Demi Moore: Ghosts, dreams and tiniest dog you’ve ever met

When a 1 ½-pound dog hops on your lap, there is only one possible response — joy. The dog, a micro-Chihuahua named Pilaf, knows this, and Pilaf’s owner, Demi Moore, knows this as well, though that doesn’t mean she doesn’t apologise and ask if you’re OK with Pilaf taking liberties. I’ve had leaves fall on me that felt heavier than this dog, I tell her. Besides, who could resist an animal that its owner calls the “bonsai tree of dogs”? It’s been all of two minutes and already there’s a lifetime bond. We’re sitting on a couch in the pool house of a Mediterranean-style home in the Hollywood Hills that has been owned over the years by Mary Astor, record producer Marshall Chess and Marilyn Manson. Moore just kicked off her boots and, looking down at the transcription app running on my phone, starts telling me how she uses one to record her dreams.

“Sometimes I have a question that needs to be answered and I can ask that in my dreams,” Moore tells me.

“Like lucid dreaming?”

“More like dream incubation,” she answers.

Before I have time to properly follow up on that, and maybe because we’re sitting in a house giving off big ghost energy, we start talking about the dead appearing in our dreams — and our realities.

“My mother was a big smoker, and I have had quite a few experiences, not necessarily in my home, but in a hotel room or maybe a boat, and all of a sudden I smell cigarette smoke,” Moore says. “And there’s no logical explanation. And I think, ‘Maybe that’s my mom popping in.’”

Moore just posted a series of behind-the-scenes photos from her new movie, “The Substance,” that may haunt the dreams of anyone following her Instagram account.

Moore, 62, wrote with candor about her own struggles with body image in her 2019 memoir “Inside Out,” detailing the demands she put on herself, though they were often mandated by filmmakers, to project a certain physical ideal. Having read the book, it’s hard to imagine a better fit for the cautionary tale of “The Substance.”

I don’t know how hard you had to pitch yourself to win this part. But the book seems like a great way to move to the front of the line.

This movie is very personal to Coralie, and she wanted to make sure that she was going to cast someone who understood it. In many respects, Coralie is Elisabeth. So I just gave her my book. I’ve gone through a lot of stages in my own relationship with my body. So I understood the character, up to a point.

What aspects of Elisabeth baffled you?

I have family. I had my kids at 25. She’s the extreme version of someone placing their value completely in the validation of other people. Parts of Elisabeth’s story did hit me deeply, namely, the violence we can have against ourselves in the pursuit of some idea of perfection.

You went through a lot of that — dieting, extreme exercise routines — through the ‘80s and ‘90s ...

Being told to lose weight is humiliating. But nothing was as harsh as what I did to myself, and that’s why I think people relate to this movie. I had a young flight attendant, a gentleman, come up to me and say, “This movie made me look at what I was doing, the dieting and all these things, and I realised I just had to stop, go down a completely different path and be more kind to myself.” That’s the unexpected gift of making “The Substance.”

The scene that people talk to me about is when Elisabeth is getting ready for a date, trying to be normal, escape her self-imposed prison and make a human connection. But she keeps going back to the mirror, wiping off the makeup and starting again.

The movie goes to extreme places, but that scene is crucial because it anchors it to a reality that we’ve all felt — harsh judgment and self-sabotaging. You know that moment of, “Let me just do this to make it a little better,” and then we make it worse and we feel defeated. You don’t like your outfit, you’re changing and nothing’s fitting, nothing’s feeling good. But when we’re not feeling good on the inside, nothing on the outside is going to make it better.

Tribune News Service