Vanilla Sky – DGA Magazine

Under a Vanilla Sky

As Cameron Crowe came to directing from journalism and, until now, has based his scripts on his own stories. But his most recent film, Vanilla Sky, is not only someone else’s story, it already exists on film in the form of director Alejandro Amenabar’s 1997 Spanish movie Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes).

“I’ve come close to doing adaptations of other people’s scripts,” Crowe said. “I generally don’t get offered them because people assume I’m going to do my own original stories. But this one just leapt out, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I felt like there was room for more dialogue. I had seen the movie as a fan and couldn’t forget it. Later I found out Tom (Cruise, with whom he worked on Jerry McGuire) had the rights.

“The more I thought about it, the more the juices started to flow, and I’d hear music that would be great accompaniment. It happened pretty naturally. I called Tom and said, ‘Do you think there’s a way we can tell this story, pay tribute to it and add to it?'”\

Although Cruise held rights to make the film in English, there was only a Spanish script from which Crowe had to work. “I know a little Spanish but mostly I just watched the original a lot when I wanted to go back and see how Amenabar did certain things,” Crowe said. “It was a movie that had a great love story and it also asked questions like: ‘What is real in your life?’ and ‘What isn’t real?'”

The first person Crowe called onto his crew was cinematographer John Toll. “I got into a very quick conversation with him as soon as I knew we were going to do it. John shot Almost Famous and we had a lot of fun, actually. It was even a better experience on this one. I loved having the two movies with him because he’s a music guy too, so our communication deepened. And I think John took a lot of pride in me learning more about telling the story visually. John was able to use all kinds of different styles, and we really talked about the visual composition a lot more because Almost Famous was a more documentary style. John started doing documentaries — so it was great to catch those flares and get a sense of ‘you are there.’ In Almost Famous, I wanted the camera to almost be a tour guide, beckoning you over. Vanilla Sky was more ‘in the middle.’ In this film we use the camera to create suspense in a way that was new to me, and it will change the comedy/drama stuff I do in the future — given the opportunity.”

How to capture the story on film called upon Crowe’s journalistic penchant for research, “I go through magazines and films and take clips from films and put them together in big scrapbooks. I’ll sit down with John and very specifically say, ‘This is where I want the camera to tell this part of the story. This is where the character should look into the audience and bring the audience into it.’ I have a strong storytelling and scrapbook idea of how to use the camera. What John does is pen work with colors, shadows and light. He builds on what I have. It’s part of that process that’s getting more and more exciting to me. As a journalist, through and through, I do the research for ever and ever and ever and at a certain point it’s really great for somebody to say, ‘OK, you’ve done enough research, now it’s time to go out and shoot.'”

With Cruise set for the lead character of David Aames, Crowe looked toward casting the rest of the roles. “I really wanted to work with Cameron Diaz. I knew I had to see Penélope Cruz, because I heard that she was very protective of the part (having played it in the original) and had said, (something along the lines of) ‘If anybody does this movie and doesn’t talk to me, I’m going after them with a gun.'”

Crowe went to Greece, where Cruz was shooting another movie, talked to her and welcomed her on board. “Penelope was wide open to things — and fresh. (On the set) I would come up to her and say ‘Look Penélope, let me tell you a little about the story, it’s about a guy…’ I mean! I was like your worst uncle with the same joke but she never said ‘This is how I did it in the other one.'”

Crowe also got his editing team on board early, bringing in Joe Hutshing with whom he had worked on Jerry McGuire. Hutshing is the editor, and Mark Livolsi has a co-editor credit. “They put assemblies together as we were shooting,” Crowe said. “This had helped me realize the shots I may have missed. He has an assembly put together almost immediately after we finished shooting. I took a week off and came back to the editing room and we have a very creative process together. He’s very patient. I promise the actors, when we’re doing those extra takes, that I’ll look at everything in post. There are no throwaway takes, I print a lot and end up printing most in some form. Music is our guiding force and the music for a scene dictates everything, he’s a huge music fan and so am I and we love chasing the humanity.”

Making an English-language version of a foreign film, especially so soon after release of the original, can prompt criticism from purists, but the movie came together so quickly for Crowe, “I didn’t have time to indulge in those nasty dark thoughts, only the nasty dark thoughts that were part of the story. It’s one of those rare movies, made in another country that seemed like it could have taken place around the corner. It felt very modern and global in a cool way but not so specific that it didn’t invite another movie or a play. It just builds as a wonderful open-ended set of questions. I felt like I knew all the characters and loved the opportunity for (a chance to expand) the character (Nuria) that became Cameron Diaz’s character (Julie). She didn’t have a lot to say in the original but you sort of wanted to hear from her. Amenabar gave us his blessing. That was key, else I wouldn’t have done it.”

