Vanilla Sky – Cinescape

Crowe Takes the Sky Way

Writer-Director Cameron Crowe of Jerry Maguire, Say Anything… and Almost Famous cruises through his first genre effort, Vanilla Sky

The secret of Vanilla Sky is out, and surprisingly it’s that there really is no secret at all. Although a tight veil of security has surrounded writer-director Cameron Crowe’s latest film, any interest in the story has been eclipsed by the real life romance that blossomed between its stars, Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz. While this has provided more than enough fodder for the tabloids and legitimate press, it’s also managed to retain the mystery that is Vanilla Sky giving audiences something else to focus on until the film debuts in December.

“I still feel people aren’t sure what the movie is,” admits Crowe.

The clues have been out there for quite some time as the film is based on director Alejandro Amenábar’s dream-like Spanish-language thriller Abre los ojos, a.k.a. Open Your Eyes (written by Amenábar and Mateo Gil Rodriguez). For Crowe, however, keeping things mum was integral in preventing people from making unfair judgments before they even saw a frame of film.

“I sort of learned very early on that ideas get in the wind [when] you don’t intend them to,” says Crowe. “I think Ray Bradbury once said that when you talk about a project, 40 percent of the impetus to write it is gone right off the top and the other 60 percent is going to get stolen by another writer. That’s a bastardization of something he write once, but it’s true.”

Of course, this is a scary prospect for Crowe, since – in his opinion – it can actually hinder personal and commercial projects he has in the pipeline.

“On Almost Famous, if I stood around and said, ‘I’m going to do a movie based on my own experiences,’ at some point somebody is going to come along and say, ‘What’s so fucking special about you?’ Then you go home and say, ‘God, you’re right,'” admits Crowe. “So with Open Your Eyes, I didn’t want to say, ‘We’re going to do a remake, we’re going to do an adaptation; we’re going to do a re-imagining.’ At a certain point, somebody is going to say, ‘You know, there’s this guy around the corner I met who is doing a movie that’s also like that,’ and once again you go home and say, ‘What am I doing?’ and you lose your motivation. A lot of it is a personal creative process. It’s easier to get things done when you’re not advertising what you’re going to do.”

The impetus of Vanilla Sky began with Crowe’s desire to tackle a project that he didn’t write and develop from the ground up.

“A lot of it came from writing [the book] Conversations with Wilder and spending time talking to [director] Billy Wilder and seeing how he built up his body of work,” says Crowe. “He would got from One, Two, Three to The Apartment to Double Indemnity to The Seven Year Itch. I thought it would be great to do stuff as a directing exercise that you could also add to as a writer.”

Though Crowe did look at other projects, it was a screening of Eyes at Cruise’s house that really set the stage for the project.

“We saw the movie and afterwards he said he had the rights, but he didn’t offer it to me,” recalls Crowe. “I talked to him the next day and I said, ‘I can’t get this movie out of my mind.’ And he said, ‘Do you want to do it?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.'”

After the success the pair had with 1996’s Jerry Maguire, working with Cruise a second time was a non-issue. The real key for Crowe was in realizing that, although it was technically a remake, Eyes contained within it a movie that he could call his own.

“I thought we could do it sort of without swallowing the [original film],” says Crowe, who began writing the screenplay during the filming of Almost Famous. “It felt more easily adaptable. I always have a lot of guilt and sympathy for the original writers of anything because they easily get forgotten. I would never want to adapt anybody else’s thing unless I could honor the original piece.”

Naturally, it doesn’t take long before Crowe shows off his other love: music. The 44-year-old artisan lives and breathes it. He began his career as a rock journalist for Creem and Rolling Stone at the age of 15 and made his first inroads to Hollywood when his 1981 book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, was optioned and he was allowed to adapt it into a screenplay. Even though his days as a journalist are now behind him and filmmaking is his new love, he still hasn’t left the music metaphors behind.

