Directors Close Up: Making Jerry Maguire

Directors Close Up: In His Own Words: Cameron on Making Jerry Maguire

How I Got Here

I started out as a music journalist. I began to write for Rolling Stone magazine, and at a certain point I decided I wanted to write a book about a kid working in a fast food job than some of the fat and happy rock stars that I’d begun to interview so often. And so I wrote the book Fast Times at Ridgemont High. And because I was the least expensive guy they could find, they gave me a shot to write the screenplay. My first dream to be a rock critic was a wonderful thing to kind of experience and realize. Now my heroes are guys like Billy Wilder and Truffaut. And I’m just having fun seeing where this takes me.

The Script

I originally wanted to do a movie that was about how you would arrive at your greatest success through incredible failure. Success being an emotional success, really. And it sore of began with a picture in the newspaper, of a sports agent or sports manager and his client. They were two guys of very different sizes and loud shirts. But they were clearly two guys against the world. And from there the whole story of Jerry Maguire over a number of years of research became a very personal story from me. The journey of a man to complete himself. And basically what I ended up with was a movie much more emotional than any of us thought when we entered into it.

I worked on the script for a long time, about three and a half years, and I felt like I directed it a number of times while I was writing it. A couple of different movies were directed along the way.

Originally the movie was written with Tom Hanks in mind. And it was Miles Davis music that I heard. Particularly this one live version of the song called “So What” which had many different changes to it. But it was really “adrenalized,” hyped-up live version of that song from a concert in Stockholm. But as I kept working, another song kept coming to mind which was a track called “Magic Bus,” from the Who’s album Live at Leeds and it was a younger man’s story. I think the idea of writing for a star probably added more time to the process.

Pre-production

It was an L.A. movie and the challenge was to make it not look like the L.A. you see in movies everywhere, all the time. I have big scrapbooks and I’m always pulling stuff from magazines. There’s also a great device that Sony made that allows you to take still photos from movies and videotapes and stills from commercials. There were two stills that I took from Woman of the Year that I had in the front page of my script and it was Spencer Tracy looking at Katherine Hepburn and then Katherine Hepburn returning that look, and I kept those two photos with me all the time. I would always flip open this first page and Tom would be like, “OK, I got it, I got it, I got it.” It was amazing how much those little blasts of inspiration help when you’re tired, when it’s late, you can open up one of your scrapbooks and see what the soul of the scene should be.

The Cast

When Hanks chose to direct his own movie rather than be in Jerry Maguire, I immediately wanted it to go to Tom Cruise. He was the “Magic Bus” to me. Tom Cruise read it and called me and said, “This is a part I’m very interested in playing; it’s different.” He said, “I’m coming to L.A. in a few weeks – let me read it out loud for you to see if I’m right for it,” which was great. I did have friends who said, “He’ll never play a loser.” And in fact he was dying to play someone who was on the ropes. And it all blossomed from there.

Once I had the actor, I wanted to surround him with fresh faces – you feel like you’re glimpsing real life. That’s the greatest gift of all, and so it was also rewarding to find newcomers and put them next to Cruise. And you start to forget that it’s Tom Cruise. You start to believe that you’re in another world.

I had a casting lady I really loved, Gail Levin. She was tireless and we basically saw as many people as we could. And Tom was very available to us. So he read with many, many actors from bit parts to, of course, his leading lady. And Renee [Zellweger] was the one that came in and kind of punctured everything  that you expect to see in a movie starring Tom. She came in a number of times. The first she came in, she had read the script an didn’t really have a strong take on it. But this seemed like the type of person  a character like Jerry Maguire would see around the office and not take that seriously, and her beauty or her depth would appear later. Then she came back and everything that was great about her the day before was sort of gone. She’d had a problem with her dog. She was in pieces and unable to really connect. Sort of an awful moment, when an actor leaves the room and hasn’t quite lived up to the advance hype. And so for about a month we didn’t speak to Renee. And then Gail brought her name up again, and she came in and nailed it. Tom was there. I actually had a video camera going. She flies into the room in all of her “Reneeness,” and she’s kind of spinning around and talking about things that happened to her that day. In the background you see Tom regarding her in that great way that Spencer Tracy regards Katherine Hepburn. Just someone watching this person who, as it happens, was going to play a big part in his future life. And it was all there in the first moment. She had the qualities that set him off both personally  and in the character, and you just die for that.

