Cameron Gets Out Of His House

Photo by Neal Preston/20th Century Fox

The NY Times chats with Cameron about life after Elizabethtown, Tom Cruise and the genesis of We Bought A Zoo. You can read Leah Rozen’s entire article/interview over at the NY Times, but here’s a few choice excerpts:

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.”

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.