'The Interview': What Happened to Cameron Crowe? He Has Answers.

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From the New York Times, this is the interview.

I'm David Marchese.

As a former rock journalist myself, Cameron Crowe's career always seemed impossibly cool and impossible to replicate.

He got a start as a teenager in the 70s, going on the road and hanging out with the likes of Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, and David Bowie for Rolling Stone magazine.

Trust me, that does not happen anymore.

He would eventually turn those experiences and his mother's completely understandable worries about them into his classic film Almost Famous from 2000, which he directed and which won him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Those experiences are also the backbone of his new memoir, The Uncool.

But the book's tight focus on those early days means there's kind of a lot left untapped.

That includes Crowe's transition to writer-director of beloved films like Say Anything, Singles, and Jerry Maguire, as well as some thornier subjects, like the end of his marriage to musician Nancy Wilson, and what some people, myself included, see as a real change in the quality of his more recent work.

So, what happened?

And has any of that tougher stuff chipped away at the idealism at the center of his earlier successes?

There's a lot to talk about.

Here's my conversation with Cameron Crow.

Cameron, thank you for taking the time to talk with me today.

So great to be doing this, and thanks for you taking the time.

You know, so the memoir overlaps with the almost famous story in a way.

Yeah.

You know, both in terms of the beginning of your career and some of the family dynamics that you were living through at the time, particularly with your mom.

But Almost Famous, I think it came out almost exactly 25 years ago.

You've been thinking about this part of your life, these formative experiences for a long time now.

You've really been working through this material for years and years and years.

I'm a pack rat.

What are you still trying to figure out?

I think you're maybe an emotional pack rat.

What are you still figuring out?

Yeah, really well said.

Well, I love that time when everything meant

life or death emotionally, and you really felt things and you hadn't built up like many layers of leather-like skin.

Like, oh, yeah.

And when I first started directing, one of the things that really drove me crazy was when people would say, like,

that's not how it's done.

Let me, let me show you how it works.

And they didn't seem to have joy.

And I, I wanted to never forget the joyful experience of following your dream and finding your fucking voice in the world, which to me is sometimes a youthful experience and sometimes it doesn't happen until late in your life.

But I loved the journey of

finding that kind of comfortable place where you know, like, this is who I am as a writer.

This may even be who I am as a person.

So I wanted to make sure that I wrote something that captured that feeling, not through the mists of time, not through like a thick wall, a thick, you know, glass wall where you see, you know, yes, that's how it used to be.

I wanted to write something about the time when

Bowie was still alive, Glenn Fry was still alive.

And I wrote it for pure pleasure.

And then eventually I I knew it was going to get published.

But I pressed send on the manuscript the night before the Palisades fire showed up to,

I thought, consume our house.

So I remember thinking, like, okay, I sent it in.

If I lose everything, I did write the thing that kind of captured the sum total of all those memories and everything I kept.

So I'm really proud of it.

Can you put me back in a moment when you were, you know, 19 years old

doing what you were doing?

And you thought, well, it's all happening.

Really, it started before that.

It started like when I was 14 and 15, when I just wanted to get backstage and I had all these questions, like I did way too much research and stuff.

And as a fan, I had like a huge notebook generally, one, sometimes two full of questions.

So I think like people tended to show pity on me sometimes standing outside with this notebook full of questions and a tape recorder.

It's like, let's let him in.

And once I was in, David, I always found like the doors would open.

Like, you know, people like Jim Croce

or Glenn Fry of the Eagles or these people whose music I really had questions about.

were so relieved and happy and excited that there was somebody who was actually a fan and knew their music standing in front of them with a tape recorder.

Turn it on, let's talk.

It was embarrassing when people would bust me about my age, but exciting when they laughed about it and said,

ask me whatever you want.

So I just kept going with it.

And was there something that you saw in those earliest days that made you think like, oh, I'm seeing something that most people don't get to see?

Yeah, the hunger of people that weren't understood in their own adolescent life.

They chose music because music chose them.

And it was a day-to-day kind of crusade to like keep this life alive where they were understood.

Also, there wasn't a feeling that rock was going to last that long.

So there was that thing of like, well, we're making hay while, you know, the sun shines here.

But I saw a documentary on the Eagles recently where Don Henley said, you know, basically, we don't know what we're going to do when our real life starts.

And, you know, he's planned a sphere and it's 55 years later.

So everybody, I think, was kind of like on an adventure, not knowing where it would end.

When did your real life start?

I think my real life

started

when Jan Wenner called me in

to have a conversation about what I thought was a congratulations for having gotten Led Zeppelin for the cover of Rolling Stone.

Led Zeppelin hated Rolling Stone.

