It's Cameron Crowe and I'm here with Nancy Wilson.
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- There's the Paramount logo. - You know, I associate this
with stomach pain.
Because every time I saw this logo in the test screenings,
I knew that there were two hours coming where anything could happen.
And a lot did happen.
We'll talk about that and more.
I'm really proud of these overhead shots of New York City.
I think everybody does, kind of, grand landscape shots of New York
that are powerful and romantic, but this...
John Toll and I both wanted the feeling
that you were a spirit. You were with a spirit that was coming down to Earth.
And within that the story was going to begin.
We now see the Dakota,
which was an important place, I think, to set David Aames' life and world.
And the first thing you hear in the movie is Penélope Cruz saying,
"Abre los ojos," which to me created a bridge
with the original picture by Alejandro Amenábar.
So the two movies can kind of hold hands a little bit.
Now this, beginning with Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina,
it set such a beautiful tone for me.
It was kind of a dream of romance that David Aames,
Tom Cruise's character, was having.
And the movie begins with a dream of romance. I loved that so much.
You can see The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan shot in the background
and you start to see his world.
And of course the TV, designed by Tom.
He said, "Let's come up with a TV that we'd all want to have,
"that disappears into the floor."
And he drew a diagram so that they could build it.
So I think he should keep the copyright on that.
It's a good idea.
The gray hair is a symbol of, you know, wanting to live forever.
And is it ever really possible, you know?
And that was one of the many touches, I think,
that, if only subliminally, existed in the movie from the very beginning.
The apartment was created by Catherine Hardwicke,
who's a wonderful production designer.
And here we are behind the Dakota.
The Dakota doesn't really let you film there,
so we filmed around it. And the place is very powerful.
Not since Rosemary's Baby.
Since Rosemary's Baby they don't let you film.
But we took over several areas of New York
when we were making the movie.
And this was one.
We stopped traffic for a brief period of time and got these shots.
And John Toll and I both really wanted
that feeling of a crisp New York fall
approaching winter.
And there's no feeling like it. And I think the movie does capture that.
Now we're approaching the Times Square scene,
which really kind of deserves its own audio commentary.
We worked pretty hard on this.
We did not want to use computer enhancements.
We didn't want to do a CGI version,
so we actually,
with the help of New York, the mayor's office and the police department,
closed down Times Square early in November for three hours.
- It was a Sunday morning. - Sunday morning.
Very eerie being there with the electricity on.
And everything in Times Square...
There's a Twilight Zone episode called "Shadow Play"
that kind of has a statement to make about what our movie is about.
And everything that you see
is selling a solution to his loneliness to him.
And if you look at it,
and DVD is a good place to look at it,
everything is a quick fix for what he's longing to have in his life.
And there's even Jann Wenner, our good luck charm,
the publisher of Rolling Stone. There he is.
I love that couple in the skyscrapers, too.
And that was the Times Square sequence
that we always knew needed to be a part of the movie
from the very beginning.
We thought this is the most populated place in the world in many ways.
A guy who fears being alone
would have a nightmare about being alone in an empty Times Square.
I always loved the structure of Alejandro Amenábar's original film.
The fact that the whole movie was a discussion
between two guys in a prison cell.
One guy trying to work out a disastrous love affair,
an aching love affair, an aching life, really.
And the whole movie, I think,
is that conversation between those two guys.
And everything we see, the dream that begins the movie,
is Tom's character explaining, telling his life to Kurt Russell's character.
Here, of course, we have the appearance of Cameron Diaz,
who really did an amazing job in the movie while on a break
from making Martin Scorsese's picture, Gangs of New York.
And immediately you have, like, a high-octane couple.
These two together really bring out greatness in each other.
And Tom is... This is part of the
really kind of exquisite thing that Tom is doing with his performance
is that he's using what you know of Tom Cruise
to put a spin on pop culture
and the psyche of the American male.
He uses his smile, he uses his easy charm.
And he's gonna lose it,
and then we're gonna see how he's gonna deal with not having any of that.
But I love this early stuff.
I wanted to direct it kind of like a modern Howard Hawks movie.
In a way... Cameron Diaz is so great there.
They're both play-acting at love.
And they're play-acting the kind of love that you do see in a movie,
that I think Howard Hawks always caught,
the theatrical part of pairing romantically.
And they did it great.
Here we have a wonderful clue,
the guy in the Revolution Number 9 shirt.
Should we explain some of the clues in the movie?
- Yeah. - Okay.
That was a clue.
Shots of New York that we stole basically from a car.
We drove around and just shot.
Jason Lee, who's a great music fan,
and a wonderful collaborator on Almost Famous and this movie,
Jason Lee was really in love with Radiohead and Kid A.
And that spread through the whole movie and the crew.
We played Kid A during a lot of these scenes.
We played music all the time.
And Jason really gives you a wonderful spirit.
I love his dramatic acting and his comic acting.
And he and Tom really brought out
a portrait of friendship that I think was really important.
Jason and Tom drove around the streets of Manhattan
and just did this dialogue with people driving by going,
"Wait a minute! Who were the... That's..." That happened a lot.
This is my first real, extended, car near-accident scene.
Got this on the streets. Choreographed it pretty well.
There's John Toll and Herb Ault,
there in the background through the windshield.
Mike Thomas in the back,
the camera operator grabbing this handheld.
I thought that was a cool way to shoot it.
This is more of the Howard Hawks-Billy Wilder way
of showing Tom's life.
The guy outside with the cart, I love that.
Delaina Mitchell, really in her first part,
plays Tom's assistant really well.
This was shot in the Vanity Fair offices in New York,
in the Condé Nast building.
And I love that hat, don't you?
I love the hat. I love the R.E.M. song here, too.
The R.E.M. song really gave us a boost.
And we never could find the right song until pretty late in the process.
Danny Bramson contacted R.E.M. and they had this song in their archives
and it just sparked the whole beginning of the movie.
Great song.
Betsy Heimann, our costumer, had that hat.
And Tom just took it immediately and felt very comfortable in it.
And it became part of the carefree David Aames life.
Here we have the Seven Dwarfs.
It was fun casting the Seven Dwarfs.
We had about 40 dwarfs at one point standing around looking ominous.
That last gentleman was the winner, the most ominous dwarf.
- And there he is. Robin is his name. - Oh, yes.
- He does not look like a Robin. - No, he does not.
He looks like Grumpy.
"How's it going?"
Skateboarding.
We shot many different variations on a lot of these scenes.
We shot versions
of these scenes
where Tom was actually a part of his own memory,
standing there observing himself.
It didn't quite work.
But what did work, I think, was the relationship
between Kurt Russell and Tom Cruise,
two guys that had always wanted to work together.
And finally they did.
Kurt has such an easygoing weight.
You believe that guy, you know that guy.
- You did grow up with that guy. - Exactly.
Robert Towne once said he's the best-kept secret in Hollywood,
and I agree.
Although he's not that much of a secret.
He just doesn't work all the time.
But this is a very layered and depthy performance from him.
And there's To Kill a Mockingbird on the monitor,
which is the first kind of tap at the idea
that we're within the psyche of a man and everything matters.
Everything is a shred or a memory of something
that was once part of his life and that mattered to him.
I like this set. Catherine Hardwicke once again
worked with John Toll and I to come up with something
that looked like the inside of a man's mind.
And that's where the central conversation
of the movie occurs.
The idea of Kurt Russell as Curtis McCabe
was always to provide a tour guide.
Kurt is helping Tom's character
through a question. How did I end up here?
How did this crime that doesn't feel real to me happen?
And Kurt, we're gonna find out in the course of the movie,
develops a strong relationship with this guy,
who he's attempting to deconstruct.
And everything spins from their relationship.
The fear of heights was a nice touch that was in Abre los ojos.
And I always thought it would be good to turn the screw on that a little bit
so that you really did feel early on
that he had disappointed his adventurous father
and he, the son, couldn't even deal with heights.
So, all that stuff shot in the Vanity Fair office
shows a guy that fears the heights that he's reached.
Also, I like that moment that happened earlier
where Kurt Russell goes, "No can do."
I saw him do that in a conversation
and I just said, "That has to be in the movie."
"No can do."
And that's one of the great things,
when you can take something that an actor does
or is part of who he is and just kind of pull it into the character.
This was shot on a stage.
We spent a lot of time there
and it really was kind of like a wrestling ring
between these two characters.
Kurt takes the longest walk to a punch line I've ever seen,
in that section that we just saw. So great.
"You've crossed that line."
Tom really did some of his best work behind that mask.
Because he's a guy who's trying to communicate
without any of the tools that he's so used to having.
The character and Tom.
The smile, the facial gestures that let you know,
the wink behind something that he might be saying.
He's denied that behind the mask and, in a way,
the mask is eerier than anything that happens to his face later.
That's great.
And it is a love story.
And it's a story about love and lost love.
And eternal love, in a way.
The party scene has a crux issue,
which is that David Aames is not aware
of the kind of emotional wreckage that he's left behind.
Here are two women that have spent time with him
and he's not aware of the sadness that he left behind.
It was a nice moment there with Ivana Milicevic and Oona Hart.
I really liked that shot after he leaves.
The introduction of Penélope Cruz.
- There's Steven Spielberg. - And there's an interesting party guest.
Steven Spielberg came to visit Tom and discuss Minority Report.
And he looked like he wanted to get into that shot.
And I kind of turned to him
while we were filming and said, "Get in there!"
And he did.
And after he left, everybody looked at me like, "'Get in there'?
"That's how you talk to Steven Spielberg? 'Get in there'?"
It's like, yeah, he got in there.
And he was fun. Two takes, smoked it. It was good.
Tom does some of the Howard Hawks work that we talked about earlier
with Penélope here,
where they're coasting on the superficial buzz of just having met.
