This is so erotic.' So when it came to editing the film, we decided we didn't need the lovemaking scenes – the sensualness of the pottery scene was everything. The look on their faces was so real and funny and immediate, and whatever that was, we all thought, 'This is so sensual. "So we shot the pottery scene first – she's making this big, almost phallic pot, and then it collapses.
And it was going to be full of light, and we were going to see images of them, some underneath and above the tarp. Then the plan was for Molly and Sam to dance and then make love under the parachute-type tarp on the floor. The jukebox was Jerry's own, and producer Lisa Weinstein had brought in the music for 'Unchained Melody' one afternoon and we all knew that was it. Jerry suggested she be a potter interestingly, my wife is a potter, and I know a lot about pottery. "Basically, I originally thought of Molly as a sculptress, not a potter. Because if we hadn't been able to cast Patrick, the studio was going to can the film."
And that's how we got Patrick, and that's how the movie got made. He came in, did that, and by the end we were all crying. I pushed Jerry to let it happen, so I called Patrick directly on the phone, told him to wear a suit and tie, carry a briefcase, and told him a few scenes to read, including the last one in the film. "So I called Patrick's agent without anyone knowing to tell him to call Jerry to ask if Patrick could read for the role. It was the most incredible, unaffected masculine cry I'd ever seen, and I thought, 'We should approach this guy.' "One night I saw a Barbara Walters interview with Patrick Swayze, and he started talking about his father who had died, and he started crying. It looked like the movie wasn't going to get made. Fox and Paul Hogan, and a whole list of guys, all turned it down. We started off with Harrison Ford, but he said to us, 'I've read this thing three times, but I still don't get it.' Michael J. "Patrick Swayze was not our first choice. Just about every leading man in Hollywood turned down the role. One day, we realised we had the script right, and we had a movie that flowed pretty much like it does on the screen." The best part of that process was that the Oda Mae character became funnier than ever. Eventually Jerry said, 'None of this is working, let's try to do this,' and we started edging all the way back almost to the point where I started. I couldn't bear it any more it was so painful. "About six months in, it was so far from its original intent that I thought we should quit. He wanted to cut everything! Man, he had some horrible ideas! I spent an entire year with him rewriting the movie. But Jerry and I met, and became good friends immediately, but when we sat down to discuss Ghost, that was when the knives came out. "The movie Beetlejuice had come out a little before this, and I suddenly had this horrible fear that we were gonna be turned into that kind of wacky movie. Jerry Zucker, the director of spoof comedies Airplane and The Naked Gun, ended up getting the job. In the second scene, his father's ghost appears and says, 'Avenge my death.' When I saw that, something in me went, 'Yes! That's the engine I need to drive this film.' I loved the idea that a guy who is dead has to figure out who killed him and why, but it wasn't enough, so I had to add one more element, which was the urgency of having to save the life of the woman he loves." I originally thought he would be a suicide, but then I saw a production of Hamlet. "I didn't know what the story was, except I knew that it should be a about a man who didn't believe in anything. I was working on other scripts and ideas – in this time I wrote the script for Jacob's Ladder – and while I was doing that, I decided I wanted to tell a ghost story from the side of the ghost. One of those got made by Brian DePalma, called Brainstorm, which was Natalie Wood's last film.
"I wrote a few early scripts as a way of learning how to be a screenwriter. The film took its inspiration from Shakespeare.