“For Vanilla Sky, there was a way to sample the original and hail as you’re doing an American riff on it,” reveals Crowe. “In the end, though, we’re going to play this song with our band – that was the way it felt. Some chords you keep, some instruments become electric that were once acoustic.”

Thankfully, the source material of Eyes offered Crowe much to choose from during the “sampling” stage. A challenging, labyrinth-like picture that evokes an ethereal quality while mixing genre elements (romance, thriller, film noir, fantasy), the movie follows the good-looking misogynist Cesar (Eduardo Noriega) who ends up in a tragic accident. Obsessing about the one girl that got away, he tries everything he can to hold onto his sanity while he’s under suspicion for murder.

Like many films in the past few years that have blended fantasy elements with those of “real life,” Eyes was definitely a genre-bender with striking characters, intriguing interactions and a stunning opening half hour that most American movies would have died for. For Crowe, whose screenplays are often the most vibrant and character-rich in the business, this posed a definite concern – how do you adapt something that is already so well written?

“I heard Amenábar was flattered we wanted to do the movie and said, ‘It’s your child now, have fun with it,'” says Crowe. “He knew we loved the original and I felt free to jam with the original script. I really loved the relationship in the original movie between Cesar and [Cesar’s envious best friend] Pelayo. I thought it was a pretty great relationship between those two guys and not real stereotypical. I also loved the love story, and there were relationships I felt I really understood. I did keep some of the dialogue. I kind of did some riffs on some similar situations.”

Vanilla Sky follows a similar structure to Open Your Eyes, but contains a few cosmetic changes. Cruise plays David Aames, a major publishing player whose dabblings with the opposite sex traditionally lead to frustration for those he discards so quickly. This becomes particularly problematic when his latest one-night stand, Julianna (Cameron Diaz), turns her infatuation with him into a dangerous obsession. Meanwhile, David becomes fascinated in his own right with the one woman he didn’t sleep with – Sofia (Cruz) – who continues to haunt him even after an accident threatens his very livelihood.

“I wanted to get to the roots of wants, desires, obsessions and where in pop culture they come from,” explains Crowe. “That concept is not really in the original. I used that door to get into a different third act.”

The most obvious reprise from Amenábar’s original film is Cruz. Eyes made Hollywood notice her enigmatic qualities initially and put her on the map to becoming one of the most sought-after actresses working today. For her to come full circle may seem a bit odd, but Cruz was actually the one lobbying for a second chance.

“There was a quote where she said, ‘If they remake this movie and don’t hire me, I’m going to go after them with an Uzi,'” recalls Crowe. “Well, that sounds like she’s passionate about the character. I didn’t know what she was like, but knew it would be fun to do a different version of the character with the same actress.”

Like many Crowe films, the elements that he latched onto the most were the relationships themselves – elements he’s explored in very atypical yet heart-wrenching ways with previous endeavors like Say Anything…, Singles and Jerry Maguire.

“This is a mainstream movie that gets into the territory of casual sex, which is something that gets glossed over a lot,” says Crowe. “It’s been fun to get into the corrosive aspects of casual sex. In most romantic comedies or movies that have a love story, it’s like, ‘Oh, come one, you just have to get them in a bed and cover any aspects of easy or quick sex with a loop line.’ We have an aspect here of the hidden price of casual sex and what happens to the wonderful movie conventions when they fall in love in one night. What happens if they guy never follows up on that one night and imagines what could have happened and the one girl he doesn’t sleep with is the girl that haunts him? One of the themes of the movie is how important the little things are and how little things are never that little, especially the little things that happen casually between people. The one thing said in passing that the other person never forgets and the first person never remembers.”

Vanilla Sky may sound less and less like a genre film as Crowe continues his discussion, but to reveal the true mechanisms driving the story would be a disservice to those who haven’t seen Open Your Eyes. Crowe doesn’t really want to label the film either; to him, it’s neither a romantic comedy nor a thriller – instead, it’s a mix of just about everything.