Led Zeppelin.

were the last band that you would ever expect to see in Rolling Stone because it was a well-known feud.

And Jan called me in to talk to him.

And in fact, it was, yeah,

you did well,

but is it a real piece of writing?

And this was a day where he had lost his own mentor, Ralph Gleason.

And he kind of was working his way through a bottle of vodka and didn't need to see me.

He could have blown off the meeting, but he didn't.

And he talked to me about that.

And then he said, meet me at my home.

And I met him later at his home and he gave me a copy of Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and said, read some of this stuff and read her earlier profile on the doors.

You'll see how to really write like a real writer.

And I was hurt,

but also challenged.

And on the way back from San Francisco that day was when my real life started.

And so that would have been like 1975 or so?

Yeah.

Also easy for someone to...

for an editor to hand a writer a copy of Joan Didion's work.

I'd say, yeah, use this as your model.

Good luck.

Well, it was well-thumbed.

So

I knew there was some history in connecting with the book, but it was great and it did inspire me.

And her profile of the doors where the doors are waiting for Jim Morrison to show up is incredible.

You know everything you need to know about that band and you feel like you had a front row seat to an experience, which is what I always wanted to do and create that feeling as a writer.

Are there any experiences from those 70s days that stand out to you as ones that you, you know, have lingered with you, but you don't know how they fit into the larger story of your life?

Interesting.

Bowie was like that

for me because,

you know, I cover this thin white duke period where he was kind of lost in Los Angeles and

allowed me or asked me to do a profile on him that took place over that period of time.

And it was a wild kind of glimpse of,

you know, his own kind of untethered brilliance at the time.

But when I re-interviewed him in like 2012

and asked him about that story, I know where you're going.

This is fascinating.

Keep going.

Yeah.

I know what you're going to do.

And

I think I made him

a little melancholy and regretful that I had glimpsed this time when he was untethered.

And so what was fascinating to me was that time that he was slightly embarrassed about now was one of my most formative times.

So that was something that made sense to me later because he was essentially telling me when I re-interviewed him, like, hey, I'm glad you had a good time.

I scared myself to death and almost died in the time that we knew each other really well.

But guess what?

I live in Soho now.

I have a beautiful life.

I love my children and I love my wife.

And like,

see you later.

Yeah, it's, it's

the exact example you're pointing to is one I was thinking about also.

So it's like, you know, you're hanging out with David Bowie in 1975, 76, whenever it was, when he was in his,

I believe it was like, maybe it's from one of your profiles of him.

He's like only eating peppers and drinking milk or something like that.

And thought he was being pursued by witches.

And so you wrote this profile that kind of has like an effervescence to it, I would say.

And then when you spoke to Bowie about it later, you know, he basically says, I was mentally ill.

And

I thought, like, from a larger perspective, are there things that your age and perspective prevented you from seeing and therefore stopped you from putting into the stories?

I think I always wanted to put my experience forward in the stories.

Some stuff would be in between the lines, but mostly I wanted people to feel what I felt.

And I'm still like that making movies.

It's like, I want to create that feeling.

And it's the feeling that music gives you, where you're,

you're

transported into this place that's a safe, glorious kind of place.

And it's not going to last forever, but you feel it while you're listening to this music that means so much or has touched your soul.

And I wanted to create that feeling journalistically too.

Like I wanted you to feel like you were in the car riding with Bowie.

And this is the guy that you still don't really know that well in media.

He was a warm,

hugely,

he could see, he kind of saw around corners musically and culturally and stuff and so his his kind of um

lost weekend was more

i think amazing than he wanted to remember but the point was i i saw stuff i saw glimpses of things and i tended to write about it a lot but also to put you the reader into a place where you felt what i felt

do you think anything you learned from doing your job as a journalist, you were then able to bring back to the relationships with your family.

Ooh, ask me that.

Ask me that again.

That's really a great question.

Yeah, because you were still a young man, you know, and

young people, you know, their late teens, early 20s, they're still kind of figuring out their relationships with their siblings, with their parents.

And you were in a situation where you're sort of practicing the art of

understanding someone, of learning how to talk to to all different kinds of people, of knowing when to listen, when to interject?

It's a great question.

It teaches you to listen.

It teaches you to have empathy.

It teaches you to see people in very tough situations and, you know, how to read a room.

It's true.

And I brought back a lot of empathy from my parents and for my sister because I could see the daily battles that everybody.

suffered, you know, some people think because I got published as a young guy and, you know, had success early on that was kind of obvious in Rolling Stone and stuff that I was a candide, you know, that life was just easy and I was just like cruising through every open door.

And like, you know,

he's living a Cinderella story, but it was tough.

