Photo By Mikael Jansson
Cameron sits down for a chat with Emma Stone in the latest issue of Interview magazine. They talk about how Emma grew up on 70s and 80s comedy, heartbreak, her filmography, The Apartment and much, much more. We hope you like it.
Robert Plant by Neal Preston (1975)
To celebrate and honor Robert Plant’s birthday today, we’d like to remind you about all the various Zeppelin related Journalism that’s available for your viewing pleasure. Dive in and reacquaint yourself with all things Led Zep.
We asked Cameron to share a few words about the 30th anniversary of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It was released in theaters on August 13, 1982.
On the last day of filming Fast Times at Ridgemont High there were high-fives and happy/sad goodbyes. Amy Heckerling had powered through a tough schedule, and we’d snuck the movie through the studio system, in no small part thanks to our fiercely funny and protective producer Art Linson. Sean Penn, who’d been in character the entire filming, arrived in a brown corduroy jacket and introduced himself. “I’m Sean,” he announced. We all felt instantly nostalgic for the blonde stoner we’d known and called Jeff for the previous three months. I looked around, and saw one of the red trash cans that had followed us from location to location, from the Sherman Oaks mall to Van Nuys High. It’s been in my writing room ever since. Happy 30th Anniversary… and thanks to all the cast, crew and fine friends we still have from those bitchin’ summer days of not so long ago….
The Bootleg Cut of Almost Famous will be screening as part of a double feature with The Last Waltz. The Prince Charles Cinema in London will host the event on July 30th. More details and ticket info over at their official site.
As part of a feature in the November, 1980 issue of Pro Fun magazine, Cameron was amongst a group of rock critics that shared 10 Records (or singles /artists) that in some way affected them or changed their lives. We thought it might be fun to peek back and share those with you today.
1. Everybody Knows This is Nowhere – Neil Young
2. After the Goldrush – Neil Young
3. Born To Run – Bruce Springsteen
4. Bayou Country – Creedence Clearwater Revival
5. For the Roses – Joni Mitchell
6. Something/Anything? – Todd Rundgren
7. Blood on the Tracks – Bob Dylan
8. “The Wild One, Forever” – Tom Petty
9. Cloud Nine – The Temptations
10. James Brown
That’s right. We Bought A Zoo is out today in the UK on Blu-ray. Extras should mirror those in other countries. There’s still a few countries left (listed below), but we are just about finished with Zoo and getting ready for the next project . . .
Mark Dillon’s Fifty Sides of The Beach Boys – a new book that discusses fifty of the greatest Beach Boys songs – hit stores last month. In addition to Cameron, contributors to the book include the likes of Zooey Deschanel, Alice Cooper, and The Beach Boys themselves. In this excerpt, Cameron shares his thoughts on “Feel Flows”:
Cameron Crowe on . . .
Feel Flows
Written by: Carl Wilson and Jack Rieley
Lead vocal: Carl Wilson
Produced by: Carl Wilson
Recorded: July 29, 1971
Released: August 30, 1971, on Surf’s Up
Carl and Jack Rieley followed up their “Long Promised Road” collaboration with the powerfully atmospheric Surf’s Up cut “Feel Flows.” Continuing in a spiritual vein, Rieley penned impressionistic lyrics seemingly about the soul overcoming real-world sorrow. Whether it was poetry or “wacked out meandering” — as Village Voice critic Robert Christgau panned1 — Rieley’s alliterative lines are wonderfully musical and delivered with conviction by Carl.
Most remarkable is Carl’s production. The recording features an eerie forward echo on his vocal and an organ part run through a Moog synthesizer and then played back simultaneously with the original part. He also applied a variable-speed oscillator to the piano track for an out-of-tune sound2 and laid down a menacing guitar break. He added a left-handed bass part so tricky that touring player Ed Carter had to read the notes when performing it live.3 Noted jazz musician Charles Lloyd, a Transcendental Meditation practitioner who played with the band throughout the decade, added flute and saxophone — the finishing touches to a stylistic tour de force that displayed a level of creativity not heard from the group since Smile.
With its jazzy solos and mystical aura, the number is unique in The Beach Boys’ canon. It’s great stoner music that sits comfortably on the soundtrack of Cameron Crowe’s acclaimed movie Almost Famous alongside contemporary songs by The Allman Brothers Band, Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Released in 2000, writer-director Crowe’s autobiographical film dramatizes his experiences as a teenage Rolling Stone correspondent in the 1970s. He uses the song twice: over the closing credits and in a scene where protagonist William Miller (played by Patrick Fugit) meets band hanger-on Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) after conducting a backstage interview with a fictitious rock group. In one evening, William has experienced his big professional break and meets a girl who will have a profound effect on him. With emotions running high, the inclusion of “Feel Flows” feels just right.
“To me, this song is about the human experience — the giddy high-highs and the aching low-lows and all those glorious spots in between,” says Crowe, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay.
“Feel Flows” is similarly admired by Nancy Wilson, the Heart guitarist who scored the film and who was married to Crowe at the time. In an August 2007 interview in The Believer, she explains that she and Crowe rediscovered the song while assembling the soundtrack. Surf’s Up was, rather shockingly, out of print on CD at the time, so Wilson had to dig up a vinyl copy in the basement of her sister Ann, Heart’s lead singer. The version in the movie was copied directly from vinyl, crackles and all.4
The tune got new life from exposure in the film and inclusion on its Grammy Award–winning soundtrack. Omitted from The Beach Boys’ 1993 boxed set, it would pop up on the 2007 compilation The Warmth of the Sun, sequel to the group’s Sounds of Summer -greatest-hits collection.
