were a gymnast and a world class cowboy roping guy,
and a ballet dancer? He was.
He had a level of expertise in a lot of different areas.
I think always, no matter how much fame you get as an actor,
you still wonder if you're good, if you're good enough.
Acting is the first thing
I've ever found where you can never be the best.
You can never reach the end of that challenge.
I think that's really important.
The first time I met Patrick, I was involved
with the children's theater group in Houston, Texas,
and they had joined forces
with his mom's dance school and company.
I walked by the door where I looked in at the dance class,
and she said, "Come on in."
I said, "I don't really have the money to pay."
She goes, "That doesn't matter," and actually, for a full year,
she taught me free of charge.
Here comes Lisa, sort of shy
and wouldn't fall on all over him like the other girls,
and I think the challenge is what just drove him nuts.
He had this kind of reputation of being this Casanova
and this egotistical guy, and I was always so quiet,
you could almost make up anything about me.
There was definitely a spark and something was happening,
and the first time Buddy and I danced together
was at a school exhibition. We walked down on stage.
You'd do your classic intro where you gesture to each other,
and it was almost like the whole stage filled with light.
Even though it was just like school auditorium lights,
but it was almost like we were lit,
and the moment I looked in his eyes,
it was like everything came alive.
Part of it was the act of performing.
People who are performers know that wonderful magic
that happens when you...
when the lights come up on you on stage,
but so much of it was what we saw in each other.
There was something about him.
When I looked at him, what I saw was pure gold,
and I think probably he looked at me
and he saw something else
than what other people were seeing also.
He had a Quarter Horse, Cloud,
he'd ridden and kept cattle with.
Cloud was going to live out his days at the ranch.
He had a horse whisperer quality about him.
He was very soft in that way.
It doesn't surprise me that he took tremendous amount of solace
in just being alone and taking care of things.
The animals, plants, trees, the farm, the ranch,
that would have been in his sweet spot.
There were several times when Buddy was really upset,
maybe he had some disappointment,
and he got on Cloud.
He packed a little knapsack, got on Cloud,
and went back in the mountains, slept overnight.
It really helped to bring him back down to earth.
Being an actor fed something in his soul.
He knew he was good at it, but give him his preferences,
he would be at home with the horses,
working with a tool belt around his waist,
working on the ranch, working on the earth.
He rented the bulldozer and the backhoes and figured it out,
almost flipped the thing.
I mean, he learned the hard way how to move dirt.
He just came from this place,
this grounded dirt-moving cowboy place.
It's so hard to get Patrick to read scripts.
I've always wondered about that, why he wouldn't read,
and sometimes I think, when you have success,
you don't want to make a mistake.
When Ghost came and I said to him,
"You have to read it.
You have to," and he said, "What's it about?"
I said, "I'm not going to tell you."
Finally, after about two months, he sat down. He didn't get up.
I was sitting in the bedroom when he walked in.
He had tears in his eyes, and he says,
"I have to do this movie,"
so he was pitched to the director and the producers,
and they're like...
so they talk him into doing a screening of Roadhouse.
Movie finishes.
Jerry Zucker stands up, the director,
and announces to everyone, "No way on God's green earth
will Patrick Swayze ever do this movie."
I must have made 50 calls
so that they would at least meet him for Ghost.
Patrick was frustrated sometimes
because people did not take him seriously,
which was what he wanted more than anything.
Patrick manages to get a reading.
They read practically the whole script.
They got to the final scene.
Everybody in the office is crying.
He has tears.
The casting director reading with them is crying,
and he just got them.
He just got them, and that was it.
He got the part.
Pretty much every part that he really wanted,
he had to really fight for.
Whenever anything good in my life happens,
I'm just afraid I'm going to lose it.
I love you. I really love you.
Ditto.
When I think of Patrick, I think of gentility.
He was just this very sweet, like a regular guy,
this quiet, almost very mild-mannered person.
It's the contradiction of this extremely dynamic,
physical person.
It was a really interesting part of I think who he is.
I do remember a great need to work extremely hard
to counter the perception of him being like a hunky guy
or just his physicality.
It's almost like he had a feeling that,
to be taken seriously, that he really needed to work harder.
It was kind of just getting in there hands on,
and, obviously, in one of our most well-known scenes,
it was for real, literally, hands on.
What are you doing?
I couldn't sleep.
With the pottery scene, I think that there...
Something within his dance background
that I think also gave him a particular perception
in how to approach that.
That had a sense of a dance in a way to it.
Oh, no. I hope it wasn't a masterpiece.
The movement of it was so erotic and beautiful
and probably more than they imagined
even with what was written on the page.
I can definitely say that his appreciation
and his openness was a wonderful attribute to have in a partner.
This story in particular
really required a depth of vulnerability.
I know certainly, for me, and I think for Patrick,
that without that being believable,
I don't know if the movie would have worked.
I think Ghost is his best movie. I think it's his best movie.
Patrick was able to use what was really special to him,
maybe other than Dirty Dancing, which is another one
which I can't imagine anybody else doing.
Seeing that sort of rough guy give that big...
Dude, that speech he gives toward the end,
are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?
That's one of those things that you can pull up on YouTube.
Having never even seen the movie,
pull that up and watch that, and it's just-
I love you, Molly. I've always loved you.
Ditto.
I reevaluated my career out of internal need
as opposed to career need because,
you're right, after ghost, I had tons and tons of offers
coming in and all different kinds of films,
but I was having a very, very difficult time
finding anything that matched up
with what my insides were telling me to do.
When Patrick got City of Joy, he was really happy
because it had a prestigious director, Roland Joffé.
It wasn't based on his look. It was based on acting.
It was a really big deal to get that
instead of another action movie.
I'm just very excited that I got the chance to get to this place
and get to this level of movie. It's like life after sex symbol.
I first met Patrick, he came to my office at the time.
The staff was in a pitch of excitement,
particularly the female staff. What walked through the door
was this immensely likable surf bum really,
but with an extraordinarily open kind of curiosity.
I mean, very quickly,
I forgot I was talking to Patrick Swayze,
and I felt I was talking to somebody who really,
really wanted to know what did this story mean.
There were aspects of Patrick which I felt in that meeting.
This was somebody searching for a way of escaping
being what everybody was telling him he wanted to be,
and that became a theme,
and he was struggling to find the him inside that.
He was one of these actors also that brought his work home
with him. He lived in it.
He would have a hard time dropping the role
after he left the set, which was really tough on him.
The thing was City of Joy that broke my heart
was it wasn't received in the United States
the way he thought it was going to be,
and he was incredibly disappointed.
Hollywood as a whole saw him as a bonafide star
who could make money,
but I think that they, to some degree,
still wanted him to be that guy, the sexiest man alive.
I don't know that they wanted him to be the actor.
He wanted to be the actor.
You don't decide what the world thinks of you
or sees you or the place that the world puts you in.
That's the piece that was always missing for him I think,
that acceptance as an artist.
Being the star and being a character, it was...
It would have been a better place for him to move,
and I remember talking to him about that, and that...
He didn't feel that that was going to be a choice
that he could make, that it would be made for him,
that he wasn't looked at as an actor like that,
but he was looked at as a movie star,
and movie stars don't always get to do those parts,
and he was absolutely right.