You know, everything is a negotiation in a way to get yourself access, to get yourself in the position where you can do the interviews.

And the other thing is, there's always a story behind the story.

What was the story behind the story with your family?

I think because I was the youngest and I was the last,

I was for my mom in particular.

It was

I was the one that they could get everything right with.

And so they came to it with a certain playbook that they learned from two children before me.

They reluctantly let me go out into the world and fight these battles and win and lose and stuff.

But

it was

kind of me coming back

wounded from some of those battles that provided some of our most important times where it was just me and my parents sitting around talking about the ups and downs of life and how you have to fight to be optimistic and how being a warrior.

for that kind of optimism is a good life to live.

And I think that that I learned with them as a family.

You know,

there's that phrase, everywhere you go, there you are.

You know, that's what I'm thinking about.

It's impossible to avoid your journalism being a reflection of who you are.

So I'm going to nerd out just for a second on Lester Bangs,

who is sort of a legendary.

rock critic who died, I think, in the early 80s,

who was still a young man, just in his 30s, I think.

Yeah.

And was sort of a mentor to you.

And he was played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous.

And in Almost Famous, the Lester Banks character functions as kind of like the moral conscience of journalism and of rock and roll.

And he's kind of like the Obi-Wan Kenobi figure for the character of William, who was based on you.

And in the film, and it's also in the book, too, Lester sort of cautions you against being seduced by the people that you write about.

You know, don't turn in some story that just makes them look like a cool genius.

My question, though, is,

is that what you ended up doing most of the time?

The thing that Lester asked you not to do?

Well, this is an interesting thing because the last time I saw Lester, he, the guy who said, don't hang out with the rock stars, don't make friends with the rock stars,

was was friends with Bill Spooner from the tubes.

And the last time I saw Lester, we were hanging out with Bill Spooner from that band.

And Lester had a wonderful relationship with Bill.

And I think what he was saying, and it's a fair question for sure, is like, don't sell yourself out.

Like, you're going to be seduced.

You're going to do all that.

Like, yeah, you can be a so-called friend.

It may not last forever, but you can be on a very kind of like,

you know, almost a confessional basis with somebody.

And

you're not a friend, but you're a sympathetic listener.

And I always felt like that was a great place to be, particularly if I loved the band or the artist I was writing about, because I was in heaven.

But I think what Lester was also talking about is like, don't try and join the band.

Don't try and be that person.

You know, study that person from a distance.

And then like I always wanted to do, I wanted to bring people along with me.

I never thought I could play guitar or any of that.

But I could spend some time around Jimmy Page and maybe get something across that you as a Led Zeppelin fan would be listening to like Cashmere and you will have read this story and you like Cashmere more because you get where it all came from.

Well, and sort of the in a convoluted way, part of what I was trying to get at with the first part of my question is that, you know, it is the personal decisions you made were a reflection of the person you are who is an optimistic person, an idealist kind of fan.

And I think if a dyspeptic personality like Lester, perhaps, were in those same situations, he probably would have come back with very different stories.

And he did.

And he would mix it up with Lou Reed.

He would like come at these people.

And sometimes this is another thing that's like a choice you make as a journalist.

Like, is the story about you or is it a story about what you learned when you were there?

Um, would you say you're friends with Joni Mitchell?

I am friends with Joni Mitchell, proudly,

uh, in the best way.

She was my best interview at Rolling Stone.

The 79 interview that we did when she was putting out the Mingus album was by far the best interview I did there.

And she speaks in third draft.

And so it's really fun to talk with her.

And where do things stand with the biopic you're making about her?

We're going to make it next year.

There's not a lot I can say about it.

Soon I'll be able to speak more kind of definitively about who's in it and how we're going to do it and everything.

It came from a very

interesting place.

I was working on another script and another project, and I loved writing about Joni.

And so she was coming, you know, back into the world a little bit after her aneurysm, but she was putting out an archival set of her earliest stuff, which she always said, like, I'm never going to put that stuff out.

It's, it's naive.

But then I think she and history kind of said, go back and check that stuff out.

So she was putting out the archive.

And I, I said, yeah, sure, all right, liner notes for sure.

But I also want to interview Joni.

And we we started talking.

And

her memories of childhood and growing up and everything were so vivid, I actually had a dream of a structure of how to tell that story.

So I called over to her place and told Marcy Gensick, who's her kind of right-hand person, that I'd had this dream about what a structure would be for a movie about her life, though we've never talked about it.

But if somebody comes knocking, come to me first and I'll tell you this idea and we'll see what happens.

She's She's like, they're knocking, they're knocking all the time.

And Joni wonders why you've taken so long to call and ask this question.