And everything is gonna get deeper from here,
but at this point it all comes easy to them.
They're basically social animals
behaving socially, beautifully with each other.
And it's the calm before the storm.
Jason's great there in that shot, as he turns away.
The friend that's immediately been rendered useless.
I was very proud of the John Coltrane hologram here,
John Coltrane playing My Favorite Things.
That was another kind of hint that the movie was gonna deal
with things that may or may not be real,
and may or may not defy the laws of humanity.
That John Coltrane felt so real, almost too real, you know?
Timothy Spall's one of my favorite actors.
I loved him from the Mike Leigh movies.
And I just was so honored that he said he'd come in and play this part,
the family counsel who's been rendered mascot.
And he's just a lovely guy and a lot of fun.
And I think he was surprised when we started playing music
during his performance takes, but he got into it.
Shalom Harlow did a great job, I think, and she was...
She suffered from us having cut the party scene down a bit.
Cameron Diaz and Tom once again.
It's a lot of power on a set.
You can feel two people that stand shoulder to shoulder in many ways.
They're a very strong screen couple.
I first saw them together when we were auditioning for Jerry Maguire.
And it wasn't quite right for Jerry Maguire, but I never forgot,
and I don't think Tom ever forgot,
the chemistry that occurred between them.
So what we did was
we thought of Cameron Diaz very early on for this movie.
And the idea was in this movie she was gonna play someone
who didn't quite get to be Cameron Diaz.
It's the Cameron Diaz that didn't get The Mask with Jim Carrey,
didn't get those breaks and was turning 27.
Cameron Diaz was very adamant about wanting to play 27.
The disappointments, the learning stages that happen at 27.
And here she is someone who has not gotten the brass ring
and is now not getting the guy, who was a brass ring, too.
I love the line that she delivers, where she says,
"I don't want to meet your fancy friends.
"I knew them all back when I was fancy, too."
And it was amazing how well Cameron Diaz
related to the kind of thing that could have happened to her
and has happened to...
You know, all of us know people that didn't quite get there.
Holly Golightly a few minutes past her prime.
And there was a sadness and beauty to her
that really did make her the saddest girl to ever hold a martini.
That's not a real smashed guitar by Pete Townshend.
That's my dream of the smashed guitar of Pete Townshend that I wish I had.
And it disappeared so fast off the set.
I don't know who has it, but it looked good.
I love Penélope's look as she turns away from Tom back there.
They're really great together.
They have sparks that come from laughter and fun.
And I always thought it's great in a story to show that love comes from laughter.
And they're suspicious of each other,
but they make each other laugh early on.
Tom gives her a great look when she says
"saddest girl to ever hold a martini" here.
That is one of his wonderful gifts is,
he regards a woman onscreen and you don't need dialogue.
He gives you the beginning embers of love
from a guy that appreciates a woman.
And it's a great gift in the editing room, you build scenes around it.
I love that shot of Cameron Diaz.
But now we have Tom's regarding shot here.
Just simple, but really drives the story.
- Jason kicks ass, it's just that simple. - He does.
He can walk around and chat at a party
better than anyone I can even imagine.
This scene began as an homage to Love in the Afternoon,
the great Wilder movie starring Audrey Hepburn.
There's a scene with Audrey and a cello.
And I just like those private moments, being able to see those on screen.
And although the scene changed quite a bit from its original intention
there is a whiff of Love in the Afternoon in that hallway.
Penélope is a big fan of Audrey Hepburn,
so all you have to do is say "Hallway, Love in the Afternoon,"
and she says, "The cello scene!" And you gotta love that.
This moment between the two spurned friends is key.
And it's funny how few people
remembered, the first time they saw the movie,
that Diaz and Jason Lee's characters actually did meet.
They did have a discussion and a relationship
brought on by the fact that
the two people they were interested in were not with them.
That snowboard is a Catherine Hardwicke original.
- This is a... - And that's a real Monet, right?
I wish.
It's a real Joni Mitchell, though, behind it, which I'm very proud of.
It's a painting called Edmonton that Joni herself loaned to us.
This scene we did handheld to give it some energy.
It was really fun to do this.
We found that Jason and Tom together can really drive a scene.
And if the camera suits
the kind of easy flow of what they talk about
and the way they relate to each other,
you have a scene that feels like real life.
And I was really proud of this. I love all the stuff about Frank Sinatra.
Jason's got a Frank Sinatra fixation
and Tom is going to indulge him in the Frank Sinatra fixation.
And that's what ultimately gets to Jason.
Jason is playing a lovable Iago in the movie.
And here we have our wonderful sons,
Curtis and Billy Crowe.
And here's Curtis.
Curtis, what are you saying? Bone Daddy in the house?
- What that? - What that?
That is a scene between Jason Lee and Tom Cruise.
- Yeah. - Night...
- Night, night. - Night, night.
Night, night.
Bye, Billy.
This is a scene where also we established
the idea of the sweet and sour.
The movie is kind of an exploration of the sweet and sour in life. And...
That's a scene about the sweet and sour in life, hon.
And that...
Exactly.
And that's even echoed in the beginning,
in the Radiohead song, Everything In Its Right Place,
when Thom Yorke sings, "Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon."
Once again, the sweet and sour,
which was I.A.L. Diamond's description of why Billy Wilder was great.
Because he said Billy Wilder captured the sweet and the sour.
And that's a little bit of what,
not even a little bit, that's a lot of what the movie's about.
Can you say sweet and sour?
There's a wonderful moment here at the end of this scene
where Tom is confronting his own conscience.
And he's a good man who's compromised himself.
And now we go to this pretty iconic shot with Cameron Diaz and the waiter,
a guy named Marty, holding the two martinis.
It was the last thing Cameron Diaz shot
and it was powerful even when we shot it.
We shot this piece
down underneath the Manhattan Bridge overpass, DUMBO,
which was the world of Penélope Cruz's character.
She lived in DUMBO. And it really suited who that character was.
She was an artist and a photographer,
and somebody with about five different jobs, trying to make it,
trying to finance that apartment that she loved.
A gloriously messy apartment. And she "refuses to clean up."
One of the lines that we haunted her with throughout the entire production.
Penélope has a way of showing romance
in a carefree but still intoxicating and memorable way.
And that was always what the character was.
I always loved her work in the Spanish films that I'd seen
and in Belle époque.
Here Tom falls in love really
with the image of a girl living a real life,
a life more real than his life.
And in a way he's been living a dream and he wants reality.
But he does want to know Sergio's story.
Kind of a bizarre thing for a girl to have on her refrigerator,
but then that is Sofia Serrano.
There was a quality in the original film that I really liked.
I wasn't sure when she said in the original film, you know,
"You've never met an arms dealer before."
I remember thinking in the original film, maybe she is an arms dealer.
And I liked all those levels of intrigue going on
while we're doing romantic comedy.
Tom is a wonderful romantic comedian.
I loved working with him on Jerry Maguire
in the scenes with Renée.
And I loved working with him in the scenes with Penélope in this movie
because he has a light touch
that brings out the best in all the actors around him,
as well as a deeper touch that's going to come into play later in the movie.
The one thing about Jerry Maguire that I always liked
is Jerry Maguire was sort of a romantic comedy for men.
And Tom plays romantic comedy from a man's point of view really well.
Here he's falling in love with a girl who looks great,
but everything that she's saying
is matching up to his image of what the great dream girl would be.
Right down to the fact that she can like
Vikki Carr and Jeff Buckley.
And, of course, there's the wonderful Nancy Wilson score
to assist us in this sequence.
Just as she can assist us now.
Cue Nancy!
This was the day Alejandro Amenábar came to visit us. Nobody told me.
So he was actually watching this scene on the monitor while I was directing
and I never knew.
But after I left that night,
he went
and he studied the set.
And I remember hearing later that it was a psychedelic experience for him
to revisit his own movie in a different way, in a different country,
through a different prism.
So I think of him sometimes when I see that sequence.
Kurt Russell does some great comedy in this little scene.
Because I love the fact that he's been married for 22 years,
but he has a dim memory of when he was a single guy out there,
a social animal like Tom's character.
So there's a jealousy and a melancholy that's happening
between these two guys who've both been racked by love.
And it's one of my favorite things in the movie.
Kurt's delivery there, "Like, what?"
In a minute here, you're gonna see Tom doing kind of an odd dance.
He's actually listening to Over the Hills and Far A way by Led Zeppelin,
one of the songs we used to play a lot on the set.
And so you can kind of imagine it.
Many times I've cried Many times I've listened
- Are those the right words? - Something like that.
The great Michael Shannon gracing us once again,
with To Kill a Mockingbird going on in the background.
And this was a scene from the original
that I always thought was at the core
of how Abre los ojos was able to establish love in one night.
Alejandro had this great tool that he could use,
which is that they both liked to draw.
And they both were going to draw an image of each other.
In kind of romantic comedy terms,
it's like one of the brilliant and hard-to-find ways
where people can learn how they're viewed by the other person quickly.
And deal with it.
- And there's the big mouth. - There's the big mouth.
We had a couple different drawings
that we tried out in the early test screenings.
It was clear that the big grin
was an audience favorite, so we went with that.
But at the soul of the movie were a lot of questions
that we asked each other even while we were making it.
Have we been irresponsible in love? What is love?
What are we saying about love with the movie?
Many a morning was spent while we set up for shots
talking about what is love right now.
What is love in a world that's just fueled by pop culture
and a lot of visions of...
Of easy sexual conquests, and love as sex?
And what was love really to us?
And David Aames is a guy who's learning
what love really is in this scene.
She sees him very clearly.
In one of the lines that was cut, he says, "Tell me how you see me."
And she says, "Well, you live in the shadow of your father."