The little boy  was tough. The little boy was written to be a joyous little guy, but I sort of fell in love with this young kid who was quiet and sad. And I thought, this brings out a different aspect of the script. This is a kid who has truly lost his dad. This is a sad kid. And what if Jerry Maguire sees himself in that kid? And gives that kid a relationship that he hadn’t had. And so I hired him. So I was trying to adapt to this sad kid and it wasn’t working. He did not want to be an actor and wasn’t an actor. And so three weeks in, we replaced him. And it was a very odd and terrible thing. Not to the kid – I think the kid was happy. A kid was found by one of our producers. And he was in fact everything that I didn’t want in the kid that was going to be the movie. His one experience was a McDonald’s commercial. And to me that’s the hellish version of kids in movies. So I kind of, in an exhausted state, went into the hotel room where the kid and his parents were staying. And I was really tired. I said, “Hi, how are you doing?” The guy said, “We think our child is a magical child.” I said, “Great, great, great, great, where is he?” So out of the bathroom comes trotting this little kid. His hair is exactly as it is in the movie. His glasses are the same as in the movie. I would never make up those glasses and that look.

That was him. The kid was on fire. Knew the lines, and said, “I’ve wanted to be an actor my whole life.” He’s five! He’s great. And we took him to a set and put him in the room with Tom. And Tom started doing some scenes and Tom looked over to me like, “Whoa, this kid’s pretty good.” So we finished our little audition, and then the kid said, “I just want to tell you that my favorite movie is Top Gun and I’ve seen it twenty times.” And at that point Tom turned into perfect profile and said, “I feel the need – the need for speed.” And the kid just exploded and never came down. We hired him, and everything you see in the movie is his ride. That was a lucky break.

The Crew

The main guy that I’ve always wanted to work with is, he’s sort of a legendary assistant director, Jerry Ziesmer. And he’s retired and comes back more than Sugar Ray Leonard. He’s a real partner and an inspiration guy. He’s also an actor and he pops up in a lot of movies that he Ads [assistant directs]. He was AD on Apocalypse Now and he’s the guy who says, “Terminate with extreme prejudice.”

Design

Well, we built a lot just because it was a complicated movie with a lot of scenes. The porch where the kissing scene took place and everything is on a stage. A lot of care was put into making it seem real. But the jewel really is, of course, the set you don’t see a lot, which is where Jerry works. Every desk in that place is unique, special to the person that works there. One’s a punk rocker, one is very angry about certain things in his life, and all the photos on the desk are very specific to that person.

The house was supposed to be Jerry’s soul in a way. At the beginning he’s sort of “shoplifting the pooty,” as they say in the movie, but by the end of the movie this place that he was kind of rushing out of to move on with his life is where he has to go to begin his life. And for that you’ve got to have, I think, the perfect kind of place. Where you stand on the lawn and look in the window and what’s inside is your future. That is how we designed the house.

The Shoot

I was able to direct rather quickly and enjoy the process more than I ever had before because of the time I’d spent directing it in my head.

Renee [Zellweger] does have an utterly real quality. And you find that you torture an actor like that sometimes because, say you have them do a break-up scene twenty, thirty, forty times from different angles, and they’re in shreds, because it’s real – they’re breaking up every time.

The Best and the Worst

The worst part is dealing with the casting process.

The best part is when something simple and unexpected becomes the real soul of your movie.

Courtesy of directors close up – moderated and edited by Jeremy Kagan – Focal Press