So yes, come over and tell us what your idea is.

And this was about four and a half years ago.

And she said, wonderful.

Let's spend every Monday night.

Let's talk.

You come over here.

We'll talk.

You ask me anything you want.

And

I'm here to serve this idea.

And so that's what I've been doing all this time.

It's been an incredibly inspiring time.

The most I've interviewed anybody, the deepest tissue kind of conversations I've had with any artist.

I've just found it like incredibly invigorating and can't wait to make the movie.

Are Meryl Streep and Anya Taylor Joy playing her at different parts of her life?

Can't confirm that.

I wish I could.

And what is most important to you to

convey about Joni Mitchell that maybe hasn't been conveyed already?

Like, what part of her story still don't people really know about?

Her life from her point of view yeah and the many people along her path

everybody's kind of phobic about the the term biopic but a biographical story about somebody i always felt musician or not should give you the feeling that you came to being interested in this person over like a joni mitchell movie should feel like a joni mitchell album Be good to the people that have been there as a fan all along.

And that's the best road to telling a biographical story about a musician for sure.

Like that's the sensibility I crave.

And it's in a movie now.

Yes.

And that's the Joni Mitchell dream.

And I have a handful of questions about your Hollywood career, but before we get to those, just because I think it's useful, practical information for people, give me Glenn Fry's recipe for a good buzz.

It's come into the room, drink two beers immediately, get a good buzz going and ride that buzz and have one more beer, preferably long neck bud,

and do one every 45 minutes.

You will find that you had a great time and met a lot of wonderful people.

Have you tried that?

Oh, yes.

It works.

It does work.

Right.

So you don't have to be a member of the Eagles for that, for that.

No, no, it's really, it's really just, I think the key thing is the long neck Budweiser.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But he, this is, this is one of the great things that was so fun to write about was because Glenn was like a student of not only how to succeed in a rock band, but also how to carry yourself

as a teenager.

And his nickname was Teen King.

So he totally saw me as this awkward person and be like, okay, you're getting a good face.

It's kind of getting along, maybe a little too long, but it's good.

It's good.

I wouldn't do a mustache.

What you got to do is just kind of know that you've got a quality.

And this girl you were talking about earlier that, you know, likes a better looking guy and whatever.

Hey, if she can't smell your qualifications, you got to move on.

Understanding someone's qualities strikes me as

not dissimilar from what a director has to understand about people.

Yeah.

Are there actors who come to mind who you understood something about who they were that maybe they didn't even know was in there?

The thing that comes to mind is Jerry Maguire.

I always loved how playful Tom Tom Cruise is as a person.

He is.

He called me right after Say Anything came out and said,

hey, this is a really good movie.

You made a great movie.

Congrats.

You got to do more of these things.

This is really good.

I'd love to work with you someday.

Take care.

So I knew he was a guy that had kind of a adventurous, fun spirit.

Anyway, so I forget.

It was early in the process of filming.

And I had a whole like, you know, set full of people.

It was SMI, his sports agency.

And this is the scene where, you know, he, he's leaving.

He's got like a goldfish and everything.

And who's coming with me?

And,

you know, marching through the office.

And I just had this feeling, what if you fall down?

What if you fall down on your face?

Do a prat fall and do a prat fall.

And they're all there.

We had a, we had a set full of people and they're watching Tom cruise.

How does he do it?

How does he act?

How's he, what's he going to do?

And so I thought like, okay,

let's do one where you do the Pratt fall and let's see what happens.

And at that point, you're standing there.

You're going like, okay, I'm telling Tom Cruise to fall on his face.

My bet is that he might do it.

And Tom Cruise goes, yes, let's do it.

Don't tell anybody.

And he did it.

And it was.

The oxygen left the room in such a profound way.

And then he got up and everybody realized that it was part of the scene and it got applause.

So that was an example of like kind of

seeing a nugget and asking them to bring it on camera.

I would say 90% of the time you ask for that, you'll get it.

Tom Cruise was in Jerry Maguire, and then, of course, he was in Vanilla Sky also.

And,

you know, I re-watched those movies in advance of talking to you.

And I think it's,

I'm going to sound like a doofus, but

because it's not like Tom Cruise is lacking in public adoration, but I think now when you spell doofus, do you spell doofus with two O's or D-U-F-U-S?

I have never even considered spelling it with D-U-F-U-S.

Is that how you spell it?

Good.

No, I'm double O.

Just checking, just checking.

But I re-watch those films and I was sort of curious for your sort of perspective on

Tom Cruise's career over the last 10 years or so, because he's really focused on these spectacular films, the Mission Impossible movies, or he did the mommy movie, which are very different from the kinds of character-driven performances that he gave for you.