And he seems stunned by this amazing revelation.
And Penélope had a great look, like, "Isn't it obvious?
"Everybody knows that about you."
And it didn't make the movie,
but it was one of those wonderful moments
that was about...
None of us are as mysterious as we think we are.
And that's what this scene's about.
That's a... I think that's a powerful moment on Tom,
where he kind of looks down and confronts who he is.
He's becoming the newer, better, deeper version of himself.
The character is having revelation after revelation,
a guy who was snowboarding through life.
And the big question is gonna be
how and if he's going to be able to hang on to this new version of himself.
And, once again, Tom Cruise makes it look easy.
It's the kind of thing that you see behind the camera
and you know that's...
It's like watching the movie, you can just see it already cut in.
And soon you cut it in and you are watching it in the movie.
The cryonics theme,
really we always wanted it to just creep in
and appear first as the kind of thing that you laugh over
as a couple just getting to know each other.
Because, you know, when you're first getting to know somebody,
you're looking for stuff to laugh about
that isn't about yourself.
And that stuff becomes the iconography of the relationship, you know?
So they're going to bond over Benny the dog, for example.
- One of my favorite characters. - Benny is a good character.
Every test screening, Benny rated high.
That's right. Benny was one of the most loved characters.
I would come back home after the test screenings and go,
"How can we add more Benny?"
No.
You know, it's the old thing about kids and dogs.
There's something about kids and dogs
that provide a high-pitched signal
to people.
The tentative nature of love,
and what people are like when they're first kind of exploring each other.
I mean, you're never going to have that first kiss more than once.
And I like here that what these people are doing is
they are gonna take all the potential
and all the promise of love
and they are gonna put it on a shelf.
Because if they sleep together on this night,
it won't mean as much as if they pleasure delay a little bit
and give it more respect and honor it more.
So this scene is about two people
that really in most other situations would be sleeping together.
- These are some rare individuals. - That's right.
They're not going to sleep together. They're going to save it.
And David Aames is going to use this as fuel.
The thing that Timothy Spall says to him in the party scene,
"Claim your life."
So now he's got a vision of how he can claim his life
and his first test is coming right up.
This is a little moment that we added.
I just kind of yelled to Penélope from behind the camera,
"Scream and go running off."
- I love that moment. It's so real. - She did great.
Here, John Toll makes DUMBO look like Liverpool.
- I love this... - DUMBO is...
- DUMBO? - Is?
Down Underneath the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.
Right.
And that's where we really shot some of our best exteriors, I think.
Because you don't see that in New York very much,
as seen in movies.
You haven't seen DUMBO shot a lot.
The amazing thing about Cameron Diaz in that car
is how her eyes link up with the color of that Buick Skylark.
And it was intentional,
but it was a surprise when we finally saw the two of them linked.
Because we kind of put the car together
before Cameron Diaz had come into the country,
she was working in Italy.
She came in, she sat in that car and it was haunting.
Because her eyes are the same color as that car.
And the two of them together became a very lonely and dangerous image.
And that is Julie Gianni.
David Aames was a hard name to come up with, by the way.
David Aames. But in the end it came
and it was the kind of name that you had to say both, David Aames.
Julie Gianni, instantly that felt like Cameron Diaz's character.
This scene is really the crux of David Aames' life.
And it is, "How much are you going to stay
"with that little decision that you make as you're leaving the house?"
And you say, "You know what, I'm going to be a different person.
"I'm going to be the best version of myself."
And then...you're tested immediately.
And this scene is about that little voice inside that you shouldn't listen to,
that we often do listen to, that says,
"You know, just run one more emotional red light.
"Nobody's gonna catch you."
And suddenly we have David Aames in the car.
I Fall Apart, that's our composition, isn't it?
- We wrote that song. - We wrote that song.
And you can't beat the way Cameron Diaz brandishes that CD, you know?
The way she just flips that around to him.
Love that.
This scene was shot over two days on Riverside Drive in New York.
And it really was a challenge to keep the concentration going,
but Tom and Cameron really did stay in the zone
and did this scene a lot.
A very wrenching scene
that I always said was our mini-tribute to Carnal Knowledge.
This was going to be a raw glimpse
of the way people can be with each other in a love affair going bad
if the camera was a fly on the wall.
And she says some rough stuff in this
and he says some emotionally rough stuff in this.
And I remember, the first time we showed this at a test screening,
when Cameron Diaz said the line about,
you know, "swallowed your cum."
- Tough one. - That was a tough one.
And there was a shudder that went through the audience,
like they couldn't believe they had actually seen her say those words.
I hail her as an actress for never questioning that dialogue,
but doing it in many different circumstances,
always totally committed.
- She's brave. - I think it is a brave thing.
And the fact is, people involved in a casual sex relationship often...
Often it's not that casual. Somebody's keeping score.
And often both of them are acting casual.
And this scene in many ways is about her saying,
"Look, I can't keep the act up any more.
"I remember everything.
"All those throwaway moments that we pretended didn't matter,
- "they mattered." - That's right.
"In fact, here's what I remember most of all."
And a guy who's sort of addicted to the quick-fix relationships,
the things that can happen,
you meet someone, you sleep with them in a night.
It's amazing when you're hit directly
with somebody who never really was casual.
Tom was very generous in these scenes,
he was very caring with Cameron.
They were very caring with each other.
And sometimes you saw it, and you really did feel like
you were watching something that you maybe shouldn't be watching,
it was so personal.
The car accident, John Toll and I really discussed a lot.
We wanted it to be random
and brutally so.
The way a car accident would really be.
You feel the impact, you feel the silence.
And you know something terribly wrong is inside that car.
And I wanted those people to come running from a distance.
In a way, it's a reflection of that car accident we saw in Seattle that night,
when we came upon that car accident and the car had just been turned over.
And there was such a darkness about that silent car
- that had just been in an accident. - It's tough.
Here's a very key, key, key scene.
This is David Aames' dream
of what he wished had happened.
The toughest scene to maybe put any piece of music to.
It's true. We tried a lot of different stuff through the various test screenings.
And this was always...
It's the first scene we shot, by the way, on the first day.
And the first score piece we ever put in ended up in the end.
It's true. Just a little sideline thing.
This takes place... This is taking place about 7:00 or so in the morning.
There is an army of paparazzis firing off shots
just outside of the frame.
In every one of these shots.
Because in New York City, if you shoot in public,
the paparazzis, they have the run of your set.
And they have the legal right to.
So they're firing off stuff, you know, throughout all these scenes,
running to their cars, and making sure that the shots
are FedExed to Spain and London within an hour.
And at one point they all yelled out, they go,
"Cameron, Cameron,
"if you get Penélope and Tom and Cameron Diaz
"to all pose together for us, we'll go away."
And I went up to a cop and said, "Hey, you know,
"if we get them all together and pose for them, they say they'll go away."
And the cop's like, "First, welcome to New York.
"Second, they're lying to you. They won't go away."
I was like, "Oh, okay."
But this scene was very key.
Because when we played this scene with a different piece of music,
a piece of music that wasn't personal and wasn't like your score,
people felt wrenched out of a love affair that they were just getting settled in
- to watching. - Yeah.
And it was a very polarizing moment in the movie.
People walked out in the second test screening, I know, at that point.
They were disgusted they weren't going to get the movie
that was about the love affair between these two characters.
And it was all about the transition of this scene,
which is his dream of what he wanted to have happen
into the reality of what did happen,
which is in itself a flashback of a story that he's telling to Kurt Russell.
We did ask a lot of people in this movie, didn't we?
- Ask? - Yeah. To like...
To hang with, like, a tri-level concept like that.
But still, the people that got it,
even in the screening where we had walkouts in this sequence, really got it.
And that continued throughout the whole life of the movie.
When people took the ride
and appreciated the ride, they got a cinematic buzz.
- Yeah. - One of those cinema buzzes
that they sought us out to tell us about, which is great.
There's a dream going on, but there's also kind of a second reality.
- Or a second reality. - Yeah, and there's many levels.
This, I remember we watched the dailies of this after the first day.
And we were on a long lens and we got, you know...
Tom just looked into the camera accidentally really
or just was beautifully unaware of the camera and it happened
that at the point he realizes he's dreaming,
he's looking right into the lens. It was very powerful.
Everybody in the screening room kind of went, "Whoa!"
And that take was what we used and always stayed with.
Tom's performance...
It's a particularly beautiful thing as he realizes that he is within a dream.
He can't get out of his dream. He can't wake up
and he can't face the nightmare of him losing that girl.
Joe Hutshing and Mark Livolsi, our editors,
really did a masterful job in constructing this whole sequence.
Because you want to gently guide
an audience through the challenging parts,
but you don't want to ever talk down to them.
I think an audience is really, always so much smarter
than anybody gives them credit for.
And Joe and Mark kind of lived up to the best of a belief in the audience
as opposed to simplifying
to the easiest level of what you can communicate to an audience.
And this whole sequence is very complex.
- Let's call him up. - Let's call Joe.
- Actually, Joe's on vacation. - Oh, too bad.
The other thing about the scene that we just saw in Central Park,
what we called the "hall of trees" scene
is we wanted to use colors and sounds
that didn't exist anywhere else in the movie.
So that it did signal a hyper-real level that was going on.
This is just a sequence that I felt, as a director,
it was the beginning of a new chapter
of really using visuals to tell the story even more than I had before.
And that was something John Toll and I had wanted to do.
From about the middle of Almost Famous
we talked about the potential of using visuals even more.
I loved that light below.
It was kind of an eerie but centering feel,
that light on the table that shines up at Tom and Kurt.
And once again, there are clues everywhere.
There's a Martin Luther King poster, "I have a dream."
