WINNIPEG -- Patrick Swayze is a notoriously heart-on-his-sleeve kind of guy. So it shouldn't be a surprise to see him choke up a little, as he did yesterday afternoon in the shabby downtown Winnipeg production office of his next project Without a Word.

If you're looking for a model from his movie work, he's closer in spirit to the sensitive spectre he played in Ghost than he is to the archetypal gun-toting yahoo Pecos Bill, whom he played in the movie Tall Tale.

Forgive him if he takes this project personally. Without a Word is likely to be his most personal film.

"It's a very ... it's a very emotional moment for us to be here," he says. "It's been a long road."

That road began two years before his Hollywood breakthrough in the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing. It began over coffees at L.A.'s Beverly Cafe with Swayze, his dancer-wife Lisa Niemi and fellow dancer Nicholas Gunn. They reminisced about their days in the New York ballet scene in the mid-'70s. That session eventually spawned a play titled Without a Word, which won a number of L.A. drama critic awards after its run at the Beverly Playhouse in 1985.

Sixteen years later, Swayze, 48, is finally bringing the play to the screen, as a producer and lead actor. Niemi, his wife of 25 years, wrote the screenplay and will co-star and direct the film, which begins its seven-week shoot in Winnipeg March 12.

THROWN FROM A HORSE

Swayze was in preparation to do the film in 1997 when it looked like the project might have been permanently derailed, following an accident on the set of the thriller Letters from a Killer. He broke both his legs and a shoulder after being thrown from a horse.

"I raise horses and I've been riding since I was born," says the Texas-born actor. "But no matter how you get around it, on a dead run on a bareback horse, if he decides to go somewhere else, he can just turn you into a human projectile."

"He cut 90 degrees and sent me head-first into an oak tree. And the only thing that saved me was my dancing and gymnastics background, I guess. I grabbed two handfuls of his mane, I tucked up my body and flipped myself so I broke my legs into the tree and came down and broke my shoulder."

He didn't let the accident deter him from continuing on Without a Word.

"I'm really, really good at (rehabilitation)," he says. "After they put a titanium rod in my right femur, I was back up walking three hours after the surgery and immediately into rehabilitation

"I had myself back at work in three months and finished that movie, had three days off and went straight into an action movie (Black Dog)."

Swayze made a few more films before finally readying for the strenuous work required for Without a Word.

"Many writers many incarnations later, many financing entities later, and we're here in Winnipeg. And believe me, it has not been an easy road to get here," he says. "It's wanted to chop you off at the knees many times, and we just didn't give up and here we are."

Winnipeg will be substituting for New York City in the film, a prospect that doesn't phase either Swayze or his wife, both of whom have nothing but praise for the city, especially the resources available at our world-class facility at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

"It was a big (selling point) because it was a dancer factory," Swayze says of the RWB. "They've just opened their arms to us on every level. Everyone there have been truly wonderful to us, and they're letting Lisa take company class every day.

"I'm sort of relegated to my three o'clock-in-the-morning workouts," he says.

As for the chilling effects of a Winnipeg winter, Swayze shrugs them off.

"After I did Red Dawn in New Mexico at 60 below, I kind of got used to it," he says. "I had frostbite on every part of my body and my hair was falling off in chunks," he says of that 1984 epic.

"Also we live in the mountains in New Mexico (when they're not at Ranch Bizarro, a five-acre ranch outside Los Angeles)," he says. "We live at 7,300 feet, so we're pretty accustomed to cold weather."

"We're finding our way around," says Niemi, 44. "For the most part it's pretty easy but there's a few little curves, where things start south and head west that you've got to watch for.

"I went to get groceries the other day and I returned three hours later," she laughs. "When I stared seeing wide-open countryside, I knew the Safeway was not nearby.

"People are really friendly and they're really down to earth, and the city looks gorgeous with the snow."


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