Do you think just his interests as a storyteller have diverged from the kind of work that he was interested in when he was making films with you?

Like, how do you see where he's gone?

I see that there's a time coming, and it might have already started,

where he's going to sag into character roles as strongly as he sagged into doing action movies and learning to do action movies in the highest of quality circumstances.

And that Paul Newman character phase that's just around the corner, I think will fry people's minds in a way.

I think what Tom does is becomes an absolute student in whatever he's attaching himself to.

And so like, of course, he's going to have the best stunts.

Of course, he's going to have done the work to know how to do this and that.

But when that Paul Newman phase starts again, he's going to apply the same kind of passion to it.

It's going to be amazing.

I'll tell you one little thing.

I have the same lawyer as Clint Eastwood.

And Bruce Raymer is his name.

And he invited me to a dinner party.

and sat me next to Clint Eastwood.

And I was so nervous.

What do you say to Clint Eastwood?

So I'm sitting there and and Clint Eastwood leans over and says,

Tom Cruise.

And I go, oh man, Tom Cruise.

I love working with Tom Cruise.

And he goes, in 100 years,

they're going to look back.

That's the career, Tom Cruise's career.

Yeah.

That's the career to watch.

When everything melts away and it becomes, you know, simple statements of what happened at a certain time in history, you're going to read Tom Cruise's name.

And just on the the subject of seeing things in actors that maybe hadn't been utilized by other directors, I'm thinking of John Cusack and Say Anything.

There's a great quote from John Mahoney, who played the dad in Say Anything, and of course played Frasier's dad for years on Fraser.

But John Mahoney has a line about John Cusack that he said in an interview somewhere that Say Anything is where, I'm paraphrasing, but Say Anything is where John Cusack discovered his cusackness.

And I think that's exactly right.

I think he wanted to dial down his Cusack-ness when I met him.

He was like, I can't do another teen movie.

I'm like, oh, it's really not a teen movie, I swear.

I mean, I think Cusack grew up on that movie in a lot of ways.

He'd done Eight Men Out and stuff with John Sales.

But there was a kind of a tortured wisdom about him in say anything that I loved so much.

The first time I saw him, he was facing away from me in a coffee shop in Chicago.

And

he hadn't even turned around and I knew he was Lloyd.

Then he turned around and we started talking.

And then he said, I'm never going to do this part because I don't want to be that John Cusack guy again in that way.

So the making of Say Anything.

I would say we were fighting with that perception of like earlier period QSAC and current QSAC throughout the entire making of the movie into the session where we worked on sound sound at the end after the film had been shot.

He watched one of the scenes and said,

oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right.

I guess I do get what you were going for.

You know, there's the iconic scene in the film where John Cusak's character holds up the boombox and Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes plays to Ione Sky's character.

Is it right that John Cusack did not want to have to hold the boombox up?

Oh, baby.

So right.

He really felt that it was a subservient act.

And why does Lloyd have to be a wuss like that?

Like, why?

No,

this is an epic wuss phase for you.

But really, I think we struggled with how to get that scene.

And it was the last scene on the last day.

where we got the scene that's in the movie.

And it was the cinematographer, Laszlo Kovacs, like like really legendary cinematographer who knew that we'd been battling.

We had actually shot the scene where Cusack had the boombox on the hood of a car and he was standing like this saying like, well, that's more, that's more what I would do, you know?

And

I think after we had shot that for a while, I started worrying that the executives were going to see this and I would get in trouble.

And Laszlo knew that and leaned over and whispered in my ear, don't worry, there's no film in the camera.

So he knew we were chasing the grand moment of holding up the boombox.

So on the last day, as we were losing the sun, he said, I found a place across the street that would be good.

And the car is parked there.

Let's get him across the street and see if we can get it.

And so we ran across the street.

QSAC said, okay, I'll do it.

And so he's holding out the boombox, literally kind of pissed.

that he's having to do it one more time.

And you knew it watching it in the monitor.

That was the perfect emotion for the scene.

In what way are movie stars like

rock stars?

And in what way are movie stars different than rock stars?

I have a theory about this, but you tell me.

They want to be each other.

They want to be each other.

One has all the magnificence that the other one feels is just around the corner in the right circumstance.

But they appreciate the artfulness in what the other one does.

The difference is

the difference is probably that actors sometimes have to give up what's perceived as the power of what they're doing to another person, the director.

So it's like they're not actually making the thing totally.

Whereas a musician generally is making the thing totally and possibly working for a tough producer or something.

But one perceives a little more liberty in the other's job.

I think from the fan's perspective, a difference for me is that the musicians that I really love, I really identify with personally.

