We Bought A Zoo – N.Y. Times

Cameron Crowe Gets Out Of His House

TOM CRUISE gave his longtime pal Cameron Crowe a jump-start — no couches involved — when he needed it most.

Mr. Crowe, the writer and director whose new movie, “We Bought a Zoo,”opens Dec. 23, said this was back in 2006, when he was in a funk after “Elizabethtown,” his 2005 film about a young man’s journey to his dead father’s hometown, had crashed and burned with critics and moviegoers.

“I wasn’t in a fetal position, but yeah, I was blue,” Mr. Crowe said, “though I always kept on writing.”

Mr. Cruise, who had starred in the hugely successful “Jerry Maguire” (1996) and “Vanilla Sky” (2001) for Mr. Crowe, felt that it was time for his friend Mr. Crowe to emerge from behind the yellow legal tablets on which he composes his first drafts in longhand. “I was deep in the writing cave,” Mr. Crowe recalled, “and he said: ‘Hey man, you need to be directing. You’re forgetting the joy, the adrenaline.’ He’s, like, ‘Let’s go for a drive.’ ”

The drive took them to the nearby set in Los Angeles of“Knocked Up,” where the writer and director Judd Apatow was trading punch lines with Seth Rogen and the film crew. Mr. Cruise introduced Mr. Crowe to Mr. Apatow, who joked that he’d been stealing for years from “Say Anything,” the sharp-witted teen comedy that first established Mr. Crowe as a director in 1989.

“Cruise sidles up to me and goes: ‘See? Get out of your house, man, it’s fun,’ ” Mr. Crowe said. “And that’s when it felt like, yeah, it’s time to direct again.”

Mr. Crowe did direct again. It just took a few years, during which several projects failed to coalesce, and he made a couple of music documentaries, including the recent “Pearl Jam Twenty.”

His new movie, “We Bought a Zoo,” is based on a memoir by Benjamin Mee, the British journalist. The comedy-drama stars Matt Damon as a recent widower and single father who buys and rehabilitates a dilapidated zoo. In the process he reconnects with his estranged adolescent son and finds a way to move beyond the emotional paralysis caused by the loss of his beloved wife. “It was an opportunity to tell a joyful story even though it was stationed in grief,” Mr. Crowe said, explaining why he took on the project.

“Zoo” is only the second of the seven feature films he has directed that didn’t originate solely from his own pen. (The first was “Vanilla Sky,” an English-language version of a Spanish film.) When the studio brought Mr. Crowe aboard, the screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (“The Devil Wears Prada”) had already taken a shot at adapting Mr. Mee’s book; according to Mr. Crowe she had devised a sturdy structure and characters “that popped.” He then refashioned the script — they share the screenwriting credit — to layer in his own take, adding emotional depth and filling out relationships. “I thought, ‘O.K., I can build it from the inside out because she has built it from the outside in,’ ” he said.

Mr. Cruise, speaking by telephone, said he looks forward to viewing the “Zoo” that Mr. Crowe has constructed: “I just love his writing. It’s unique and filled with humanity. I’m always happy when I’m going to go see a Cameron Crowe movie because you always know there are going to be jewels in there.”

On a recent rainy afternoon here Mr. Crowe idly strummed an acoustic guitar in his temporary office on the 20th Century Fox studio lot. He was warming up for the interview, like the rock musicians he spent years covering while a teenage wunderkind working for Rolling Stone and other publications in the mid-1970s. (A chapter he chronicled in his 2000 film “Almost Famous,” for which he won an Oscar for best original screenplay.)

At 54 he remains boyish looking. The outfit he was wearing — jeans, a dark navy shirt and yellow construction boots — would not have been out of place back in the day when he was riding along in Led Zeppelin’s tour bus. But times have changed, and so has Mr. Crowe. While he is still as disarmingly polite (“Thanks so much for doing this interview,” he said at the start), friendly, enthusiastic and emphatic as ever, he has in recent years been chastened both professionally and personally.

On the personal side he and Nancy Wilson (of the rock group Heart) separated in 2008 and divorced last year after nearly 24 years of marriage, though he said they remain friendly, and he continues to solicit her advice and opinion on his work. (They share custody of twin sons, now 11.)

Professionally, especially after “Elizabethtown,” he has been viewed in an increasingly bottom-line-focused Hollywood as someone whose distinctive, character-driven, personal films, while hugely admired, cost too much and take too long to shoot.

Mr. Crowe is hoping that “Zoo” will change that perception. By mapping out every shot ahead of time with the cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and rehearsing extensively with his cast before filming, Mr. Crowe said he was able to shoot efficiently and bring in the movie early and under budget. “It’s lean and mean and shows up on the screen, which sounds like a Don King-ism, but it’s good to work that way,” he said.

