An Interview With Cameron Crowe

In the world of movies, only a few names can be mentioned and people know what kind of film you’re going to see. Cameron Crowe is one of those names – Jerry McGuire, Almost Famous, Say Anything, and of course the classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Well, Cameron has done it again with his newest film, Elizabethtown! It stars Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst. Orlando plays Drew Baylor; a normal guy who works for a shoe company. When his shoe design goes wrong, he loses the company about $1 billion dollars and is fired. The same day, he gets a call from his sister who tells him their father dies. So he goes back to his hometown of Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

But this isn’t just an Orlando/Kirsten film, this is really about the story of Cameron’s life – Drew is really Cameron:

Cameron Crowe: “Going back to Kentucky – that definitely happened; my mom definitely did deal in her own way with grief, nobody understood it, she did take comedy lessons (laughter), she was embraced by a neighbor, who’s name – I guess we can reveal cause we’ve lost him now, time rolls on – it was Bill, Boner Bill (lots of laughter). So you can see we ‘reeeeeaaallllyyy’ changed things around a lot. (burst of laughter) We leave no clues at all; yeah, but all that stuff really happened. But some things in Fast Times actually happened that felt embarrassing to write, not all of them happened to me, but some people I was researching and I talked to them at the time, but oddly enough, it’s the personal stuff that I put in that people come up to me and say ‘I can’t believe you put that in the movie; that happened to me. And I thank you for it.’ I feel that way about things I see in movies. And the things that you make up happened to no one, so I don’t know if the next thing will be taken so directly from our experience, but this one was.”

Because it’s a movie very close to Cameron’s heart, why would he want to put his story on the big screen:

Cameron Crowe: “The first eight pages came and then followed by a whole bunch of other stuff. I had been working on this other project; I had been on tour with my wife (Nancy Wilson of Heart) and had dropped off in Kentucky and I was driving around with these first eight pages. When I hooked back up with the tour, I was like ‘You know that story I’ve been torturing you about’ (laughter) – ‘well, I’m not thinking about that anymore; I’ve got this other thing!’ Nancy was like ‘Oh G-d’ (lots of laughter) ‘now it begins, this goes on for years.’ (lots of laughter) So I read her the first eight pages, while in Albuquerque, and she said ‘Eh, that’s pretty good, that’s pretty good, I get why you would want to do that.’ She knew my dad, and she also knew that song by The Hollies ‘Jesus was a Crossmaker’ and that sort of arrived, too, from the beginning. And it all sort of took off from there, but the thing was, as all stories have a problem, was it too personal? And so that was something I wondered about for a long time.”

Another thing that hits you when you watch one of Cameron’s movies is the music. He’s known for putting the perfect songs at the perfect moments. And for this, he wanted to capture more than just his emotions, he wanted to show what real American music is about:

Cameron Crowe: “Pretty much the music in this is what survived all the different stages and worked the best. And then I took some out cause I didn’t want it to be too music heavy; if you can believe it, there was even more music that was in there. It was always meant to be a tribute to the American singer/songwriters working out, cause there are so many great ones and they don’t get played; there’s no place to hear them, there’s no place except Internet Radio, which is a guy with his iTunes is the only way you’re going to hear it. So I just wanted to use the movie to play some of these great singer/songwriters like Patty Griffin and Ryan Adams. But Nancy’s score, I’m really proud of, I think it’s the best kind of score – it’s guitar based thing. Mark Knopfler did a score like that for Local Hero that knocked me out, so I love a good score.”

So with all the experience Cameron has had with the music business, why would he choose the shoe industry:

Cameron Crowe: “Yeah, when it’s tied to lifestyles and accessories and clothing and a huge ad campaign, you start getting into big, big money. There are these maverick guys who run these shoe companies and sometimes they will say ‘I am not going to test market this.’ – that doesn’t happen in the movie business – ‘I am not going to test market this; this is a shoe that must come along with a pump.’ And it doesn’t work. Why the shoe business? It could have been anything; what I liked, and maybe this is over explaining, I just liked the idea that there’s a guy who could learn so much from people by the shoes he’s wearing. He’s looking down at the world and what’s happening and what’s happening around him. And I just like the poetic idea of somebody who needed to come along and lift his head up to look around at the world itself and that was Kirsten’s character.”

And she’s a flight attendant, how appropriate:

Cameron Crowe: “And she’s a flight attendant, and she looks up (laughter) and you have to look up at her as she flies by. And she’s a traveler and she’s not; he makes things about traveling, but he doesn’t travel himself – see I over think these things! (laughter) This is why it takes years!”

During a road trip, Drew visits the Lorraine Hotel where Martin Luther King was shot and killed. While shooting the film, Cameron found a better story than the one he was looking for:

Cameron Crowe: “It’s now a civil rights museum. There’s a woman who lives on the corner, who’s lived there for 22 years in protest of the neighborhood becoming gentrified and the place not being torn down. Because she says it should a true monument to Dr. King would have been to build a children’s hospital there, not to put a shrine up to where he was murdered. So this woman lives there on the corner in protest, and I wanted to put her in the film too to get both sides of it. And I went up there one day, her name is Jackie, and I said ‘Can we film you?’ She had watched us filming all our stuff, and she said ‘No, cause you’re a Hollywood sell out.’ And so I said ‘I’m trying to tell all sides to the story.’ And she said ‘You’re a Hollywood sell out, and further more what does Johnny Cash have to do with Dr. King!’ ‘Nothing; I don’t think anything.’ And then I realized she thought we were Walk the Line which was filming at the time. And so I said ‘No, this is about a guy and his father, a road trip, and an urn. And so she said ‘I still think you’re a Hollywood sell out!’ (lots of laughter) And so you can see her in the background of one of the shots; I wish we would have been able to shoot her, she’s a passionate woman, obviously. But that’s what’s happening on that corner in Memphis; it’s amazing.”

What’s your impression of a Cameron Crowe film? What do you look for when you go see one of his movies? I wanted to know what he thought about his own movies. What does he want people to take away from his films:

Cameron Crowe: “I think I want them to feel like the characters are real, cause the movies I’ve loved are ones where the characters are so real to me that I feel like I know them and I miss them. And I feel like I know Fran Kubelik from The Apartment – I do, I know her, to the point that when I see Shirley MacLaine in another movie, I go ‘that’s Fran!’ And I love it, and I have been oddly satisfied a few times in some of the movies I’ve made that the actor has matched the character to the point where they live. And John Cusack was that guy (Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything) – and he is. It’s the thing that when he acted it, it came to life and that’s my favorite thing; like if Kate Hudson (in Almost Famous) is able to twirl and for a moment be a character that you believe is real, Penny Lane, it’s like ‘walk away’ – it’s the coolest, so that’s what I would hope.”

The film is so pure! You will see yourself in at least one of these characters. Cameron cut out about 20 minutes of footage of the movie since it’s release at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals. I didn’t see that cut, but from the cut I saw, I can’t imagine what could have been taken out that has made it one of my favorite films of this year! This is definitely a movie you should see and remember for a long time!

Elizabethtown also stars Susan Sarandon as Drew’s mother, Alec Baldwin plays Drew’s boss, and Judy Greer is his sister. The film is rated PG-13 opening in theaters nationwide on October 14th