“The movie is genre-less in a way,” he reveals. “I don’t know if you could pigeonhole it. It may be a plus or a minus. It’s not a glorious niche movie like Pulp Fiction where, ‘This is so cool, it means so much to me and I’m going to celebrate this avenue.’ Vanilla Sky is a comedy, drama, sci-fi and romance.”

Although Crowe’s films are structured on the emotional character level, trying his hand at suspense was a skill he was experimenting with, admitting that he’s unsure as to whether he’s succeeded or failed in that respect.

“When I see a movie like The Others – [director] Amenábar is really good at sustaining tension with music and I think I may have hooked on a loopier version of that,” says Crowe. “I think we have suspense and tension, but I think it all comes through the characters. I wanted them to be rich and get the suspenseful stuff though knowing them and knowing how much they wanted what they want. I also sort of wanted to fuck around with it a little bit.”

Making the film that people will continue to talk about once it’s over was another priority for Crowe, who was interested in tapping into a dreamscape world a la famed Spanish director Luis Bunuel so people can read what they want into Vanilla Sky.

“We made this movie a little more like a Rubik’s Cube and that was fun,” he says. “There are many layers put into it, not to confuse people, but to hopefully delight. If you sat around and talked about the movie 15 minutes afterwards with a couple of people who have seen it, one person is going to talk about the one thing they spotted and that will spawn another person realizing another thing they saw. And what fun it would be if you get on this idea of thinking about the various textures in the movie.”

As with all of his films, music will play an integral part in the tenor of Vanilla Sky, and Crowe’s wife – Nancy Wilson of the rock band Heart – will be providing the score.

“We do what would be her version of an Alan Silvestri/John Williams type of thing,” says Crowe. “And because it’s her and she is a rock-based guitarist, it really comes out like a beautiful interpretation of that form. It’s cool and I think it works. It’s been great because she’s working with strings for the first time. I never had strings in a movie, and we also used a kind of ‘Paul is Dead’ feel. There’s a trippy feel to the music, like ‘Revolution #9’ – kind of sound environment. And Paul McCartney wrote a song for us, too. She really did try to create a psychological environment – sometimes suspense-oriented and sometimes it’s just psychedelic.”

As for the psychedelic title Vanilla Sky, Crowe says it refers to a key moment in the movie. Ironically enough, it was also an alternate title for his previous work, Almost Famous, when the studio forced him to change it from the originally intended Untitled.

“The studio didn’t want to put out a movie called Untitled, so I was looking for a title that was atmospheric and [where the sound of it] gave you a feeling – sort of like [the Cream album] ‘Disraeli Gears,'” says Crowe. “So I said to someone, ‘Let’s just call it Vanilla Sky’ and they said, ‘It’s not right for this, but maybe the next one.’ In some ways, one of the reasons to do Open Your Eyes was to actually make a movie that I could use the title Vanilla Sky.”

Currently, Crowe is in the final mixing stages of Vanilla Sky – the process in which the film actually starts to come alive for him.

“You get so excited at one little piece of music or one sound and you’re going, “That’s it, the movie is saved. That sound – everything has changed now.”

In the meantime, he has to start prepping himself for the long promotional journey ahead, an attempt to push a movie whose story needs to be clouded in mystery and vagueness. Of course, first he has to come up with a better way to describe the film – a challenge, he admits, is better left to the marketing department.

“It’s a dissection of a love affair – a man caught between two loves in his life,” says Crowe. “I think I’m going to hit a wall now. Someday I will be able to have a thumbnail describing the movie.”

Laughing, Crowe takes another crack at explaining Vanilla Sky in a manner that won’t spoil any of its surprises.

“This movie, and hopefully the other stuff I’ve done – it has the flow and feel and random quality of real life,” says Crowe. “Some days your life feels structured, but most days it doesn’t. Hopefully, the movie has dramatic structure. It’s certainly more expressionistic than your average thriller.”

Courtesy of Cinescape – Anthony C. Ferrante – December, 2001