New model or no, he still made sure that he had plenty of time to work with his cast. “I love actors,” said Mr. Crowe, who has shown a knack for eliciting exceptional performances (Cuba Gooding Jr. in “Jerry Maguire” and Kate Hudson in “Almost Famous”). “I try and direct environmentally, so that people don’t feel like everything is going to depend on what happens when someone says, ‘action,’ so that they can literally be swimming in the warm water, and at some point the race begins, and at some point the race ends, but it is about being free to swim.”

Mr. Damon attested to Mr. Crowe’s nurturing ways. “He’s what all the great directors are: really collaborative,” he said. “He trusts and is open to ideas from everyone who works for him, not just the actors. That makes the working environment electric because everybody goes to work knowing they can have a huge impact.”

Mr. Damon, who has made films with Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh and other big-league directors, said Mr. Crowe played music from his iPod via speakers during takes, often the exact songs that ended up in the film, to establish a mood. “I’ve never seen anyone do that,” he said.

For a particularly difficult scene in which Mr. Damon’s character, alone late at night, looks tearfully at photos of his dead wife on his laptop, Mr. Crowe cued up “Sinking Friendships,” by the Icelandic singer Jon Thor Birgisson (who performs as Jonsi), the song that accompanies the scene in the finished film. “It played throughout the entire sequence and really helped me — it was amazing— in ways I can’t even say,” Mr. Damon said. “It allows the actor to understand what movie they’re in.”

Although he has been directing for more than two decades, Mr. Crowe said “Zoo” was the first film on which he thought of himself as a director who writes rather than as a writer who directs. “I think I crossed a river,” he said. “With this script, I saw the cuts and the visuals better than before. Usually it had been about capturing what’s on the page as faithfully as possible, but starting with ‘Zoo’ it was about telling the story with visuals as well.”

He points to a scene in which Mr. Damon’s character informs his son and daughter that if they want butter with dinner, it means Dad — and Dad obviously doesn’t want to do this — will have to drive 18 miles into town and back to buy it. The father suggests a family vote. Cut to Damon pulling out of the driveway in his car.

“Yes!” Mr. Crowe said, pumping a fist in the air. “That’s using a cut to tell a joke.”

That’s what Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder used to do, he continued, “and it’s great to get more fluent with that.” (Mr. Crowe befriended Wilder late in his life, and in 2000 published “Conversations With Wilder,” a reverential book of interviews.)

In retooling the “Zoo” screenplay Mr. Crowe deepened the emphasis on the lead character’s challenges as a father. “It kind of goes to that theory that the director’s personality shows through, for better or worse,” he said. “The parenting stuff got in there.” He added that he has since had conversations with his sons that echo a few in the movie: “I think I was projecting when I wrote those scenes.”

As for the other seemingly obvious parallel — a man mourning the loss of his wife — to his own shift in marital status, Mr. Crowe said it wasn’t intentional. “You know, it never occurred to me,” he said when asked. “I showed the movie to a friend yesterday, and he said exactly the same thing.”

Writing what he knows, whether on the surface or subliminally, in a voice that appreciates the human comedy, has always been Mr. Crowe’s calling card. It’s a voice that has given moviegoers such memorable lines as “Hey bud, let’s party!” (from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” Mr. Crowe’s first screenplay, based on a book he wrote), “Show me the money!” and “You had me at ‘hello,’ ” (“Jerry Maguire”) and “Rock stars have kidnapped my son!” (“Almost Famous”).

Mr. Crowe credited his mentor, the director and writer James L. Brooks (“Broadcast News”) — he calls him “The King of Voice” — with drilling into him an appreciation for staying true to his own voice. Mr. Brooks, in turn, said of Mr. Crowe: “Right out of the box nobody sounded like that or wrote like that. That’s what always made him good. He makes a film that’s distinctive, you know it is his, and that’s becoming an increasingly rare thing.”

Whatever the fate of “Zoo,” will Mr. Crowe wait as long again before making his next film? “Not anymore, baby,” he said exuberantly. He said he hopes to begin shooting in March on a new comedy that he had finished writing two days earlier, even as he was making final tweaks on “Zoo.” And he has another movie he intends to make right after that.

“He’s always writing, even when he’s in the middle of production,” Mr. Brooks said. “He’s the only writer I know who avoids writing by writing.”

At the end of a long interview, a reporter asked Mr. Crowe what she should have asked. He didn’t hesitate. “Truthfully,” he said, “I would have asked, ‘What do you say to the people who question your persistent optimism?’ ”

O.K., consider it asked. “I’d say,” Mr. Crowe replied, “I can’t do it any other way.”

Courtesy of the N.Y. Times – Leah Rozen – October 28, 2011