Vanilla Sky – BBC

Cameron Crowe Interview

How do you set about choosing your music, in particular the use of Radiohead’s “Everything in its Right Place” for the opening scene?

Some of it forces its way in. After we started making the movie, Radiohead’s album “Kid A” started taking over the environment of our little process. “Everything in its Right Place” was the perfect song. It started in rehearsals and it was the tone of the movie. We shot the scene with the song playing in the background. Luckily, they said we could use it.

Was there much room to improvise and play around on set?

We played around a lot on this one, more than on “Almost Famous”, but we were on a tight schedule because Tom had to go and work on [Steven Spielberg’s] “Minority Report”. We were just talking the other day and I was saying, “Yeah, the next movie I do, I really want to do lo-fi, really cheaply, not a lot of takes.” And Tom said, “C’mon, is that really the way you like to work? Let’s be honest. You like to do a lot of takes. That’s the way you work.” It’s one of the reasons why I love to work with Tom. He understands that once you get the right version of a scene, why move on? Why not try it out a couple of different ways? That’s a gift I’ve been given for the last couple of movies.

Were you careful about paying homage to Alejandro Amenábar’s original film?

Any interest in doing the movie came from us being fans of “Open Your Eyes”. We really wanted to do something different. We wanted Alejandro to embrace our movie as an extension, or a conversation, not a remake, as such, but a way to build on the poetry of his movie. He said, “I was really worried that Hollywood would simplify my movie. In fact, you’ve made it more complex.”

Courtesy of BBC – James Mottran – January 24, 2002