Cameron Crowe Quotes (60 Quotes)


    I was fortunate to work with actors who loved music too. Just seeing what it would do to their manner and their faces was great and it helped give the story a little more soul.

    This was not a navel-gazing experience. But it did feel like it was worth saying as a tribute to my father. I always equate it to music. Every once in a while, songwriters say, 'This one's more personal than the others.' So I figured, embrace it.

    There are so many different themes and characters and worlds within the movie, ... Lo and behold, we find that the editing of all those little strains in a movie can be really difficult. I didn't want to start cutting out characters wholesale and savaging the many different performances. Over time, showing the movie became the only way to figure out how it was all rhythmically working.

    Wilder would say, 'Ninety minutes for this picture is all my bum can take in a seat',

    I wanted to make a comment on the obsession with success and failure that we see a lot in America.


    Well all kinds of movies that you wouldn't expect that I'd want to do, both bigger scale and smaller scale than the ones I've done.

    How many times have I thought of me sitting on a bench with him and me wriggling away from whatever he wanted to talk to me about. Sometimes you say you're going to write a story about that and sometimes it just arrives, and those scenes arrive.


    The question is where do we go from here The answer is -- life.

    I sort of wanted to make a comment on the obsession with success and failure that we see so often in America. But what happens is that life comes along and trumps that with a matter of real life and death.

    All things considered, if you're going to miss one film this year, make it Vanilla Sky.

    People dance and we have a lot of music and... this might be the closet I get for a while.

    Not that I took it as a fiasco at the time, but no one saw 'Almost Famous' in the theaters,

    Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

    And I'm always surprised at who's there when you fail, ... It's usually not the people you expect to be there. It's easy to have friends when you're winning. And Jerry Maguire was kind of about that. This was about that, but it's like success and failure get trumped by an even bigger issue, which is, 'Are you going to be truly alive, and do you even know what that is'

    And I liked that whole idea that energy comes from not disseminating your ideas and talking about them.

    Claire literally saves his life. And to me there's no better story to tell than how someone can process a knock. A hero is someone who turns their disappointment into a greater opportunity. This woman helps him on the path.

    I remember loving that album, ... Frampton took me into the studio and played me that album and I thought it was the greatest party album that I'd heard in a long time, and so I wrote the liner notes and the album became huge.

    I liked the idea of starting the movie with the ending and ending it with the beginning, ... I feel that by the end Drew is ready to begin again.

    It's more like can I build a group of characters and can I tell some universal truths that feel real and aren't formulaic in the spirit of filmmakers gone by who've told American stories that were personal and universal as well.

    TORONTO -- When Cameron Crowe was flying to the Toronto film festival recently, he walked down the aisle of the plane and studied his fellow passengers sitting in front of their personal TV sets. They were just having the greatest time, there was so much joy in their eyes, ... And I looked to see what they were watching. And it was all out-and-out comedies. So many people watching The Longest Yard. And I just got the feeling that, 'You know what People just like to let it all go, and have a laugh'.

    I told them, 'Don't even think about the camera. It may not even be near you. Just have the party.' And then there's somebody in the middle of them shooting film.

    In Southern California, there's that feeling of people in transit. I grew up in Southern California, so whenever I ran across a world where your relatives stayed, and they lived a few miles away, and you have the roots that are really strong in your community, that always felt like a wonderful romantic notion. And this movie was about discovering this whole root system that you didn't realize you had.

    She loves Susan Sarandon and I know my dad (would have loved) being married to Susan Sarandon, ... Susan said she learned more about how to play the part from talking to my mom than to me.

    It used to be, like, the sanctity of rock was that you could never let a song of yours be used in a commercial. It was like, 'Oh man, we'll never let our music be exploited that way.' Now they'll call you up and say, 'You gotta use this song in your movie, man. It's the new VW ad People love it.' And you realize, boy, have times changed.

    I just think if you play it, it seeps in, it seeps into the performances, it seeps into the atmosphere of the movie. And a lot of times I used the music ... while they were doing the scene.

