CC: It’s funny, music is usually so much more eloquent. Music is often better than most movies, because it plays in your head. It can be anything. You just go to that place, and that’s what great music does. So the challenge is always to come up with the right images that can go with music that I love, and you can’t always do it. But music and film make such a great marriage when it works. We usually have a lot of fun in the editing room. Tom would come and visit, and we’d just try different music. And when it works, you just have to step away and go, “Whoa! Now, can we just get the music?” And then it begins the process of asking for it.
TC: Luckily, they throw music at Cameron. People saw the picture and bent over backwards to make sure that we could get the music that we wanted. And also, hanging out with Cameron is great, because you get all the bootleg copies of all the music you could ever want [laughs all around]. Anything you can imagine, it’s incredible.
Q: In many ways, the film is a critical look at the effects of pop culture. What do you feel it says about the subject?
TC: For me, this is a pop culture ride. You look at the music that was chosen, the characters, Times Square—the iconography of the picture is pop culture. I don’t think that it criticizes it. It’s just a look in on it. It’s just a comment on something that’s in our own lives. You can’t disassociate yourself from it. It just is. And Cameron knows pop culture, he really understands that, and has looked at it from the inside out for his whole life.
CC: One of the cool things is that, probably more than Tom even knows, he represents pop culture, too. Just in terms of the way people have related to his work so much. But pop culture is definitely commented on in the movie, as we made it and after we made it, too. It’s a wild beast, trying to make a timely movie about pop culture [laughs].
Q: Cameron, how do you get your female leads to play such unique and realistic characters?
CC: Well, I remember after Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I felt strongest writing guy characters. But I was just getting together with my wife, and she has a big family of women—I have a lot of women in my family, but I hadn’t studied them as much as I did after I met Nancy. So I started to study how great women characters had been written, and what I found that it came down to was letting every character—not just the women characters—have their private moments, where you could just be with them and see how they react to the world, and see their private joy and pain. Kate and Penélope both have this great ability to make you feel like you were watching them live a whole life, or say a whole huge speech, but really they were saying nothing, and you’re just watching their face. And that’s the coolest thing of all, and a lot of actors don’t get characters that allow them to say that silently. So it’s so much fun to just play music and let actors have a chance like that, because they give you gifts like you wouldn’t believe.
Q: A lot of Cameron Crowe films have a defining moment. Was there a defining moment in Vanilla Sky?
CC: There was one moment that we sort of found as we were shooting. I went to visit a friend of mine and saw that he had papers spread out all over his house, and he was trying to read while standing up, and I thought, “How great if David Aames, when he’s an indoor-bound guy, would have all these memos spread out, and he would just be walking, gaining strength as he’s looking at these words.” You had that bathrobe, and you were just kind of shuffling through all these memos, and then later you did that voiceover and you said, “People will read again.” It gets me. I love his voiceover stuff, it’s one of my favorite things. It began in Jerry Maguire, and we were able to use it again. It’s somebody talking right to one person, not to everybody.
TC: And when Cameron gets excited about something, we do it over, and over, and over again [laughs]. There’s moments on the set where we can’t help it, you get lost in it. You’re on the Crowe ride, so you’re just like, “Yeah, I can do it, I can do it.” And you do, because his writing is so extraordinary. For an actor to be able to have those words to say, and these characters to play, you just want to play it over and over again.
Q: A lot of filmmakers evolve—was this the type of film you had in you from the beginning, or was it something that you realized you wanted to make later in your career?
CC: Well, we loved making a romantic comedy for sure, and it’s not like I was looking for a more serious thing. This just came along. It was a movie that we couldn’t stop talking about, and it became the genre that it is, which is no genre, or many genres. And we talked about this when we were doing it. I connected to some stuff that happened when I was a little guy reading Ray Bradbury. I loved those interior kind of quasi-science fiction stories, and we just found ourselves there, and loved where we were.
Q: Tom, could you compare the film’s theme of reinventing yourself to the choices you’ve made in your career?
TC: Well, I’ve always tried to do different kinds of characters, and challenge myself, and see where it takes me. If I fall on my face, I fall on my face. But every day that I’ve worked, I’ve never taken it for granted, I’ve never slacked off. So it kind of feeds my life. It’s a dream to be able to produce, with Cameron and Paula Wagner, a picture like this. I’ve always pushed myself. And now I’ve got kids. I’m a problem solver, and I enjoy that. You learn how to solve problems by making a lot of mistakes and going through it. But I think it feeds my life. There’s nothing like working hard at the end of the day, and you’re lying in bed, and you think, “You know what? I couldn’t have given more to any area of my life.” And that’s kind of how I live my life, the best way that I can, with dignity and respect for other people. And I feel happy.