"Live the dream." There are things on that blackboard
that, frankly, aren't too hard to decipher, so let's protect the mystique
- and not talk about it too much. - No, no, now's the time.
Okay, all right. There's all kinds of stuff on the blackboard.
- Yeah, check out the blackboard. - Easy codes to break.
It's funny. This was an attempt to show that David Aames had become
a kind of Citizen Kane.
He had become an emperor trapped in that apartment
that was once a joyful place, where he met Penélope.
So he's actually sitting in the exact spot where he met Penélope,
except now he's an emperor of the indoors.
And the reveal of the makeup and the disfiguration, I should say,
also shocked people.
It kind of surprised them
and I think that was the right way to reveal the disfiguration.
"Rumors of my death have been mildly exaggerated."
Yeah, that was something we came up with on the spot. And...
- Which quotes Shakespeare. - Well, isn't it Mark Twain?
- Is it? Mark Twain, okay. - It's a bastardisation of Mark Twain.
This always felt like a mini Truffaut movie to me.
It's one of my favorite parts.
And your great score, Garage Beat, I think is the name of that cue,
gave it that feeling, a kind of sad, whimsical feeling.
- And we shot this in Greenwich Village. - Definitely off balance.
Penélope in that shot feels like she's in a Truffaut movie.
And I love Truffaut. Stolen Kisses, particularly is the feeling of this scene.
This was originally the reveal of his disfiguration.
We switched the order of the scenes.
This became more poetic, whereas the other was more jarring.
And I think it put you in the frame of mind of David Aames.
Now we have the wonderful doctor scene.
We searched forever to find the right actor to play Dr. Pomeranz
and we found Armand Schultz in New York.
He's a New York theater actor and he just plain nailed it.
And what he does is give you the subtle, or not so subtle, arrogance
of an extremely successful doctor,
who holds David Aames' future and vanity in his hands.
This is a big scene for Tom
because Tom's character is trying out his persona,
the persona of a guy that has none of his previous benefits.
And he's straining, you know. And he also has some new poetry.
You know, he's able to say, "I know what my place in the world is."
You know, "I'm out there. I'm a social animal, that's my poetry.
"Give me back my poetry." And he had a long speech to do
and Tom just couldn't wait to do this scene.
I think it was something that he knew was very pivotal
and important for the audience.
Because the audience gets to laugh in this scene.
And they don't know previous to this that it's okay to laugh.
And we always wanted humor to be a part of this whole movie.
There was a great sense of...
I love the "playing jazz," the hand that passes through the frame.
But Tom had a great sense
of David Aames reinventing himself here,
trying to use whatever he can to get by.
And in the end it's money that he offers to try and get there.
He wants to buy poetry, he wants to buy love.
- And he wants to buy himself back. - Buy himself back.
That was Carly, who worked in the prop department.
And we always thought there was a nice little mini-story there
where Dr. Pomeranz was having an affair with Carly,
so they have their own little romantic interlude.
"Thank you, Carly." "You're welcome, Doctor."
I love that guy.
Pomeranz is just quietly, coldly on fire.
But I had this idea pretty early on.
A scene where nobody wanted to say the word "mask."
And every other word or term is used, an aesthetic replacement.
And then Tom just has to cut loose with the word "mask,"
which always played better in the wide shot.
I just like the idea that he becomes a dervish
as he says the word nobody wants to say.
This was a transition that used to be done to Steely Dan's song,
Here at the Western World.
And it was always a part of the script. It was one of the first things
that was written into the script, this transition
that shows the re-emergence like the Normandy invasion.
And there's our fabulous Simpsons gentleman outside the window.
Love that shot.
Thank you, James L. Brooks.
And this shot, shall I say what inspired this shot?
- Yeah. - Yeah, I went to visit Mike Myers,
who is nothing less than a comedic genius and a wonderful guy.
Robin Ruzan, his wife, and I and Nancy were all there.
And he had a script laid out that he was reading,
but he wanted to get the flow and the arc of the script
by kind of standing within it.
And I saw all these pages laid out
and I immediately went and wrote that scene out and that shot
so we could get, again, the Citizen Kane aspect
of Kane trying to catch up on his lost memo reading.
So thanks, you guys.
The dance rehearsal scene
was a very, very key scene, as well.
Penélope herself was a dancer for 14 years
and I wanted to show a little bit of her dancing.
But once again this is David Aames trying out his new persona.
And he's decided that, you know, he's gonna make her laugh.
And Penélope kind of matches the spirit
of what David Aames is doing so well when she says,
kind of against her better judgement, you know,
does she want to get together with him, she says, "Sure."
And I love that she could just as easily be saying, "No."
But she's saying, "Sure."
And here is where Tom is just trying to make her laugh.
David Aames is just trying to find that dark, ironic humor that's gonna work.
And, of course, and this was true when we showed this
in the theaters for the first time, people weren't ready to laugh.
They kind of laughed at the hair day line,
but they really were just getting used to the very thing
that David Aames was getting used to.
And that was what Cruise I think, was doing with the performance,
is taking you there, into what it is to be that guy
- trying to reach back to love. - Oh, my God. There's Benny.
Well, this was the first thing shot in preproduction, really.
- Benny! - Benny and James Murtaugh, the actor,
and, of course, the great Conan O'Brien.
Oh, yes.
And Conan I talked to on the phone and let him know that we were all big fans
and that we wanted to do this thing.
He said, "You know, I have a very discerning Late Night audience,
"it's mostly college kids,
"can you promise me it won't be cheesy?"
And I said, "I can promise you, no dairy products will be involved."
And he said, "Okay, let's do it."
So we shot this scene and he did that great ad lib about tongs,
which I love that.
And I talked to him later and I said, "Man, I loved the tongs thing.
"You remember that?" And he said,
"I've ad-libbed so many other things since I ad-libbed
"whatever you're talking about. I really don't remember."
I said, "That's okay, thank you."
But Tom here goes back to a teenager's anxiety
about making one of his first phone calls to a girl.
And it's one of my... I'm proudest of this scene
in that it just captures the anxiety of a guy
who thought he had outgrown and outlived
this kind of anxiety.
This is a 12-year-old's anxiety. This is a 13-year-old's anxiety.
And now he's going to fight his way back.
Yes, the club scene.
The club scene was always meant to be
an adolescent, high school dance that goes awry.
John Toll really worked on the colors
and we worked together on the kind of hypnotic opening
that would draw David Aames
into confronting, really, love,
and who he is as this new version of himself.
Betsy Heimann found the wonderful T-shirt that Penélope wears,
that is a clue in itself.
The saint that's referenced on her shirt
has resonance in the situation that's happening here in the club.
And once again Tom's work in the mask is aching,
more aching than I even imagined.
I loved the club scene in Abre los ojos
and this in many ways is a tribute to it,
and an attempt
to just revel in the ache of a guy trying to reconnect with love.
Club scene was always meant to be long.
It's really a tour de force for Joe Hutshing, our editor.
He was very proud of the cutting, I was extremely proud of the cutting,
and we very painstakingly took it down from an even longer length.
All this stuff Tom added on his own,
referencing South Park in his conversation with Jason.
And it really was a powerful sequence
because we had all those extras, hundreds of them,
there as these kind of wrenching emotional scenes were happening.
And the club scene was a real turning point for the movie
where we realized we were going into deeper waters.
And gloriously so, I think.
The movie really asks you to take hold
and really be with David Aames and Tom in this journey.
I love the actor that plays the bartender in this sequence.
His name is W. Earl Brown.
Well, he missed the Elton John-Billy Joel show
at the Forum to do this scene.
We got him tickets for a later night.
But W. Earl Brown did a nice job here.
And again, the descent into the Hades of lost love
and the trying on of this new persona
really kind of powered the movie to another place.
In fact, I'm going to call Tom right now. Let's reminisce.
There's Choo Choo Boy. The extra we called Choo Choo Boy,
because of his fabulous choo choo mannerism there.
- Hello. Hello. - Hello. Hey, brother.
- We're in the club scene right now. - Oh, baby.
And we've just seen Choo Choo Boy.
- Did you see Choo Choo Boy? - Yes, we did.
- So this club scene. - Yeah, man.
- Let's talk about it. - Let's do it.
What are your memories of the club scene?
I remember the hours that we spent talking about that club scene.
Actually, do you remember all those nights, always going down,
remember the long calls from Spain? And then the nights in the club.
The nights in the hotel talking about the dynamics of this scene?
Because you were always talking about the behavior
of Penélope Cruz's character, Sofia,
and Brian and the whole mix.
You know, that it's... Here's a guy
who is madly in love with Sofia
and is reaching, you know?
- They love each other. - Yeah.
And he's just going a little too crazy for her.
I love when you... I'm watching you getting lost
in that crowd of dancers right now.
It's kind of like stage diving,
except you were on your two feet.
Yeah, you talked about that shot.
I remember, that was one of the first shots that you thought of
when you were thinking of the club.
'Cause you always wanted me to get lost in the crowd.
You know, how he's trying to just blend in,
to be part of something, to get lost.
They really enveloped you. I remember watching it.
It was so emotional just watching it on the monitor,
because here's this guy that just could barely deal
with what was going on in his life,
but in the darkness and lost in that great song Rez by Underworld.
You were almost whole again.
- Yeah. - So cool.
Yeah, he finds himself again, finds his footing.
But it's just the drugs and the alcohol and...
It's just... They just miss. He misses her.
I'm watching that two-shot now between you and Penélope
where you're reminiscing and it's the saddest girl to ever hold a martini.
And there's just that moment where you both hit a brick wall in your memories.
- It's kind of cool. - Yeah.
It starts out well for them, doesn't it?
You know, you're always talking about that moment.
- And there it is. - And there it is.
I couldn't wait to play that scene.
I could not wait to play that scene.
