Michelle Pfeiffer talks about her recent film

If there’s one thing Michelle Pfeiffer can’t stand, it’s movies about kidnapped kids. In fact, she bolted out of the 1996 Mel Gibson thriller Ransom after all of 10 minutes. ”I physically couldn’t stay in my seat,” she recalls. ”I hate movies where the plot hinges on a child in jeopardy.”

And yet here she is, producing and starring in the mother of all missing-children dramas, The Deep End of the Ocean, playing a mom who loses her 3-year-old son in a crowded hotel lobby — and doesn’t get him back for nine years. ”There were times during production,” she goes on, ”when I said to myself, ‘Why am I doing this? What was I thinking?’ There were scenes that were excruciating to film.”

Actually, the really excruciating part came after filming, in the editing room, where Pfeiffer and director Ulu Grosbard (Georgia, True Confessions) battled over the movie’s ending. But even before that, Ocean — costarring Treat Williams as her husband, Whoopi Goldberg as the gay cop who tries to help her, Jonathan Jackson (General Hospital) as Pfeiffer’s elder son, and Ryan Merriman (Lansky) as her lost-and-found little boy — was having some trouble getting home.

Based on Jacquelyn Mitchard’s 1996 novel, the project was being hotly pursued in Hollywood even while the book was still in galleys. Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey (who gave the tome her very first TV endorsement, catapulting it to the top of the best-seller list) were both said to be highly interested. But Pfeiffer and her longtime producing partner, Kate Guinzburg (Dangerous Minds, One Fine Day), pounced first. ”Kate sent me the book,” Pfeiffer recalls. ”There were times when I couldn’t put it down, and there were times when I had to put it down, just to catch my breath.”

Of course, squeezing Mitchard’s harrowing 400-plus-page novel into a filmable 125-page script had its own perils. A first attempt by Ken Hixon (Inventing the Abbotts) was deemed ”too TV movie-ish, too sentimental,” according to Grosbard, who agreed to sign on to the project only if a new script was commissioned. Former New Yorker film critic Stephen Schiff, who’d just massaged Vladimir Nabokov’s prose into a screenplay for Adrian Lyne’s Lolita, got the job. He lopped away much of the book’s middle, jettisoning subplots (like Mom’s extramarital affair) and whittling down characters (making Goldberg’s cop little more than a cameo), but ultimately managed to stick remarkably close to the novel. Mitchard, in fact, was kept regularly apprised of his progress — whether she liked it or not.

”They would send me scripts,” recalls the author, ”but I wouldn’t read them. That would be like living with your kid after he’s married.”

Casting the $40 million film was tricky as well. More than 1,800 toddlers and teens auditioned for the part of the lost boy. ”It was like a chess game,” says Grosbard. ”First we had to find a 12-year-old actor for the second half of the movie, when the kid comes back home. Then we had to find a 3-year-old, who looked like he might grow into the 12-year-old, for the first part of the movie.” A physical resemblance to Pfeiffer helped Jackson land his part (”He looks so much like me, it made me nervous,” she says). And Williams was Grosbard’s initial choice (”The first time that’s happened in my career,” cracks the actor) for the husband.