Please enjoy Cameron’s Elizabethtown Journal entries for May and June.

May, 2004

Where did the time go? Orlando is already coming down the homestretch on his movie overseas, Kirsten is kicking at the stall, ready to go.

June 6, 2004

Tomorrow morning rehearsal begins. Man, this movie has been a tough one to get going, it’s true . . . but if the words of my now-retired legendary assistant Director Jerry Ziesmer are true – “The tough ones are the good ones” – then Elizabethtown has a shot at being blessed. (Zeismer worked on everything from Black Sunday to Jerry Maguire and Apocalypse Now – check out his book sometime, it’s the first and last word on the subject of assistant-directing.) It’s been a long road, between finding the right cast and the right crew, but we’re now almost there. The script happened quickly, my fastest one ever, over the summer of 2002. I was traveling on a bus with my wife Nancy, who was touring with her band Heart. I woke up one early morning as the bus was traveling through Kentucky, 30 miles past Lexington. I hadn’t seen these electric blue hillsides since traveling back there for my dad’s funeral in 1989, just after Say Anything… had been released. I dropped off the Heart tour, got a rental car, got lost in Kentucky, and wrote the whole story for the script in a burst. “The roads here are hopelessly and gloriously confusing,” became one of the first lines written for the story, and it came to characterize Claire Colburn – the soul of the movie in many ways – a flight attendant who knows the ins and outs of cities all over the country. She falls for a guy in turmoil, Drew Baylor, who has barely traveled at all. From that relationship, the love story of the movie grew. Together, they became travelers in the world, partners in exploration and love. Tomorrow, it all officially starts to come to life. Usually I’m nervous the day before rehearsals, tonight – strangely calm. I’ve got a lot of music picked out and I’m going to play it during a walk-through of all the set and location photos. Figure that’s a good way to get started. Music has always been the divining rod in everything I’ve ever done. This one more than ever. Using music in the auditions with Casting Director Gail Levin, I’ve even cast the actors who worked best with the Elizabethtown songs and score.

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