You know, because you come from that world of music.
You know, you've written about it, you've been to these clubs
and to have the opportunity to create something like that.
I thought it was cool how you shot it.
How you always envisioned that for the film.
And when I saw it...
You know, rarely do I feel that kind of feeling.
When you see that scene, it's...
You know, I just... I think it's powerful. I'm really proud of that scene.
Me, too. I love it when Penélope says,
"I'll tell you in another life when we are both cats."
- Oh, my God. - Which she said to me
when I tried to chat with her
in an emotional moment where she just didn't want to talk.
And she said that to me and I felt like,
"I am so going to put that in the script right now."
I remember that day.
Just getting this scene there, do you remember the hours we were working?
Oh, yes.
Everyone was pounding it.
And we... It was just... It just had to go there,
you had to go those hours to find it and keep working it.
And the pressure was on and you came
and you told me that line, do you remember that?
- Yes, I do. - I went, "Oh, my God!"
Tried to take credit for it, but in the end I just figured
I was never gonna get away with it. I had to give Penélope credit.
And I always knew that we had to end on that close-up.
Where people just needed to be that close to you
and see what you looked like.
- That's a trippy close-up. - It is a trippy close-up.
Every time we get in, I remember seeing it with an audience
and they sit there. I always found it to be quite humorous.
Is it just me?
Well, we're now on the street. Sofia is running away from you.
- Oh, man. How great is that run? - I know, I will see...
How much do I love when you told her, "Now, run."
And she starts running away. I remember seeing that the first time.
We did a couple of takes and she walked away,
and then you said, "No, no, now, run."
And that run! You know, people always overlook those moments that...
It's all these little moments that make up a performance,
that add to a scene in the movie.
And when she turns around and runs, and the look that she gets, it just...
I love that. I really...
I find it moving and kind of heartbreaking.
- It's the last time he sees her. - Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
"We'll meet up soon." I always thought was... Once again,
it's like the way she said "sure" in the dance rehearsal scene.
She says, "We'll meet up soon," and she could just as easily be saying,
- "I never will be able to see you again." - Yeah.
It's so cool.
Yeah, and you understand, I mean for me, why she can't.
Yeah.
- This was a freezing night. - Yeah, oh, God, it was cold.
There was ice on the ground.
It actually was dangerous to run like that.
And there we were with that great breath
coming out of all your mouths as you do the lines.
Man, it was cold. That makeup froze to my face.
It took a while to get it off that night.
And I love that there was one person
that was in the neighborhood that needed to cross.
And we were so happy to have somebody else in the shot.
You know, like some semblance of life. So we're like, "Cross, cross, cross!"
"Just be in the movie! Cross, cross, cross!"
Some people have sort of deciphered it
that the person that's crossing is wearing a mask themselves.
I think we should say that that was our intent, don't you?
- Yeah, absolutely. - Okay, yeah, we planned that.
- Okay. - I always loved the dark, the irony,
the humor, the dark humor of this portion, you know.
We were talking about who is this guy now
and how you really helped me discover that and that...
To me, it's both painful and just deeply humorous.
Yeah, and now you have Sweetness Follows playing
in that crane shot as you run away.
It's one of the great marriages, I think, that we had in the movie,
between music and the visuals. That song which was always
in the script and we rehearsed with it, Sweetness Follows.
- R.E.M. - R.E.M.
R.E. M., baby.
- We love R.E.M. - We shot with R. E.M.
- We did. Once again... - We shot it, that was the song.
That's one of the scenes that we...
If you just played the sound that was on the shot,
you'd hear the same thing that's in the movie.
That's the same song that Diaz wanted
when she hits me to the ground later on in the picture.
Yeah. And that's what she's listening to
- as she's looking at you. - For her close-up.
It's true. Very cool.
Well, I thank you for picking up the phone tonight and reminiscing.
You are now crumbling on the sidewalk.
- Hey, Nance. - Hey, Thomas.
Back to reality.
- I will talk to you soon, my brother. - Okay, brother.
- Take care. Bye. - Bye.
- Okay, nice. Special guest star, there. - Thomas.
And there's the great walk-away shot that's happening in just a moment,
where originally, a scene that was gonna...
That's a real moment actually, that we just put in.
That's the end of a take.
When she lifts him up.
But this walk-away was always really important to me.
And stuff that we were going to put into close-ups,
we ended up using in this long shot
because it was more poetic and more powerful.
And it was that great spirit that you get shooting in DUMBO.
And I gotta say it,
I don't think anybody's ever thrown an arm around a loved one
as well as Penélope is about to do it.
To me, that's love.
That's the kind of thing that you remember later, long after sex
or, you know, the words of love that are said.
You remember the little actions.
You remember the way she threw that arm around you.
- That's friendship. - That's friendship and that's love.
This was a little bit of an homage
to the French New Wave heroine,
which is one of the things that was rattling around
in David Aames' brain throughout the movie.
He loved those French films, Jules and Jim, Breathless.
And these little things spike up throughout the movie.
It's all his consciousness. You could say, in a way,
the whole movie is rattling around inside his brain.
And all the sets were constructed that way,
this one, as we discussed earlier, especially so.
The stairway that leads... Where? We never know, you know?
I liked throwing these little questions in.
Because I think the audiences that love movies
or just what we love in movies.
You love those little things that you think
you could be the only one that spotted.
And when you have a movie that gives you little gifts like that,
little things that you feel, "You know, somebody put that in,
"and I don't think anybody got that but me." You love that in a movie. I do.
Kurt really gives it up here.
He's doing a turn on a traditional type of character,
but very slowly but surely he's showing you
how much he's becoming emotionally invested.
And that's delicate work, and work that you really appreciate as a director.
As anybody, really.
This...
I love this part.
Well, because Dr. Pomeranz is about to return as his best friend.
And there's just something about the way
Armand Schultz is about to say the words "my brother"...
- Here he comes. - ...that gives me
- odd and constant delight. - The next thing that happened
was surreal.
- I love the way... - "He's my new best friend."
Here he is.
Now something... You've got to know something is wrong now.
And if you think about it,
the amazing thing that's happening in the relationship
between Kurt Russell and Tom's characters.
It's really a man talking with himself, trying to figure himself out.
We used the Joan Osborne song, One of Us,
because it was a kind of a nudge
that we're dealing with potentially celestial issues.
Recreating, reclaiming, reconstructing life.
And Noah Taylor appearing there.
Edmund Ventura.
This was a sequence,
where the two men are sitting against the wall talking,
that was out of the movie for a time, and I missed it so much.
It's just... It's kind of indicative.
In this movie more than anything else I've ever been a part of,
every little thing mattered.
When you took one thing out, the whole movie was affected.
Things way down the line meant something else.
- House of cards. - It was a house of cards.
It was a tent of dominoes.
It was... It was intricate.
But when we put this conversation back in,
it was so correct.
You needed that relationship to build
between Curtis McCabe and David Aames,
but you also wanted that conversation about the Beatles.
'Cause the movie in many ways I wanted to have kind of layers,
like the later Beatles' albums did.
Every time you listened you'd hear something else.
And it's true, your favorite Beatle changes over the years
and it defines who you are.
The original line was something else, but I just kind of shouted something out
to Tom while we were filming,
that his favorite Beatle was George.
And he just said it and that, of course, was the take that we used.
And later, you know,
George passed away just at the time the movie was being released
and that sent another one of those shudders through the audience.
It's funny, you make a movie that in some ways is about pop culture
and how pop culture invades our life and our minds,
and pop culture is going to outrun you every time.
Pop culture from 9/11 and the twin towers
later on in the movie to George passing
to so many other things.
And the Dakota, where John Lennon lived.
- Yeah. - At the beginning.
That was definitely a hint that we were going to get into Beatley territory.
This was a great scene from the original.
I love the idea of Tom in a vaguely purple,
strange plate system.
- Facial plates. - A facial plate.
And it's one of Penélope's strongest scenes
in that she does now what Tom is a master of.
She volleys back the regarding of a loved one.
It's like a woman who knows a man better than the man.
Absolutely.
And she's now going to reveal him to himself through her eyes.
Exactly.
But she's not going to be too serious about it.
Here's a love scene that's a tribute to Jules and Jim,
- with the jump cuts and... - Stills...
Kind of a... The jump cuts and the freeze frames
and the still moments.
It's one of those love scenes where it feels completely real
and once again like you're a fly on the wall.
I never did find out what he whispered in her ear.
No?
- They won't say. - They won't say.
But the thing is, when you shoot a scene like that
you really have to create a mood.
Because there are people everywhere and it is kind of embarrassing.
It's embarrassing as a director, really, to say, you know...
- "Take your top off." - "Take your top off."
No, I never said that!
Not that way. No.
But what you do is, you play Madonna, you play the Stones.
You play all kinds of stuff. We played a lot of Prince.
You don't see the hysterical, nervous laughter
that, you know, precedes or follows some of these moments.
And that's one of the great magical gifts of cinema in that,
you put it together and it's a stolen moment.
I love this love scene. It's so personal and fun.
Well, it becomes about this kiss, which is, again,
it's the kiss that you remember.
This, of course, is a tribute
to the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album cover,
which to me as a kid was a vision of romantic love.
I wanted a girl to hold my arm like that.
- And I found one. You! - All right.
But that was David Aames' image of romantic love as a young boy.
We tried to find the real street.
We found the real street in New York City.
The trees were different, the apartment house was different.
It had lost a little bit of the magic of the day.
So we recreated it on the Paramount lot.
- And it was actually more real... - With the cars and everything.
...on the lot than the real place was,
which would only be the case in this movie.
Reality challenged.
Here Jason... This is a pure Jason Lee scene,
talking about proximity infatuation and this actually happened to me.