And I think the actors and actresses I love, it's more a feeling of sort of admiration or idolization a little bit.

There's more of a distance there.

Whereas with, you know, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, whomever, like I, I feel like they're a part of me almost

in a way that feels different to me than I feel about my favorite actors.

Super true.

And they've authored more stuff from the heart that could speak to you personally as well as a musician.

Yeah, it's really true.

But I like doing, I like creating a character in a movie that feels as inviting to you personally as the way you just described what a musician can do for you.

It's like, if you can get that feeling from a character in a movie, you've got it all.

And I think that's one of the reasons why I love using music in movies so much.

And

because that marriage, when that happens, is just like,

it's everything.

Who's an actor that you've worked with that

sent your

latent journalist bells ringing?

Who thought, gosh, that would be a good person to write about.

There's something going on there that I'd like to get to know more about.

Oh, wow.

Great question.

Well, Penelope Cruz was one.

Tell me about that.

Fascinating person.

She's in vanilla sky person.

She's in vanilla sky.

Fascinating person, reads a room like nobody you've ever seen.

I don't know that I've ever seen anyone that read the room in such a deep tissue way.

I thought she was really fascinating.

I wish I'd written about Philip Seymour Hoffman.

He was another guy who was very mysterious to me, David.

He didn't want to come in and rehearse, but he was really sweet about it.

And

I said to him, it's really important to me playing Lester Bangs.

Like, I really need you to come to LA at least for a couple of days and work on this stuff.

He's like, well, you'll find you won't need a couple days.

I was like, well, I need it.

And so he got on a plane and he came out.

He walked in, sat down,

did all the scenes, was on a plane two hours later.

He knew his craft.

He knew his instrument.

He knew.

And he had Lester down then.

This is what's great about having a collaboration with an actor that doesn't have to be totally on your wavelength because he also was curious about my method of directing and using music and stuff.

So, yeah, writing about that guy, I am bummed that I didn't get a chance to spend some time with him.

I still haven't seen the profile where they really pulled the curtain back on Phil Hoffman.

I probably should look harder.

After the break, I asked Cameron more about his life in Hollywood and for his response to people who say his more recent movies haven't quite hit the mark.

Yeah, getting bad reviews, having people question some of your stuff,

it is

part of the big ride.

And if you're lucky, you get to stay on the ride.

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Most people are not going to understand this reference, but it doesn't matter because you're going to understand it.

I'd like to now enter the Lester Bangs Lou Reed portion of the interview.

Okay, let's go down that hallway and turn into that room.

So, your transition to Hollywood really started with the,

you know, the screenplay to Fast Times at Ridgemount High.

That movie, sort of inarguable teen classic.

The first movie you wrote and directed,

say anything.

Another, I think, inarguable teen classic, maybe doesn't even need the term teen put in front of it.

Thanks.

And then,

really, just kind of like a.

You sound like me trying to talk to QSAC about why you should do the movie.

Just forget the teen part.

Forget the teen part.

Forget it.

And then it's really just a pretty amazing run.

So it's singles: singles jerry maguire almost famous vanilla sky which was i think 2001 which some people might quibble with but yeah yeah but you know made money you know is it certainly a bold film wears well over time i feel go ahead um

since vanilla sky it's been elizabethtown we bought a zoo aloha uh the tv series roadies which you know i'm sure they have their fans but i don't think anyone would would really argue that they're on the level of the work that came before.

Something changed there.

How do you understand that shift?

I think some of that was taking time to raise two boys

and

really investing time in that, my sons, Curtis and William, and just like building for the future in a lot of ways.

And I actually

appreciate the question because I've thought about it too.

And I think there are waves you go through as a writer where you feel connected to things that you really need to write about and have the skills to do it properly.

And then there are times where, as Billy Wilder says, you know, you want to chase the batting average of the left fielder and the Dodgers, you know, where like, if you get close to a 500 season, you might be a legend.

I think all the movies that you mentioned, including Roadie's, the series,

They have pockets of stuff that I'm super proud of and are part of a growth step that I think is still happening.

We Bought a Zoo.

I'm really happy with We Bought a Zoo.

We Bought a Zoo

speaks more to me over time than many of the other things I've done.

My mom thought We Bought a Zoo was one of the very best.

I know the title is daunting and kind of sends people into another place when they see the title.

It's like, hmm, maybe I'll choose something else tonight.

But We Bought a Zoo has a misleading title, I I think, in many ways.

Well, I mean, it is what the movie is about.

It is what the movie's about, but it's also about, you know, a guy that follows his instincts.

I went to Hawaii not too long ago.