    Music is such an inspiration to me. I love it when it completes a story, along with the words and image,

    I liked the idea of beginning our movie with death, the place most movies end,

    And I called her and gave her the job. And then I cast Orlando to her. He was like the kind of ingenue-discovery part and she was the established actor that I usually give the guy role to.

    I liked the idea of fiasco as failure gone to church. How does that become a transcendent thing And that morphed into the different mini-themes.

    Orlando was the first guy I thought of because we'd done a commercial together and I just liked him -- every take was different.

    It blew my mind, ... There were two girls who acted out the poster of the movie. They had a little red sofa by the side of the road. One was dressed up in a black suit like Orlando with a black wig and an urn. And the other was Kirsten with the champagne glass and her legs crossed it was so sweet. I was truly in shock.

    I always thought I'd write about my dad, at some point, ... I didn't think it would be like this, but it arrived like this. I'd been listening to a lot of Garrison Keillor at the time. I love that simple story that ends on a grace note and you go, 'Wow, I'm just happy to be alive right now.' That was the feeling I was chasing.

    We used music in the film to create an environment. It made it feel like we were telling our story with a little extra -- a little extra soul.

    Life sends you angels sometimes when you're in need and, in my theory, it's usually never the people you expect to be there, ... They are often gone the people that appear with a piece of advice or something they want to give to you to help you through are generally surprising people and I wanted Kirsten's character to be that.

    She's an old soul. You will find her to be one of the more mature 23-year-olds on the planet.

    Well it kind of is project to project because as a writer I think you always write to some degree about things that you know or things that happened - but my favourite filmmakers, my favourite movies of theirs tend to be the personal movies.

    I knew 'Almost Famous' wasn't playing in theaters at that long length. And really, it wasn't one of those terrible squabbles that you read about, where people want to change their name or anything. Our toughest discussion was, did Kate Hudson dance too long It wasn't that big of a deal.

    Great music is its own movie, already. And the challenge, as a music fan, is to keep the song as powerful as it wants to be, to not tamper with it and to somehow give it a home.

    I like double albums, ... And this was kind of a double album. And with double albums, sometimes you say, 'Well this is a whole lot to process.' But then you listen to it again and you start to develop favorites and it gets a character all its own. And then you think maybe you see this movie later on TV and you start to think, 'Well, you know what I get it. That all these themes are supposed to be part of a bigger simpler theme.'

    This is a personal movie that I knew I had to come here to make,

    I liked the idea of beginning the movie with death, because you sort of say well, where do we go from here. I think the only answer is life, and that's the ending of my movie.

    The entire story of 'Elizabethtown' arrived quickly, ... a tale of love and loss and the discovery of family roots in the aftermath of a very black turn of events in the life of a young shoe designer, Orlando Bloom. It was a story that would start with an ending and end with a beginning and, I hoped, give a sense of what it was to be truly alive.

    The thing was always, as every story you write has a built-in problem, was Was it too personal. That was the thing I wondered about for a long time. Oddly enough, it's often the personal stuff that people come up to you later and say about it, 'I can't believe you put that in a movie. That happened to me.' And sometimes, the thing that you make up happened to no one.

    I married a musician, music is everywhere I turn, thankfully. Yeah, a lot of times the ideas for a movie, or even the way I cast a movie, comes from driving around in my car and listening to tapes and thinking, 'Kate Hudson floating on a Joni Mitchell song.' That's a good scene.

    Hopefully I've done it, not in a pretentious way, but just as a cinematic mix, ... It is kind of a flourish. I didn't know if it would work. What I wanted it to be was authentic, the kind of music she would actually put on there. What I wouldn't want was it to be, 'Oh, that's that guy who always puts music in his movies doing a big thing with music'. I wanted it to be that girl's taste. And yeah, she would put Pride (In the Name of Love) on it. You do go for some obvious stuff when you make a mix tape because it reinvents itself.

    If you were on a desert island and you could only bring along five records from the past five years, what records would you bring


    People always complain that movies are all the same and that ticket buyers are voting and saying, 'No more,'

    Tom's dad also passed away when he was a young man and he had that history of feeling he never really knew him properly - so he just seemed like the best guy to work with on this one,


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