I was having a conversation with my friend who is also a writer.
And he was on a rap in a restaurant and it was a great rap
and we realized that there was another writer at the next table
taking notes about his speech. And we just felt so violated.
Because, you know, how dare someone try and steal from our lives
what we were stealing from our own lives, you know?
Here Noah reappears.
And we're getting into thriller and psychological minefield territory,
which was a first for me
and it was one of the reasons I wanted to do a cover of Abre los ojos
because I thought Alejandro did it so well from a character point of view.
Let's raise the stakes of the characters,
make the characters even more real and the plot even more vivid,
and that's what we get to bring to the table in our cover version.
So here of course is where the movie truly starts to take a shift.
There's a beautiful lull here that I know from watching the movie in audiences,
people know that something's coming.
And it's that great, kind of gnawing suspicion
that all is not what it appears to be
that even David Aames has.
This was really a sequence that was cut very quickly.
Joe Hutshing cut it in a day and it stayed the same throughout.
It was always fairly explosive. It used to be a little longer.
And it's just those elements
of dealing with horror and vanity and nightmarishness.
And there's such a yearning in Tom's performance here,
where he just wants that love.
And his true nightmare is that he embarrasses her with his looks.
Which, for David Aames, is a true nightmare.
And I love the way she says, "Was I snoring?"
It lets off a little steam, you know?
- Release valve. - It is a release valve.
The whole kind of sequence that we're involved in now
was very carefully calibrated visually.
A little bit had its roots in Abre los ojos,
but we certainly wanted to show that apartment
and the sanctuary of that apartment,
that had been invaded by his questioning of reality
and his own appearances.
These are things we talked about constantly, we still talk about it.
Even on our press tour that happened later, we were still talking
about elements of the movie and the layers that are there.
Tom added this moment where he kind of mocked his own scream,
that I thought, you know,
that's another one of those "Well, this is in the movie" moments
where you see it happening live and it's just perfect.
I know.
There's a... There's a kind of a...
There's a true lack of vanity
in the way David Aames, through Tom's performance,
approaches the craving of appearances.
I think Tom kind of heroically throws himself
into what people's images of him might be.
The reappearance of Cameron Diaz I always thought, should be simple
and random.
Not a lot of genre techniques,
but really just, kind of, she appears.
He slammed himself into that wooden doorway in one of the takes.
His whole back was just bruised and slaughtered.
- This was really fun to direct. - It's on the gag reel.
Yeah, it is on the gag reel
which should appear on this DVD or a future package.
But this was our very nightmarish session of takes
between the two of them.
A blast to direct.
And the way Cameron Diaz looks into the camera
- with that kind of stony terror... - Oh, my God.
It's very nightmarish.
And it's one of the images that people said
they couldn't get out of their minds after they saw the movie.
This was a pretty high-octane sequence.
We did this two different ways. We did this sequence
with Penélope Cruz and with Cameron Diaz.
And the two of them did their takes together.
You know, so one would go in there and do a take,
and then the other would go in there and do a take.
And it was like tag team wrestling at a certain point
between these two really powerful actors and Tom.
And you really have to hail Mark Livolsi,
who is one of our two editors,
for the subliminal cuts that he makes in these scenes.
You don't see some of them, some of them you do see,
but you do know that you're unnerved.
The way Cameron Diaz says, "Wake up, man" is not only a clue,
but it's just great character stuff.
Some of Penélope's voice is coming out of Cameron Diaz's mouth
- at certain points. - It's true.
And Diaz is doing Penélope Cruz.
And it's a little different from the original,
where I think, in the original, you really do believe
that that is Penélope Cruz's character throughout,
but he's just envisioning her differently.
Cameron Diaz's interpretation of the character
is more of a hellion from his psyche.
The jail scene, really, for me it was a blast to work with Timothy Spall
for such an extended period of time.
And have him, though he basically was doing a cameo in the movie,
this was a nice piece of acting to get into with Tim Spall.
- He's amazing. - He's amazing.
It's an interesting thing that happens when two actors
that really respect each other get together, in that they...
Particularly with Tom and Tim Spall,
they sort of set little banquets for each other.
And all the stuff they did for each other in the off-camera
was about serving it up to the other guy.
It was a very generous thing that they were doing here.
We shot this on a location of an abandoned jail in Brooklyn.
And the spirits of what had passed before in those rooms
were very much present.
You could feel everything that had happened before.
- It was very nightmarish. - We tried to score that
on the way out of the prison.
Yeah, we tried to score this sequence...
Many times.
...many times in many different ways and what ended up working best of all
was a piece of music done by you
that was a little bit Revolution Number 9.
- And it was the backwards... - A collage.
- It was a collage. It was the... - A very big collage.
The backwards playing of your romantic theme.
- Backwards theme. - Combined with
- the voice of Joe Hutshing... - Joe Hutshing.
...and some elements of a thing called the Conet Project,
which are spy transmissions that still occur on short-wave radio.
- From World War II. - And up till now.
Jason really brought it in this scene.
I think he felt as an actor that this was a chance to be more
than the comic friend.
And he is so much more than the guy
that you've seen in the early stage of his career.
There's a lot of drama and power in Jason
and it's not easy to go head-to-head with Tom in a scene like this.
But they really did bring it.
And I love this scene for Jason.
The great thing about Jason is
that Jason also, you know, has no problem doing...
And giving you little character flourishes that always shake it up.
You know, you never feel
like you're just getting a straight-ahead dramatic performance.
You get a real guy, and a real guy in a tense situation like that
wouldn't just say, "Hey, man, you stole my girlfriend."
He knows that guy so well.
It would be like, you know, "What's going on, man?"
You know, and I love the reality that Jason always brings.
He's a comic actor.
He's a dramatic actor that has comedy
- and a comedy actor that has drama. - Exactly.
Which is what Billy Wilder always said was
one of the rarest, rarest combinations.
It started to snow towards the end of this sequence
and there's one take, right here where you start to see the snow,
and we thought, "Oh, my God, you know.
"It's going to be snowing in one take."
But this is the movie where that would be okay.
So you see snow in Jason's last take.
This is the sequence we always called the Florentine Bar sequence,
which was our mini Twilight Zone moment.
It's also the full appearance of Noah Taylor,
one of my favorite actors ever,
as Edmund Ventura, future man.
And he's really a messenger from the future
who also is trying to provide a map for David Aames.
But he's doing it in a suspicious way,
which only fuels Tom's character's paranoia,
helped, of course, by the music of Radiohead.
Once again.
Always, every time we used Radiohead,
it really kind of hit the tone of the movie.
And in fact, we were listening to Radiohead most of the time
when we were doing the movie, so it was a good fit.
Noah appears in this movie
in such a different form as he did in Almost Famous
as Dick the road manager.
I love seeing Noah in this type of a role,
'cause Noah can do anything.
Now we have the moment where David Aames realizes
he is truly either crazy or lost in the future or the past.
And this shot I always had in mind,
where David Aames enters in utter horror,
and the only thing that really helped make it perfect
was when we used Sympathy for the Devil.
And then Tom entered the frame in that shot and it was perfect.
Cut, print, go home. You know what I mean?
It was great.
Now, we've segged into the part of the movie
where Kurt Russell is really turning the screws.
And Curtis McCabe is going to get David Aames
to face this huge area of denial.
The crime, the murder that we've discussed the whole movie.
The deconstruction is almost complete.
And Kurt Russell really does this masterfully,
conversationally,
with real kind of righteous weight.
And David Aames surrenders to that.
He also has a great clue line where he says,
"You realize you own the keys to this prison."
That line is a real kind of signpost line.
All these are bits of a sequence we shot
of David Aames' suicide in a motel room.
And now, Alicia Witt starts to appear.
Alicia Witt is one of the actors
where we had a dream list of people we wanted to work with
and I love her stuff and I loved her turn on The Sopranos.
So she became one of the actors that we asked to do a cameo
and we'd be quite honored, and she said yes.
So now we have the recreation of the murder.
And Tom is really an amazing individual in a scene like this
because he is a real cop for the level of anxiety
and physical exertion that a character has to have.
He'll skip rope, he did this on Jerry Maguire.
He'll skip rope, he'll do push-ups, he'll do everything to get the character
into the physical state that the character needs to be in
and that's a real gift, not just to himself
for the performance but for the director.
We really enjoyed watching this.
Cameron Diaz has a nasty kick, fresh from Charlie's Angels.
- Exactly. - The two of them really...
You know, you have Ethan Hunt
and the Charlie's Angel martial arts queen going at it here on one level.
And I think the crew had a good time with that one.
But what's great is she makes this turn into an utterly emotional place.
And she's doing it while listening to Sweetness Follows by R.E.M.
And I felt, watching this, that this was...
I think it was one of the best kind of performances she's ever given
because it's so emotionally centered.
Even though she's in a completely ridiculous position,
she has utter emotion and love for this guy.
Even though she's a figment.
Which is one of the gifts of this movie,
is that everybody has true, real emotions,
whether they're actually real or not,
because when you imagine reality, it's real.
That may not make sense, but if you think about it, it does.
She's very much in the moment.
And Tom's doing stuff like
his "whatever" in that scene is very funny,
but once again it's one of those things that people
were too stunned or surprised
to laugh at the first time they saw it.
A lot of people saw this twice, at least.
Which is one of the things, and we can talk about that later,
but the dream of the movie was to...
Whether you saw it, you know, the next day,
the next week or two years from now,
that there would always be something more for you to see.
And it's not about selling another ticket,
it's about providing another experience, really.
And that was one of the great goals that we had.
We had a version of this scene where Penélope opened her eyes
over his shoulder and we screened with that, I believe,
and it was just so chilling.
People did not want to believe
that Sofia was in on any kind of trick or stunt.