Well, it was a while ago because Don Ho was still alive.

And I went to see Don Ho, and there's like a line to get your CD by Don Ho signed after the show.

So I'm in the line and I get up to him and I have my CD and I say, hey, Don, it's to Cameron.

And he goes, How long ago did you retire?

And I'm like, retire?

I'm years away from retiring.

But it was at that moment that I was like, oh, shit, man, I got to pick up the pace here because Don Ho thinks I'm in retirement.

And

I've never felt more,

I don't know, excited about telling a story.

And I think the Joni Mitchell movie is exactly the right story to be telling right now.

So, you know, it's one long adventure that I'm very proud of.

I think we can go deeper.

Let's go deeper.

The first thing you said in response to the question was about sort of taking time to raise your sons.

And can you just unpack that for me a little bit?

Are you suggesting that sort of what you maybe needed

to function as an artist?

It was intention with being a dad.

Was your attention pulled in a different direction?

Why is that where you went with your answer?

Kind of, I'll tell you because

when

you raise a child, you can no longer call yourself a kid oh huh i think and so

that was entree into like you know what you can do to make the world a better place through these people that you brought into the world

and i thought every day was an important learning process it was a little different than waking up in the morning and just getting right into transcribing interviews or writing all day long nobody gonna knock at your door because you're going into that hallowed place where creativity happens No, you have to kind of, you have to parcel out the time you're going to do the work.

So there's that's one thing.

But the other thing is you see what's truly important is you want to leave behind people that carried a message that will resonate.

And I wanted to learn about that for a while and write with that in my heart.

And a lot of the stuff didn't come out or hasn't come out.

There's a movie about Marvin Gay that I spent many years working on.

Trying to get made, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, and there's like so much personal writing in that.

But I believe everything kind of works the way it should.

I love being a parent and

learning how to like,

you know, schedule your life emotionally.

But you're not defined by your hits, nor are you defined by your misses.

And that was what I learned from Billy Wilder.

Of course, you put together a great book of your interviews with Billy Wilder.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, in Conversations with Billy Wilder, there's a part where

you're talking about Jack Lemon in the apartment and why he's so good in it.

And you say, you know, it's something like, I think you're talking about his performance.

You say something like one inch to the right or to the left, and the movie is lost in pathos or sweetness.

And I think that after Vanilla Sky, for whatever reason, your writing moved one inch to the right or left.

And I have three theories about it.

Do you want to hear them?

Cool.

All three, please.

You're like, why is this guy telling his theories for him?

I love it.

I've been thinking about it a lot.

So here's the first one.

The first one is that

it seems to me that Almost Famous was the culmination of your career and in some ways your life.

It was really what you had been working towards as a storyteller.

And then you did that film and

you sang your song beautifully.

And that after

maybe there was some struggle to figure out, like, what was the next song you could sing quite so beautifully?

Um,

how does that theory grab you?

I'm waiting for two and three, too, man.

I want the big picture.

I want the big picture.

Okay.

Hit me with the deuce.

Come on.

Okay.

The other one,

or the next one, is that Vanilla Sky is the first film that you made that was, you correct me if I'm wrong, that was based on pre-existing material.

Yeah.

So it's the first time you were working with an idea that you hadn't self-generated.

And then that film was sort of,

at the time, certainly, the reviews were pretty mixed, pretty divisive.

And I wondered if that then

after, if like the experience of doing that, made you feel like, okay, I'm going to, that maybe was mixed.

I need to do something that's more Cameron Crow.

and you were doing like cameron crow cover versions of of yourself like you were writing what you thought the idea of cameron crow was supposed to be writing and that accounts for why like the the some intangible thing about the writing felt different to me and then the third one

bring it brother come on

okay

and then the third one yeah the third one is um your ex-wife Nancy Wilson,

you know, she

the lead guitarist and heart, or I should say ripping lead guitarist in heart.

Ripping.

Those albums still, and her playing still stands up incredibly well.

Incredibly well.

Who worked on the music for a lot of your films also?

You two got divorced in 2010.

And I wondered if losing the solidity of that relationship, both sort of emotionally and creatively,

affected the work in some way.

Well, all three.

Okay.

Well, let me tell you something.

Here's what I was thinking through a lot of what you were just saying.

I love being studied that carefully by you, by anybody.

I'm honored.

I'm totally honored.

There's elements of truth in all three.

And then there's a truth that would be four.

And I would choose four.

What's four?

And four is life is the best writer.

And sometimes you have to let life

show you a little bit of what that is and so

I had been living a life that was pretty stacked with stuff for a long time and

what was important to me around the time of I don't know I think post vanilla sky maybe

was to let life in a little bit and let

Let your experiences show you what the next chapters were going to be like.

