Melanie Griffith Gets Real

NEW YORK — I had a fast, merry chat with Melanie Griffith, who will soon be seen in “Another Day in Paradise,” in which she gives a powerful, gritty, utterly glamourless performance as a drug addict on the run, opposite James Woods. Griffith says that Woods, with whom she has worked before, called her up and said, “I’m sending you a script . . . you have to do this [expletive] movie!” She laughed. “Well, I read it and loved it and we did it for nothing. But I’d rather do something like this, and be proud of it than get a lot of money for crap.”

The camerawork in “Paradise” is unsparing to Griffith and will startle those who still see her as a juicy young thing, bouncing around in comedies. But Griffith says, “Listen, I want to work till I drop. And you have to be realistic: You can’t be an ingenue forever. You can’t be eternally cute and sexy. I mean, this role was kind of extreme--the woman was supposed to be a mess--but if you’re going to work toward a lasting career, you can’t complain because you’re not getting enough diffusion on the lens.”