And that's one of the by-products of people being so emotionally invested
in these characters. It's more than just a plot.
They're real people, too.
This, we did this with no trickery. The two actresses made a quick switch.
You can sort of see the shadow of them moving as Diaz moves into place.
John Toll, once again a great comrade to have in a moment like this.
He really does have a pure joy of creating stuff,
new school and old school.
And this was kind of an old-school switcheroo that we went for.
Cameron Diaz as a person is a really winning soul.
And it's one of the things that you're really tested on as a director
is that you're guiding someone through their own death.
And you have to be gentle
and strong and know what you want to do but,
God, you just love Cameron Diaz as a person.
It's really tough to choreograph a murder scene
with somebody you care that much about.
She really came to play on this one.
She did and once again the scene was done
both with Penélope and Cameron Diaz
and they both brought it.
Mark Livolsi, who worked with Joe Hutshing,
we've talked about him a bunch on this.
Mark Livolsi really made this sequence a meal
and it was his baby.
We would take little pieces and move them around,
but it didn't change too much from kind of the first...
Really kind of a visual opera that he cut.
There's all kinds of stuff flying around, all kinds of music and sounds and score
and the return of the Joan Osborne song.
- It's a collage. - Again.
And once again, we're rattling around inside a man's brain.
There's the Monkees song from Head,
which I always loved, The Porpoise Song.
There's phone messages.
- There's the Conet Project. - The Conet Project
which are those spy transmissions
that were always meant to be a part of it.
And then there's Tom,
who is flying in the face of his own image
and doing things that I think people didn't ever expect to see him do.
And you can't help...
And this happened throughout the entire experience of putting the movie out.
You can't help but be affected.
It's definitely not a movie that people said, "Well, that's cute.
"Where are we going now?" They're seeing...
- "Fun for the whole family!" - You know,
they're seeing the real ramifications
of love, loss and death.
It's the first time I had tackled some of these things as a director.
I did like the mole being
the real kind of nail in the coffin, and the reveal that he had killed Penélope.
But the murder sequence went quickly.
And we didn't do a lot
of takes on that.
The emotional note got hit
and people were affected on the set, for sure.
Kurt Russell really shows you why he is
one of the great gems
in the community of actors in this scene.
The compassion that he gives you,
and compassion is a tough thing to feel, much less see in movies,
but he gives it to you just in the way he looks at this guy, who...
You know, he's become like family to Kurt
and Kurt's character doesn't know why.
It's the most odd and heartbreaking thing.
And that moment where his eyebrows kind of scrunch together a little bit,
it gets me every time.
It's those little moments
that make a movie come together.
There was another sequence that followed this,
which we might talk about, you know, later or in another commentary.
But this sequence became more of Tom Cruise's character
driving the realization
that LE was Life Extension
and that he had to get to this place, Life Extension,
that Life Extension held the clue
for this murder that didn't feel real to him.
I love this last look Kurt gives Tom.
He reminds me of the young actor
in the Walt Disney movies there.
Someone's at the door. Okay.
So now we have Benny the dog returning.
Benny!
And Tom putting the pieces together.
And the pieces come together courtesy of the infomercial that he saw
when he was first falling in love with Sofia.
And, of course, Noah Taylor.
John Toll really did this in a great manner.
We loved the idea of the image of the TV rattling on the glass.
And that's not CGI, that's old school, baby.
This was shot at a real psychiatric unit in New York.
And the Stones song Heaven, once again, is one of those things
where the sequence never quite played right
unless we had that one song.
And thankfully we have it. Heaven by the Rolling Stones.
The movie now is sort of
really taking you to a different place.
And I always did think
that this was a movie that could be genre-less,
even though it had a lot of different genres built into it.
And the whiff of science fiction
was something that I really thought in a love story...
You'd never expect a movie to start out about romance
and end up here.
But it was one of the great attractions of doing our cover version
and it was one of the great surprises of the original.
That's my mom, by the way, on the monitor. Hi, Mom.
Hi, Mom.
The great Mel, the majestic, there.
Ana Maria Quintana, script supervisor extraordinaire,
Paul Haggar from Paramount.
A few of our friends, neighbors, family there in the monitors.
Tilda Swinton.
I was delighted that she was available
and threw her hat in the ring to play this part.
I love Tilda and once again it gave the kind of global gift
of getting actors from different countries and different styles
to come and do flourishes in our movie.
To be there directing a scene with these three actors
is really where the job is not a job at all, it's completely a thrill.
And we'd always talked about Tilda is having
her own mini love affair with David Aames in this scene.
She's being very seductive
and Kurt Russell,
who is feeling these fatherly and protective feelings for David Aames,
is realizing that his role is being diminished by the second
by this woman who's actually an incredible saleswoman.
And she uses everything.
Future, technology
and sexual allure.
This set, I've got to say, is truly great
because what it is, is a very warmly-lit and photographed mausoleum.
And once again that's Catherine Hardwicke
who brought a wonderful touch as the production designer.
And that's hot sauce there on the shelf behind Tilda's character.
I thought, "How great if she just collected hot sauce."
The film that you see in the table, well, it begins with our child, Curtis.
- One of our two children. - Yeah.
And what it is,
is really the result of some... A lot of really painstaking work
done by Casey Cannon and Scott Martin.
And Neal Preston.
And Neal Preston, who photographed these gentlemen
who were cast by Gail Levin,
who did an amazing job casting this movie,
and Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire
and she cast a whole line of guys
that looked like they could be the same person.
So we filmed that and then we blew most of our budget on that,
so through found images and things we got off the Internet,
and, you know, Björk's video and a little piece of Dr. No...
You know, you have to write Sean Connery and request that.
He's a cool guy, man. He said, "Yes."
And, but anyway, we... And Björk. You have to write Björk.
- And Björk was very generous. - She said, "Yes."
So we assembled this film that was a very slick
and subliminal piece of salesmanship
to get you to freeze yourself.
Cryonics is so lo-fi.
I mean, people think that it's like Thunderball
or, you know, some great vision of the future.
It's one step up from an ice chest and dry ice.
- It's really Io-fi. - It's not Space Odyssey yet.
It is not Space Odyssey yet.
I love Kurt Russell's joke about cryotainment.
The way he does it, you can't beat it.
We have this series of scenes now that you just need to work
and it's an intricate puzzle and here,
Tilda Swinton gets truly inside his mind,
repeating things that...
Repeating things that there's no way she would possibly be able to know that,
things that he's said in his own life earlier,
referencing his affair with Penélope Cruz's character.
And repeating, "This is a revolution of the mind" with him.
There's a great moment as Tilda turns to the camera.
I don't think anyone looks into the lens quite like Tilda Swinton.
She becomes a Vermeer portrait.
And it broke the wall.
It's one of the many things in the movie that breaks the wall a little bit,
but this is one that was particularly chilling.
And a little bit of stunt work with Michael Shannon
and down the hallway we go.
That's Danny Bramson, music supervisor,
executive producer, there against the wall.
- If you blinked, you missed him. - If you blinked, you missed him.
And again, one of those songs
that we couldn't live without was Good Vibrations here.
It's counterpoint to what's going on. The terror of what's going on.
And it's also a song that's very emotional.
By the way, he's yelling, "Tech support" there.
- Tech support? - Tech support.
It's an emotional song that's been, I thought, corrupted by
being used in commercials and things like that.
And it's been played a lot, but wouldn't it be great if this great song
can get kind of buffed and polished
and viewed in a completely different context?
And that's why we went with Good Vibrations.
Tom's slow realization that that elevator door is open
and reveals the answer
- is a nice... - Contrary emotion.
Yeah, it's contrary emotion.
This was sort of our mini-tribute to Ray Bradbury,
this shot, high-angle shot looking down,
passing through the layers, the pools of light,
and his reintroduction to Edmund Ventura.
- Future man. - Future man.
This is where the movie truly takes its final shift.
And after having started off in New York, now we're in LA.
We're in a soundstage in Manhattan Beach.
It was the last sequence we filmed.
These two great actors in one small cubicle,
set against a green screen.
Michèle Burke, who did the makeup throughout the movie,
had really honed the look of Tom's disfiguration.
It really kind of was its own little work of art every day.
It was its own creation daily.
And it looked great. Tom acted from way down deep, I think, throughout.
Never played the makeup as a prop.
Now as he goes through his greatest realization
as to what's really been going on in his life
and the choices he's made, everything kind of came together.
I think we all felt sort of emotional going through this last sequence.
A man really realizing the mistakes he'd made
and the crazily personal choices that he'd made
to try and sort his life out.
Leaving a long space of black there in the sequence
I thought was kind of jarring in a good way.
I read a book on Truffaut once,
where Truffaut said flashbacks are best used in a moving compartment,
a train, and I thought it would be great to do flashbacks
coming off of a moving compartment going upwards.
And that's why we created the elevator to the roof.
Great work done by Digital Domain,
and a number of other special effects houses
under Alison O'Brien's direction,
created this vision of New York that exists in his mind, really.
A lot of iconography,
not quite in the place that it should even be.
But that's David Aames' vision of New York outside those windows
and soon to be seen on the roof.
All these things are sort of the pop culture signposts
that we all have in our lives.
Our favorite movie, To Kill a Mockingbird,
an album cover, as we talked about earlier
that expressed what love was,
a vision of fatherhood that came from Gregory Peck.
I think all that stuff is lodged in all of our minds. Jules and Jim.
A great laugh you try and find in life and when you see it,
something touches you and you don't always know why,
but sometimes it's because it's linking up with images
that became you as you grew up.
And that was one of the big reasons to make the movie, I thought.
Let's celebrate the things that create us
and as told to us by a kind of a messenger, Noah,
who knows us better than we know ourselves.