For Crowe, Vanilla Sky was very much about a song and a feeling. With songs from Radiohead and Sigur Ros, “I knew where I was headed musically and what the feeling would be. The whole idea of the title was from the sky that Monet would paint; maybe it was real maybe it wasn’t, maybe it’s just your imagination of what a sky is. That sort of fits the whole light painting motif that went through the movie.”

With what he terms a “medium amount” of rehearsal prior to shooting, once on set with his actors, Crowe likes to do a lot of takes “usually for performance and to try different things.

“Staging is the thing. I’m hopefully learning more about staging. John Toll is great at staging, but what I do love is grabbing those accidents, the one take where you say, ‘I have it, let’s do a bonus take, try it a completely different way. Let’s use music during it’ (quietly out of the corner of his mouth he will whisper to Toll, “let’s begin rolling the camera right now”) I love that. The most amazing accidents generally come off as the moments people most remember. So I keep fishing.”

Directing Vanilla Sky came together for Crowe when he suddenly envisioned, “Times Square empty, as if it’s a nightmare of a guy who doesn’t want to be alone.” Accompanying that idea was another musical cue, a song called “By Way of Fortune” by Julie Miller. “That thought made me want to do the movie, and it tied us to shooting in New York. I’ve always wanted to shoot in New York and somebody has always come up with a reason it could never be done. It didn’t happen on this one. We had to go there, and we shot for six weeks.

“Times Square empty became so much a part of the DNA of the movie that we had to have that shot,” said Crowe. “We started early in preparation for it, asking tremulous questions about how we could do it. We never wanted to do it CGI. We never wanted to do it when people were there and then take them out by computer later. We worked with the mayor’s office, the film commission and the police department. Basically, they said, ‘Rehearse every move you’re going to make and let us know how long it will take, we’re going to talk about it and come back in a few weeks and we’ll tell you if there’s a window that could be created.'”

Crowe rehearsed the sequence in Brooklyn, getting a “Run Lola Run aspect to close-ups of Tom running that I wanted to make sure we got into it. I love the floating close-up of a person in a great adrenalized state, that’s very kind of musical in a way. But I needed the big shot of the empty Times Square.”

He abandoned original ideas to make the sequence more complex camera wise, deciding that it was Cruise’s reactions that would tell the audience how to respond to what he and they were seeing.

“You feel what he’s going through,” Crowe explained. “Then slowly see what he has just seen and is seeing, as he has to deal with his terrible desire not to be alone, even in what is probably the most occupied piece of geography in the world.

“So, what we really needed became a pretty simple crane shot,” he added. “The mayor’s office got back to us and said it would be OK saying, ‘You be there at 4 to 4:30 a.m. Be ready to go as soon as the sun comes out. You have a window of three hours. You’d better get everything you need because it’s not going to be longer than three hours.’ So, we got there; we did seven takes of the crane shot, and ended up using the fourth one. We had a lot of time left over for Tom to run through Times Square. And Tom will run.

“They did have to take me aside at a certain point and say, ‘Take it easy on Tom, because he’ll never say, “No.”‘ So, I went up to Tom and asked, ‘Hey man! Am I working you too hard by doing all these different running shots?’ (and in between the panting, Cruise replied) ‘No, I’ve got a thousand more in me.'”

Crowe raved about the cooperation he received from everybody in the City of New York. “It was great. It was a wonderful moment and we couldn’t believe we’d actually pulled it off,” he said. “The police were so helpful to us. The whole place was quiet. Even the subway station was closed off. We had a really good working relationship with the police in New York. It’s one of the reasons why I never considered taking out the World Trade Center (from the film). I want to pay tribute to New York. They literally gave us the run of the city. I took a cab ride back and the cabdriver said, ‘Yeah, Tom Cruise! I can’t think of anyone else they would have closed Times Square for. Well, maybe Billy Joel!'”

The DGA Directing Team
Vanilla Sky
Directed by: Cameron Crowe

Unit Production Manager: Donald J. Lee, Jr.

First Assistant Director: David McGiffert

Second Assistant Director: Stephen Hagen

Second Second Assistant Director: Marla Saltzer

DGA Trainee: Jeani Harris

Courtesy of DGA Magazine – Mike Reynolds – January, 2002