Vanilla Sky – Boston Globe

Shooting for the Sky

Cameron Crowe, the screenwriter and director, behaves disarmingly like a real person, even in the inherently unreal setting of a movie-tour interview. Crowe, who was in town this week to show his new movie, ”Vanilla Sky,” to the Boston Society of Film Critics, opens the hotel suite’s curtains to bring some natural light into the sterile room, fiddles with the thermostat to warm the air, then settles into a chair and looks ready for a conversation.

It’s almost enough to make you forget that interviewing Cameron Crowe is a little like asking Neil Young if you can play him a few tunes. As you know if you’ve seen his last movie, ”Almost Famous,” Crowe began his career at 15, writing about rock for Rolling Stone. He went on to profile everyone from Joni Mitchell to David Bowie to, yes, Neil Young, and his interviews can still hook you with their relaxed and natural grace.

Small wonder, then, that Crowe answers a question about the themes that run through his movies by talking about the way people talk. It’s the desire to capture real people saying real things, he says, that links such

apparently disparate works as ”Almost Famous,” ”Jerry Maguire,” ”Say Anything,” and his first script, ”Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”

”Somebody said about Neil Young – I love Neil Young – that he always gives you a weather report,”

Crowe says. ”It’s kind of brilliant how he does that – well, it’s not `kind of’ brilliant, it is brilliant. So I thought about how to translate that to screenwriting – is there a way to make it feel more like life. Everything should sound real, like things people would actually say.”

There’s another common thread, too, he says: ”giving people credit and celebrating their humanity. That’s my little secret that I shouldn’t really say, but it’s true.”

Why not say it?

”Because it might sound like a formula, and it’s not a formula. It’s what I and the people I care about love to see in a movie.”

In ”Vanilla Sky,” which opens Friday here, the particular expression of this theme is ”a guy who learns that humanity lives in every little thing,” Crowe says, ”and not to take that for granted.” The guy is David Aames, a rich and superficial New York publisher played by Tom Cruise whose life, as the movie begins, is a whirl of hard partying, too much money, and casual sex. Caught between an obsessive old girlfriend (Cameron Diaz) and the glimpse of something better with a possible new one (Penelope Cruz), David finds his dream life becoming a nightmare.

”Vanilla Sky” plays with the idea of dreams and nightmares, what’s real and what isn’t, in ways that can feel dizzying. But Crowe says he hopes that audiences will find it stimulating, not exhausting, to find their perceptions of reality and illusion shifting continually as they watch.

”People say it’s a really challenging movie,” he says. ”I hope it’s challenging structurally, but not ever challenging people’s humanity.”

Crowe is willing to be called ”challenging,” and he’s used to watching his movies struggle a bit before finding their audience. One reason he wanted to come to Boston, in fact, was to thank film critics here, because their praise for ”Almost Famous” saved that movie when it was about to sink from sight; it then went on to win an Oscar for best screenplay. ”Boston is `Almost Famous’ Central,” Crowe says, his voice emphatic with gratitude.

As for ”Vanilla Sky,” the movie’s themes of humanity, of finding what’s real, may feel like familiar ground to Crowe’s fans, but its sometimes surreal story and images are strikingly different from his other movies. The new feel may come in part because, for the first time, he was adapting another writer’s work, rather than filming his own. The screenplay of ”Vanilla Sky,” which he wrote and directed, is adapted from a 1997 Spanish film, ”Abre los Ojos” (”Open Your Eyes”), by the young director Alejandro Amenabar – who went on to make ”The Others” – and the writer Mateo Gil. Setting off on a path laid down by others, he says, took him in directions he might not have found on his own.

”It’s so not what I would have thought I was going to do,” he says of the film, ”but that was what the song was that I wanted to play.”

Asked if it felt strange to do an adaptation after so much original work, Crowe says, referring to Amenabar, ”Not as weird as he said it felt to him.” That made sense, he says. ”I thought, yeah, if some director were making a Spanish ‘Jerry Maguire,’ that would feel weird.”

Crowe has been struck by Amenabar’s graciousness about ”Vanilla Sky,” he says, especially because it’s so rare. ”I can’t think of anybody who wouldn’t be arrogant,” he says, then squints his deep brown eyes and assumes a supercilious air. ”Vell, think what you will of the other, I have done mine, and this – ” Crowe laughs and drops the accent. ”Of course, he wouldn’t speak with an English accent.”

Actually, it sounds more German, a suggestion that makes Crowe laugh again. After all, he’s spent a lot of time over the past few years listening to a director with a German accent: Billy Wilder. Crowe collected their talks together in his book ”Conversations With Wilder,” and he speaks with obvious affection and respect of the man he calls simply Billy. He also vehemently agrees with the suggestion that Wilder has been misunderstood over the years as a cynic.

”He’s filled with wonder,” Crowe says. ”He wouldn’t have lived as long as he has if he were the great cynic that people believe he is.” The mistake, Crowe thinks, comes from reading Wilder’s ”great, corrosive wit” as the sum of the man himself. ”In fact, he’s his own greatest character.”

It was partly from studying Wilder’s work, Crowe says, and from pursuing the path that that took him on, through Francois Truffaut and William Wyler, that he began to develop a deeper understanding in particular of the women characters he had always wanted to write. ”When you start learning about Wyler and Truffaut,” he says, ”often it’s the guys who are dunderheads. The women are so emotionally rich that they enrich the guys.”

You could say the same for many of the memorable women Crowe has created, and he’s continuing to do more. He’s reluctant to talk much about his next script, ”or I won’t write it,” but he will say that ”a woman occupies the center of this thing I’m writing now.” And he’s quick to agree that, besides his film mentors, his mother (vividly portrayed in ”Almost Famous” by Frances McDormand) has also helped shape his characters, female and male alike.

”My mom is a teacher. She’s still a teacher, you know? And she’s always about the revelation, about getting you to crash into the next room of your abilities. So you’re always striving toward that around my mom,” toward a fuller realization of your true self, Crowe says. ”And in the movies, there’s nothing better for me than when a character realizes who they are. It’s a worthwhile thing to write movies about: people who have learned how to crack the code, which often involves figuring out who they really are.”

Courtesy of Boston Globe – Louise Kennedy – December 9, 2001