Vanilla Sky – Daily Texan

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No stranger to the subconscious, Cameron Crowe’s films have been sort of a long and magical dream.

Characters wander in and out of life, finding pure love or pure joy from the most unexpected sources. A lovable loser finally gets the girl (Say Anything), a career man becomes a family man (Jerry Maguire) and an awkward teen explores the beauty in music (Almost Famous). With Vanilla Sky, Crowe’s dream is over. In his new tale, he’s asking something very crucial of his loyal fans: open your eyes.

How does an Oscar-winning filmmaker plan to take his audience down this path? Sitting in a hotel room overlooking New York’s Central Park on a cold Sunday afternoon, Crowe tries to find the best words to sum up his latest departure.

“To me, it’s stories around a campfire,” Crowe said. “I sort of think of it as a bunch of people late at night sitting around a campfire. And one guy says, ‘A kid is a young journalist, and his mother won’t let him listen to rock ‘n’ roll.’ You know, that’s one story. And then, the next guy goes, ‘Okay, a guy has a nightmare he’s alone in Times Square.'”

And so begins Vanilla Sky, Crowe’s latest collaboration with Jerry Maguire star Tom Cruise. A remake of the 1997 Spanish film Abres Los Ojos, it takes the viewer on a twisted ride between sex and love, life and death, and all the dreams in between.

“It’s a story that asks a lot of interesting questions,” Cruise said, taking a cue from Crowe as they sit together in the hotel room. “It’s a story that was open-ended. I liked Cameron’s approach to it. He said, ‘Look, I’m gonna get my band together, and we’re gonna cover this song.'”

The two friends have achieved greatness before with Maguire and they hope the fickle and somewhat close-minded American audiences can embrace such an unconventional story. For both of them, it’s unlike anything mass audiences have ever seen them do. And it’s certainly a gamble, given their popular images and even more popular films.

“We loved making a romantic comedy, for sure,” Crowe said. “And it’s not like I was looking for a more serious thing. This movie came along and it was the one we just couldn’t stop talking about.”

“Yeah,” Cruise affirms.

“So it became sort of the genre that it is, which is no genre or many genres,” Crowe continued, trying to show that he has interests in dark subject matter. “I connected with some stuff that happened when I was a little guy reading Ray Bradbury. And I love those interior kind of quasi-science fiction stories, and we just found ourselves there and loved where we were.”

Where they are is in a mind-bending tale about a wealthy magazine publisher named David Aames (Cruise). David has it all: money, a Central Park West apartment and a beautiful fling (Cameron Diaz). When he falls in love with a dancer named Sofia (Penelope Cruz), his life seems perfect. But the dream life has a rude awakening when his jilted fling decides to drive them both off a bridge.

After that, David finds himself horribly disfigured and trying to reconstruct his face and his glitzy lifestyle. But with the scars of the crash comes the greater pain of tolerating a world that now finds him hideous to the eye. To remedy the situation, the story takes a science fiction turn that is best left a secret, as plenty of secrets come raining down throughout the film.

“I’m not a fan of movies where something happens physically, and the whole movie is about affliction,” Crowe said. “Sometimes they’re good, but it’s hard to get past the affliction and into the story.”

So what set this story apart from so many My Left Foot and Elephant Man tales of an ordinary man with an out-of-the-ordinary handicap?

“This one,” says Crowe, “it felt like just part of the character, and he plays it that way. It’s a guy whose journey includes the effects of an accident. As you know, people in real life who have been through something like that, they work very hard to show you who they are inside. And sometimes it only happens when they’re forced to show you what’s inside. And that’s how we played it.”

“We did a lot of research on reconstructive surgery,” Cruise said. “It’s kind of astounding what they can do, [so] Cameron and I thought, ‘We’re not going to make the picture unless the make-up worked.'”

“I liked how you always played it from the inside out, as a guy who had nothing to depend on which he once really depended on,” Crowe added, looking at his star with admiration. ”

“That was amazing, what you brought to the stuff in the mask. It was a guy who was moving his hands more and a little more needy. It was riveting.”

“I just played the scenes. I just started playing the scenes, just part of the behavior of that character; just different head turns, and the way the camera would just kind of watch me,” Cruise said.

For Tom Cruise, Vanilla Sky is his latest tour de force acting role. After impressing audiences with Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut, Cruise has firmly established himself as an actor who doesn’t have to make The Firm every time the cameras roll.

“First of all, I never thought that I’d be able to do what I’m doing,” he said, taking on a serious tone. “Then I did Taps and a picture called Losin’ It, and I realized, ‘You know what, here I am in this place, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m going to do the things that interest me.'”

Cruise lost the days of Losin’ It and began making some of the most beloved films of the last 20 years: Risky Business, Top Gun and A Few Good Men among them. He’s now just about the biggest movie star in the world. Even when the rare film does poor box office business (Magnolia), he comes out on top (an Oscar nomination).

“I feel very fortunate where I am,” he said. “I’ve never taken for granted the opportunities that I’ve had and the gifts that I’ve been given by many people.”

In a lot of ways, Cruise’s own life makes him the ideal choice to portray the character in Vanilla Sky. He’s incredibly successful, loved by women and experienced enough to have his own views on the film’s statements regarding regret. With a private life that makes the headlines more often than it should, Cruise has weathered the media storm just fine.

In this New York hotel, he maneuvers the corridors around press that want to know the scoop on the off-screen romance with Penelope Cruz. They want to delve into the dissolution of his 10-year marriage with Nicole Kidman. They want to know the nightmare version of his dream life. But Cruise, unafraid and unshakable, gladly spends his time musing on the big themes of Vanilla Sky. Plus, a lot of those themes have a way of seeping into your own livelihood.

