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— Benjamin Wagner
Screenwriter, director and music lover Cameron Crowe has built a career crafting onscreen moments that seem to organically, effortlessly meld celluloid and song.
"Great music is its own movie, already," Crowe said in a recent discussion of the centrality of music to the conception and execution of his films. "And the challenge, as a music fan, is to keep the song as powerful as it wants to be, to not tamper with it and to somehow give it a home."
But while Crowe has made it look — and sound — easy in films as diverse as "Say Anything," "Almost Famous" and the upcoming Orlando Bloom-Kirsten Dunst vehicle, "Elizabethtown," the director insists that the right combination of the visual and aural is often maddeningly elusive.
"Forty out of 41 times you try it, it doesn't work," he said. "But on that 41st time — when that happens, everything gets deeper. You feel it in your skin. You feel like you're one with the characters, and it takes you to that place a great song always takes you. You're transported a little bit.
"Nothing moves me more than when that marriage happens," he continued, musing on those rare, long-sought epiphanies when a song and a scene fit, and fit perfectly. "I spend way too much time chasing those moments in a movie."
In a wide-ranging discussion of his influences, methods and could've-been-disastrous near-misses, Crowe recently offered MTV News' Benjamin Wagner some "liner notes" for his six films.
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In one ruinous day, Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) loses his job, his girlfriend and his father. En route to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, for his dad's funeral, Drew meets a flight attendant Claire (Kirsten Dunst), who helps him get his life and his heart back on track. Romance, hilarity and great music ensue.
"I wanted to kind of program the movie as a radio station, where we could play some new stuff, some chestnuts, some odd mixtape faves and then give the musical stage over to some great [under-heard] artists like Kathleen Edwards, Ryan Adams and Patty Griffin. It's like listening to some great American radio station."
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Tom Cruise stars as publishing heir David Aames in this Americanized retelling (or "cover," as Crowe puts it) of Alejandro Amenábar's "Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes)." Though on its surface it seems a twisted, dreamy sci-fi thriller, "Vanilla Sky" delves into familiar territory for Crowe: love, loss, self-examination and redemption.
"Radiohead is too complex and deep to ever give you just what's on the surface, so 'Everything in Its Right Place' was [the perfect song to play at the beginning] of 'Vanilla Sky.' But a lot of music that I initially wanted to use didn't work — the movie would kind of throw off-kilter any song that was overtly sincere. It was my first real lesson that the movie was going to have some dark steel at its center, and stuff like Underworld and Sigur Rós and their kind of dreamy, vibe-y perfection really worked.
"What I wanted for the end was the kind of acoustic coda that, after some emotional violence and some real dark twists and turns, would gently take you back to earth. So that's what I'd asked from Paul McCartney. Oddly enough, the song title, 'Vanilla Sky,' was kind of a Beatles-y outtake title for 'Almost Famous.' I wasn't sure he was actually going to do it, and then he called and said, 'It's Paul. Be careful what you ask for because you might just get it. I've written you a new song called "Vanilla Sky." Come over to the studio and hear it.' So we raced over to the studio and it was exactly what I'd asked for, kind of an acoustic ballad about the little things, the sweet and the sour, that make life worth living. It was the perfect kind of cleansing last song for the movie."
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An only-slightly fictionalized account of Crowe's own adolescence as a reporter for Rolling Stone, the film follows 15-year-old William Miller (Patrick Fugit) on the road with the up-and-coming band, Stillwater.
"On our honeymoon, Nancy [Crowe's wife and Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson] and I wrote an entire score for a faux-Elvis movie called 'Blue Seattle.' We got into this mode of doing fake songs. I think [the first co-written song to show up in a film was] 'Joe Lies' in 'Say Anything.' So it was great to do an entire catalog of Stillwater songs, all of them kind of vaguely Bad Company-ish."
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Crowe's massively successful paean to the power of love to triumph over greed, slime and toxic self-absorption, "Jerry Maguire" nabbed a Best Supporting Oscar for Cuba Gooding, Jr., spawned a million lame "Show me the money" jokes and featured one of the strongest, most nuanced performances of Tom Cruise's career. In one pivotal scene, sports agent Jerry Maguire (Cruise) drives down a desert highway scanning the radio for a song, then sings it — badly — at the top of his voice.
"[The driving and singing trend] began with 'Say Anything,' I think, with John Mahoney singing [Steely Dan's] 'Rikki Don't Lose That Number.' But this was the bravado of somebody who thought he would know the lyrics to a song and then quickly realized he didn't. I like the idea of a guy trying to find the right song that will make his day, and the song is elusive until 'Free Fallin' ' arrives. That was kind of cool."
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Six twenty-something Seattleites wrestle with jobs, bills and love in the midst of the burgeoning grunge scene.
"Nobody had any interest in those [Seattle] bands when we started making the movie. But by the time the movie came out, guys like Tad, Mark Arm, Pearl Jam — who were then Mother Love Bone — and even Soundgarden were an international sensation. But at the start, everybody kind of pitched in and was part of the filming experience. It was a really homespun affair that turned into a bigger deal as all those bands found fame before the movie even came out."
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In his directorial debut, Crowe raises the cool-romantic-boyfriend bar to near-impossible heights when sweet goofball Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), wins over class brainiac Diane Court (Ione Skye) by standing below her window — in the rain — a boom box held aloft, while Peter Gabriel's lush "In Your Eyes" serenades them both.
"[The song was originally] 'Bonin' in the Boneyard' by Fishbone. It worked on the day [we shot], but afterwards it felt a little bit incongruous. I know John was disappointed that the song didn't work, because he loved Fishbone so much, but 'In Your Eyes' was the only one that really fit.'
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Photo: Paramount Pictures
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