And Tom has some wonderful moments here of just quiet realization,
that are very still and moving and...
It's a powerful sequence every time I see it.
The journey that a guy takes as he sees himself very clearly.
This was a little bit of a tip of the hat to the shot we had in Jerry Maguire
where Jerry writes the mission statement.
I guess I can admit that.
The actual suicide was a sequence
that we once had cut to Strawberry Fields
and never quite could fit it into the movie in its full length,
but these are sort of the highlights of that sequence.
It really was a moving suicide.
And you see the little pieces of it that tell that story now,
particularly when the light goes out of his eyes
and David Aames actually dies.
But this is us rocketing towards our conclusion.
It's good for an audience, I think, to feel
that they're being completely taken into alien territory.
Territory they never thought they'd be in when the movie began.
There's a wistful quality that Tom has when he realizes the loss
that I really love.
This memorial sequence was shot on a soundstage at Paramount.
And, really, it was a showcase
for this moment we're watching right now,
where Penélope reappears at David Aames' memorial
and she looks around and she sees all the remnants and souvenirs
of that one magical night where they met.
And the place is now a museum of memories
for what could have been.
And that's the greatest pain of all.
She had a Spanish song that she loved that we played.
And she's listening to that and also her grandmother had passed away,
sadly, not too long before she shot this.
Penélope told me recently
that all of that was kind of swirling in her mind.
That coat was a conscious homage to Audrey Hepburn,
I'm not ashamed to admit.
And that links up with the image
that we saw on the TV set at the very beginning,
where Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina
was the first inkling of true romantic love
that was knocking on the door for David Aames.
Of course, all this is fun for us to talk about
and we still talk about it, the people that made the movie.
And I think it's good to just have our own little conversation
here on the audio commentary about what the movie means.
And I hope many people had that experience
after they saw it, where they talked about it.
And talked about the different ways you can interpret what you see.
This is a great moment for Kurt Russell when he comes out of that door.
I love the slow realization that he might not be real
and he does it in about three or four different stages.
Noah, of course, the gentle trip master,
taking him to the edge of his realization.
Of course bringing Benny the dog back.
- That's Benny now. - That's Benny calling.
- Is that God calling? - Perhaps.
That's God calling with his own interpretation.
Could be, could be.
The twin towers in the background,
a lot of people wondered what we meant by that.
What we meant by that is that's what we filmed.
And it was filmed about a year before the tragic incident
that removed them,
and I didn't want to remove them again.
I did love this moment where Tom could look out into the audience
and include the audience as some of the judges of his life.
So much of the movie is about the eternal belief in love
and what love can really be.
It's stuff we talked about every day when we were filming it.
When we tell people sometimes that the movie
is a very modern love story, I think sometimes they're surprised,
but it is that at its very heart.
You know, there's a certain romanticism about memory.
And that view of New York
is David Aames' memory of what New York is.
And it's not quite perfect.
You can look at where the Statue of Liberty is placed
and it's not in the right place, but it's how he remembered it.
And I think one of the things the movie asks is,
"How important is memory?"
Sometimes memory is more important than what really happened.
Sometimes it's memory that lives forever.
But in this movie I think it's love that lives forever.
Kurt Russell has got his own love story.
He fell in love with the image of a son
that he oddly felt so connected to.
And as he realizes here
that he is born out of Tom's character's desire
for a vivid, loving, compassionate father,
he slowly crumbles in the greatest way.
And this is one of those moments that you see an actor find
and you just want to put it all in the movie.
You want to let a take run as long as it takes.
And oddly his daughter had a moment like that in Almost Famous,
when Kate realizes she's been sold for beer.
Here we have what we called our little Planet of the Apes moment,
where Kurt addressed the heavens and said, you know,
"Mortality as home entertainment? This cannot be the future!"
But, of course, it is the future.
And this is the slow realization of a man coming to grips
with the fact that he's not real.
And I love that shrug Kurt has.
And then he accepts that he's not real and says good-bye.
It killed me when we filmed it.
And they were breaking down the equipment
and we were moving on to the next scene,
I was kind of standing around going, "Did you believe what just happened?"
And everybody was sort of rocketing on to the next scene,
but I just knew in my heart that we had that character's good-bye.
And that brings us to Tom's great decision
that he wants to live a real life.
He doesn't want to dream any more.
So in finding reality, he has to sacrifice
the dream of love
for the promise of actual love.
And a love that he can appreciate because he was schooled by Sofia.
So now you have the good-bye that passes between a character
who's ecstatic that he's got this love of his life back,
but she is a figment.
And I really wanted to do this scene
because it's just one of the more original ways
that two lovers can say good-bye in a story.
And I've got to hand it to Alejandro Amenábar
because it's his creation.
When he saw the movie,
he said some really inspiring stuff to me.
But one of the things he said is that he really loved that line about,
"I'm frozen, you're dead and I love you."
He said, "Oh, man, I wish that was in my movie!"
But, you know, they're all in both movies,
the different interpretations and the different roads you can travel.
And I do love this good-bye.
"I'll find you again," she says.
And it is a pure moment for Penélope Cruz,
who really can fall in love onscreen
as good as anybody ever has.
That yearning,
that kind of simple, mysterious look that she gives him
powers the end of the movie.
And Tom repeats that line that came from Penélope herself
and I love that wave, too.
The vertigo that you get looking down was difficult to achieve.
A lot of hard work with John Toll and
we studied how the original did it and we tried our own ways.
And I liked what made it celestial.
A guy who is jumping for a new beginning
and the end will be brief
and his beginning will appear quickly.
These images are kind of our own little Sgt. Pepper cover.
Each one of them matters
and I invite you to pause and think about who they are and what they mean.
Some of them are bands, some of them are out-takes,
some of them are musicians, albums that matter a lot.
Home movies from Tom's archives.
What it does is give you a collage of feelings and impressions.
And we fade to white at the end, which I was really proud of.
I've heard many interpretations of the movie
and almost all of them to date end up discussing
whose voice it is that wakes David Aames up in the future.
For the theatrical version, we asked a actress
that we really wanted to work with, the great Scottish actress Laura Fraser,
to be the voice of the future.
But in other sections of this Blu-ray,
you'll hear different voices waking David Aames up.
And each path, is different, open to interpretation.
Choose your path well and listen carefully.
I've read some great stuff on Greg Mariotti's website, The UnCool.
It's been very entertaining
and I've always loved how people got so invested in the movie.
Billy Wilder once said that his greatest dream was
that he could make a movie that people would want to talk about
for 15 minutes afterwards.
And when I was interviewing him for our book, I said, "Just 15 minutes?"
He said, "15 minutes is the minimum."
But that was his goal and I think that was an honorable goal
that I had in my mind when we made Vanilla Sky.
That this could be a movie that people could talk about later,
and as we're talking about it now.
The song, I have to tell you, that we're hearing
by Paul McCartney was a gift.
Paul was on our minds a lot in the making of the movie
and Danny Bramson, who does the music,
we do the music together on the movies,
contacted him and asked him if he would want to come to the editing room,
and see some footage and think about participating with some of his music.
So one day Paul McCartney actually showed up in our editing room.
And that in itself was a seismic situation.
But he came and he saw about 40 minutes of the movie
and was affected by it
and we went back to his studio, where he was recording Driving Rain,
and he played us some songs.
And they sounded great. They sounded like they'd work
and I just sort of jumped in and said,
"You know, you've seen about 40 minutes of the movie.
"There's a theme about cherishing what's real in our lives
"and cherishing love and embracing the sweet and sour of life.
"And if anything comes to you, if you want to write a new song..."
Like a folk song.
Like a folk song, a ballad.
'Cause the movie always did feel a little bit like a folk song to me.
"Go right ahead."
And he kind of looked at me like,
"You know, I'm a little busy and this is the album that I'm recording right now."
But he was totally gracious and wonderful
and then that was on a Tuesday.
On a Saturday, Danny Bramson's cell phone rang
and it was Paul McCartney.
And he said, you know, "Get to know me, man,
"because if you ask me for something, I might just come through for you.
"I've written a new song, a folk song, called Vanilla Sky.
"And if you don't like it, I'll just change the words to 'Manila Envelope'."
And we raced across town to the studio and saw him again
and he played us the song
and it felt like the perfect way
to kind of come back down to earth
after we've tumbled through this story.
And that became the end title.
You hear a little bit of it in the beginning
when David Aames is waking up in his apartment,
but it was Paul McCartney who, I think...
The DNA of the movie really is in him.
And he just kind of perfectly hit the right note for the end of the movie.
And as we're now watching the many songs
that kind of rattle around the psyche of Vanilla Sky,
it's kind of perfect that it ends
with this kind of grace note from Paul McCartney.
Who says in the song the words "sweet and sour."
And it really brings the movie together for me when it's over.
I want to thank a few people for being involved in this labor of love.
Scott Martin and Andy Fischer from Vinyl Films.
Scott, thank you for being on-set DJ and producer.
Paula Wagner, Tom Cruise, Jonathan Sanger,
the cast and crew.
Jeff Wexler, Don Coufal, who did the great sound.
Ana Maria Quintana, Dianne Dreyer, Don Lee.
Woody, Herb, Dilly Gent from Radiohead.
Daya Fernandez, Michael Doven, David McGiffert,
Gail Levin, Michèle Burke, Betsy Heimann, Ellen Freund,
Mike Thomas, Graydon Carter, for letting us use Vanity Fair.
John Arena, Michael Mann and the Ali crew that mixed next to us.
Martin Scorsese for loaning us Cameron Diaz.
And you've got to say Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil.
Thank you very much for loaning us your folk song and your fable
and your great words and story.
And the great Nancy Wilson, who thinks I say "great" too much.
Thank you for your score. Bye.