“One of the things that I loved about the screenplay when I read it, is that here we are in our lives, and a lot of times we do things in our lives that we don’t realize the effects,” Cruise said. “Not only for ourselves, but the ripple effect on the people around us. In life, a lot of times people can blame others for their existence and where they are. But when they travel back, there is that moment, at which we can all take responsibility on some level for what has occurred. That’s a very important thing in life. The future is what you make it.”

And the life lessons and brimming questions of Vanilla Sky don’t end at discussions of the future. Cruise and Crowe spent a lot of time focusing on elements that make it a very erotic film. The story looks at questions more personal than the ones we’ll need to ask the star today.

“What is casual sex?” Cruise asked, touching on a motif in the film. “Yes, you can walk away from having a sexual experience with someone. You’re physically walking away, yet emotionally, it’s there, what happened. Was there a promise made? Whether one person promised more or wanted more, there is a responsibility in that.”

Cruise sits back in his chair, trying to paraphrase how the character in Vanilla Sky may resemble himself on the surface but he’s come a lot further in his own life. The posh Central Park apartments line up as waves outside the window of the hotel room. That is the world of David Aames out there and until today, one would assume the world of Tom Cruise. David Aames is not the nicest character on the actor’s filmography, while Cruise comes across in person as a very likable man with a solid work ethic.

“I fly airplanes, I have companies, [yet] I don’t take anything for granted or any of the people who work with me for granted,” he said. “Now, I’ve got kids, and I don’t know of anything else. I’m a problem-solver, and I enjoy that.”

And Cruise adds that he can still appreciate the simple pleasures of a hard day’s work. Describing his daily job routine, he doesn’t sound like the rich superstar he really is. He sounds like a working man with a lust for life.

“There’s nothing like working hard and at the end of the day you’re lying in bed, and you think, ‘You know what, I couldn’t have given more to any area of my life.’ And that’s how I live my life. I live it the best way that I can, with dignity and respect for other people. I feel happy, I feel very happy,” he said.

“To work with Tom, you get everything,” Crowe added. “You get all the benefits of a character and of a person who can represent love. And I thank you.”

“Thanks, brother,” Cruise replied with his million-dollar smile.

Cruise and Crowe connect in a way that’s similar to the connection between Vanilla Sky and Abres Los Ojos. They respect each other, like the two films do, but aren’t afraid to shine on their own time for the good of the overall product. Just how well this film resembles or respects Abres Los Ojos will be up for debate, but the original’s director, Alejandro Amenebar, is already a fan.

“When Alejandro saw it, he was amazed. The first thing he said to Cameron was, ‘I feel like we are two brothers asking the same questions but we have different answers,'” Cruise confessed.

“It’s all different ways of telling a story, and a way to make you feel something in the dark,” Crowe said. “This is a slightly different one than the last one, and I think I learned a lot about new musical instruments, creatively.”

In this comment, Crowe proves that music isn’t just part of his vocabulary, but also part of his filmmaking psychology. Like his previous work, Vanilla Sky utilizes heavy doses of excellent music. Crowe handpicks the songs with supervisor Danny Bramson, and they’ve learned how to place music in films like perfect experts. Though with Vanilla Sky, music is even more pivotal, because it’s a story about the influence of pop culture.

“We played a lot of that music when we were making it,” Crowe admitted. “And that’s when the movie starts to get a feel, through the music. That starts in the writing. Particularly Radiohead, we listened to [their album] Kid A constantly, especially here in New York. I still think of Kid A walking the streets.”

“Luckily, they throw music at Cameron,” Cruise said with a chuckle. “People saw the picture and bent over backwards to make sure we could get the music that we wanted. That’s why hanging out with Cameron is great because you get all the bootleg copies of anything you can imagine.”

As the two of them laugh at this fact, they regain composure as Crowe remembers one of the highlights from putting the soundtrack together.

“I still can’t believe Paul McCartney did the title song to this movie,” he said. “The guy was so amazing.”

“I get the phone call,” Cruise recalls. “‘Guess who’s coming to the office?’ Where was I? I was in Washington or something.”

“That’s right, you were doing [the upcoming film] Minority Report.”

“I was going, ‘You dog, you dog!'”

“But then Paul McCartney asked about you. ‘What is Tom like?’ and stuff.”

“How trippy is that?” Cruise laughs with a blushing face. “That is a trip, man.”

McCartney’s title song is one of many impressive tunes in the film, along with songs by R.E.M., Jeff Buckley and the best new band this year, Sigur Ros. Still, all of it lies within the framework of a love story, a science fiction saga and a popular culture explosion.

“It’s a wild beast trying to make a timely movie about pop culture,” Crowe said with a grin.

“This is a pop culture ride. You look at the music that was chosen, the characters, the fact that we got Times Square,” Cruise added, highlighting the way in which the opening sets the mood for the entire piece. “I don’t think it criticizes [pop culture], it’s just a look in on it.”

As they both speak, Times Square sits a few blocks away. The apartment David Aames lives in rests only down the street. It becomes evident that Vanilla Sky is a very American story in a very American city. The way Crowe makes his images dance thickens the identity of popular culture in the film and in its characters. And it’s also in the way pop culture – music, sex, science – makes our dreams come true every day.

After all, this movie is just as much a product of pop culture as the things it sets its sights on. To make it even more memorable, both Cruise and Crowe worked hard at inserting as many hidden items as possible for audiences to discuss.

“All the clues are in there and [Crowe] has these jewels placed for the audience,” Cruise said. “Even when you see the picture again, it can mean more or something different. Films like that interest me.”

“That’s my favorite,” Crowe asserts with his eyes wide open, “Movies that kind of remind you that everything counts and people watch everything. They see so much more than you ever dreamed that they would.”

Courtesy of Daily Texan – Matt Dentler – December 12, 2001