I did want to write about relationships as you age.

I did want to write about family and all that stuff.

But you got to take a break and let that particular kind of sunlight in to show you what life is like as that.

Like I always love Francois Truffaut because he made movies about growing up.

You got to grow up with him.

So I always thought, God, I want to be one of those guys where you, people can kind of grow up with you.

So, in a way, I took time to grow up.

But the one quibble I will have with your spectacular tray of three theories is I never wrote to be like Cameron Crowe.

I never did that.

And I've read that.

And

I've read where people say like, oh, he's trying to do a Cameron Crow thing.

I'm not sure I know what that is.

Maybe it's something that's heartfelt and...

dialogue heavy or something.

I'm still not sure if it's something like matters of the heart are important in the story that you tell.

But I never sat down and tried to write a Cameron Crow Crow type thing

because I never appreciated artists that I felt did that myself.

You know, like, I just, that's the one thing where I thought, well, no, that's not true.

But

yeah, getting bad reviews,

having people question some of your stuff,

it is,

it is part of the big ride.

And if you're lucky, you get to stay on the ride.

You know, I read, there was an article about Nancy Wilson in People a few years back.

And in there, she's talking about sort of your divorce.

And she said, I think our relationship became more about the work than about a real relationship.

And we lost track of each other inside the work.

Do you understand what she meant?

Yeah, I think that's fair.

Yeah, tell me about that.

We worked a lot together.

So

that was,

I mean, let me tell you how fantastic it is to go into the kitchen and say, I need a Simon and Garfunkel kind of mood piece.

Would you just put that, just put that in the back of your head for something?

Because I'm gonna need that at some point.

Give me a guitar, she says.

You bring her guitar, she stands in a robe in the kitchen, first thing in the morning, playing the score that you hear in Jerry Maguire right off the top of her head.

This is an elixir that was in all the movies we worked on together.

And

we worked, you know, 36 hours a day on that stuff.

And it probably wasn't great for the marriage.

But

I think what she's saying is there was a magic to the time that we had in Seattle when the Seattle music was exploding and it was

all just in our neighborhood.

And it was a very quiet but noisy time.

And then when we moved back down to

it became a noisy, noisy time.

And I don't know that we flourished perfectly, but I'm very proud of our two sons.

And Nancy,

you know, we have a great relationship.

Nancy's out there playing the best guitar ever right now.

You know, even as a younger man, you were writing these characters that...

were basically uh i think of them as battered idealists you know uh jerry maguire Lloyd Dobbler, and Say Anything

is like that.

You know, since you wrote those characters,

you know, you've just experienced so much more life, so many more ups, so many more downs.

And I wonder, do you think about those characters any differently at 68 than you did when you wrote them?

And then also,

what is the state of your own idealism?

The fires of my own idealism are burned brightly.

It's kind of how I live.

I love all those characters.

Is that crazy?

I love them because they're part of my family in a way.

I lived with them and I still live with them and I get Steve Dunn from singles.

That guy still speaks to me.

They all still speak to me in a way.

Because I just, I love characters and I love building worlds.

I love it.

And

it does make me just sitting here talking, it does make me want to capture things that are happening in my life right now too.

And so I just want to speed it up a little bit because it kind of takes me a while to like finish and hone a script and stuff.

Yes, I want to be that person that writes about my age group in some way or another as I get older.

So I have some catching up to do.

Cameron, you had me at hello.

Thank you very much for taking all the time.

I really appreciate it.

You bet.

That's Cameron Crow.

Uncool, a memoir, will be published October 28th.

To watch this interview and many others, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash at symbol the interview podcast.

This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orme with help from Annabel Bacon.

It was edited by Alison Benedict, mixing by Sonia Herrero.

Original music by Diane Wong and Marion Lozano.

Photography by Devin Yalkin.

Our senior booker is Priya Matthew, and Seth Kelly is our senior producer.

Video of this interview was produced by Paola Newdorf.

Cinematography by Dan Hollis and Alfredo Chiarapa.

Audio by Tim Brown and Nick Pittman.

It was edited by Amy Marino.

Brooke Minters is the executive producer of podcast video.

A special thanks to Rory Walsh, Renan Barelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddie Maciello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnick.

Next week, Lulu talks with Reese Witherspoon about the new season of The Morning Show and the pressures of her early days in Hollywood.

Yeah, I watched them chase Britney Spears and she had two little children and I had two little children.

And I felt like it was this really unfair portrayal of her as a bad girl, but I was a good girl.

And it was a very punishing time for women who were in the spotlight.

I'm David Marchese, and this is the interview from the New York Times.

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