We Bought A Zoo – San Francisco Chronicle

Cameron Crowe Buys Into We Bought A Zoo

For “We Bought a Zoo,” his first narrative movie since 2005’s “Elizabethtown,” filmmaker Cameron Crowe enthusiastically ignored W.C. Fields’ warning never to work with children or animals by filling his screen with three kids and an entire menagerie.

“People always said that to me, ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve just gotten yourself into? You have everything but water scenes. You have everything but the perfect storm set up in this movie,” Crowe says, laughing, during a recent phone call. but “everybody was professional, even the animals.”

Based on Benjamin Mee’s memoir of the same name, “We Bought a Zoo” is the story of a family that moves into a home that is in the middle of an animal park. A journalist by trade, Mee (Matt Damon), whose family is struggling to recover from the loss of his wife, Katherine, buys the place to the delight of his 7-year-old daughter, Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones), the disgust of his 14-year-old son, Dylan (Colin Ford), and the unease of the zoo’s staff, led by head zookeeper Kelly Foster (Scarlett Johansson). They’re suspicious of the neophyte zoo director’s dedication and ability to make the zoo a going concern.

“It just spoke to me,” Crowe says. “It reminded me of movies like ‘Local Hero,’ or a movie where a character enters a world where they had no preparation for, and there’s kind of an intoxicating feeling about that that you could get lost in.”

It is an unusual movie for the 54-year-old writer-director. For one thing, it is the first film he’s directed – a list that includes “Say Anything,” “Jerry Maguire,” and “Almost Famous,” among others – that did not originate with him. It was producer Julie Yorn who optioned Mee’s book and recruited “The Devil Wears Prada” screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna to write the script. Crowe added his own rewrite to accommodate his needs as a director and relocated the story from England.

“I put it in a place I could relate to, California, plus Matt Damon obviously does his best work, in fact all of his work, as an American,” Crowe says.

Mix of comedy, drama

The film, which blends comedy and drama, may be Crowe’s first geared toward a family audience, but the family has been a strong element in many of his films, dating all the way back to 1989’s “Say Anything.”

“It started really early for me with a scene of Joan Cusack and John Cusack in the kitchen,” he remembers. “It was the first movie I ever directed, and I was trying to get the scene going, and then John and Joan just started to relate to each other. They were going over the lines and you could see all the history in their relationship as people together. To me that set a standard really early on for, like, if you can catch the slice-of-life aspect of a family, do it, because there are so many fakey versions of that.

“That kind of resonated throughout, and I thought this was a movie that could tell a story about fathers and sons, too,” he adds. “I have two boys. I guess it was in my heart to try to show some of this stuff, that we try to find a way to communicate with each other. It can be soulful and painful, but it can also really strike a chord.”

The opportunity to cast Damon was another draw. He appreciates the actor’s evident intelligence and the way he takes ownership of his roles. He recalls watching the dailies one day during the “We Bought a Zoo” shoot and coming to the realization that there was no one he would rather be watching onscreen than Damon.

“It’s true, everything he does, to me, he makes unique,” Crowe says. “He is like Cusack in that way where it’s very much his personality and then the spins he puts on it vary from movie to movie, but it’s like this central kind of electric humanity that he has that I really connected to.”

A factor in casting

There was another factor in casting Damon. Everyone around Mee is encouraging him to move on with his life, and with two children to raise, wallowing in grief is not an option. Yet he is not ready to let go of Katherine, and finding his way to embracing life again is part of the story. Crowe sensed that Damon would nail that aspect.

“There was a joy of life that came through Matt,” Crowe says. “I wanted the movie, like Ben’s story – even though it’s about loss, at least at the beginning – to be about discovering joy. Even though there’s pain and suffering all around you, what is your quest to find joy? I was so happy that we could make a movie that was about overcoming grief and finding joy, because there are so many stories that are about the overwhelming burden of grief. I like showing the other side of it, too. We all battle loss and setbacks every day.”

Crowe maintains that he would not have made the movie if Benjamin Mee had not been onboard with the project. Mee not only approved, he even took a break from the real-life Dartmoor Zoological Park to visit Crowe’s Thousand Oaks set.

Bonding with animals

“Boy, he was watching the tigers like a hawk,” Crowe says. “He immediately found a way to make friends or establish bonds with the animals, and he wanted to see the bear. He wanted to see the grizzly.”

Having spent nine months on the design and construction of his set, complete with animal enclosures, paths, the Mees’ American Colonial farmhouse, even an amphitheater, Crowe also saw it all start to go away as the production wound down. For the director, it was a small peek into the attachment that Mee feels for his wild kingdom.

“I can really relate to Ben wanting to keep his zoo going no matter what,” Crowe says. “We built the zoo and had all the kinds of feelings of ownership of the zoo, and then on the last day, it’s over. You see them start to take down the enclosures and the animals start to go away. It’s amazing, and it’s sad when it’s taken down.”

We Bought a Zoo (PG) opens Friday at Bay Area theaters.

Courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle – Pam Grady – December 18, 2011