The Beach Boys figure in another one of the film’s key scenes after William’s sister Anita (Zooey Deschanel), no longer able to live under the same roof with their overbearing mother Elaine (Frances McDormand), hits the road with her boyfriend. Her parting instruction to her little brother is to “look under your bed — it’ll set you free.” There he finds a bag of classic rock records, including The Rolling Stones’ Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass), Led Zeppelin II and Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love. But The Beach Boys get pride of placement: Pet Sounds is at the top of the pile.
“Every time I’m lucky enough to make a movie I always end up pressing a copy of Pet Sounds into all the actors’ hands, and I just end up babbling and saying, ‘Here’s what it feels like to live; here’s what it feels like to grow up. Let’s try for this feeling,’” Crowe told the crowd at An All-Star Tribute to Brian Wilson. “That’s the magic of Pet Sounds — even more than the greatest rock album, Pet Sounds may just be the greatest rock ‘feeling.’”
For this book, Crowe considered selecting as his favorite Beach Boys song the Pet Sounds cut “Caroline, No,” which in the 1970s Carl performed in a mellow, jazzier live version that appears on The Beach Boys in Concert. Another song candidate for Crowe would have been “Good Vibrations,” which he used to underscore a disorienting chase sequence in the surreal thriller Vanilla Sky starring Tom Cruise. But no.
“A big part of me wants to pick ‘Caroline, No’ as their quintessential song, but the fact that Carl sings ‘Feel Flows’ makes it a kind of distant cousin to that wonderful earlier song,” he explains. “‘Feel Flows’ has the happy/sad greatness that defines the group and the timelessness that allows The Beach Boys to tower over any attempt to classify them as simple poster boys for the California experience. It is the essence of the fulfilled promise of The Beach Boys and everything Brian envisioned for their creative journey.”
Excerpt from Fifty Sides of The Beach Boys: The Songs That Tell Their Story By Mark Dillon, ECW Press 2012. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher. Available at your local book store, Amazon or the iTunes store.
We Bought A Zoo Storyboards
Here’s Part 2 of our interview with Storyboard Artist Alex Hillkurtz. Enjoy!
What was your storyboard process like with Cameron working on Almost Famous.
It was really great. The first scene I drew for him was William and the band being lead on stage by the light of a flashlight. There’s some heavy symbolism there for me being lead out of the dark, and having a backstage pass to this amazing film. From there Cameron just wanted to keep going. I drew William and Penny Lane driving along Sunset to the Riot House, Russell getting electrocuted on stage, the bus crashing through the gates, some concert stuff, some bus stuff, some hotel room stuff… There was an amazing energy working on that film, it was like we were all on the road with a band we love. None of us wanted it to end.
Vanilla Sky - By Alex Hillkurtz
Vanilla Sky seems like a natural film to require some extensive storyboarding. Did you just work on the ending or did you storyboard other sequences as well?
Again, there was quite a bit I drew for that film. The car crash, Times Square, the whole ending, etc… It was also the first time one of my drawings ended up on screen – the scene where Tom and Penelope draw each other, that’s my drawing of Penelope. Cameron had me do hundreds of sketches of her to catch the right mood. I think Cameron kept me on for a couple extra weeks just drawing pictures of Penelope Cruz. It’s a rough job.
Sofia - By Alex Hillkurtz
Moving on to Elizabethtown, what was the biggest challenge for you working on that film?
It was actually a pretty great experience because Cameron and I had a lot of time to really dive in deep on that one. It’s a very personal story for Cameron and we really peeled back the layers of almost every scene to find the images that best expressed the story. For a while there I was splitting my time between LA and London (my wife was working on a film in the UK), so I’d be drawing these quintessential American scenes, listening to a playlist of only American bands, and then have this amazing cultural whip lash when I looked out the window to see black cabs on rainy London streets. Very surreal.
Buster and Ben Sequence - By Alex Hillkurtz
What sequence in We Bought A Zoo went through the most changes in regards to your work?
Cameron and I worked on the Buster Roams Free sequence for a while. It’s a pivotal moment for Ben in the film, and Cameron really wanted to show this connection between Ben and the bear. We kept adding little moments between the two of them, even writing in unspoken dialogue between these two characters yearning for connection and escape, like a conversation between two men both at a crossroads in their lives. The scene also required a lot of logistics of how to shoot Matt Damon and a real bear together – whether we needed to use VFX, stand-ins, animatronics etc. In the end I think it was a fairly straightforward shoot, with the emphasis on the moment of connection between two wise men.
You’ve now worked with Cameron on four feature films. Tell me about your working relationship with him and why it’s been so successful.
I think we trust each other to bring our best work. Cameron is a really intuitive writer, his scripts are a joy to read, and I love being in the room when we start turning his words into pictures. We’ll really unpack scenes to find out what they’re about at their core, and how best to express that visually. We’ll act things out, we’ll share clips from films we love, he has binders full of images culled from magazines that capture certain moments, emotions and gestures that we’ll incorporate into scenes. And he’s always scribbling down notes of ideas for dialogue or inspiration. You know the meeting is going well when Cameron is joyfully scribbling notes. And then there’s the music!
What is something about a storyboard artist that most people might not be aware of?
Movies can be such a visual feast, but they all start with a script, black and white words on a page. Storyboarding a scene is the first time a project is transformed from the written word into a visual medium. There’s something magical in that transition, it’s alchemy and I absolutely love it. A fellow storyboard artist has said that we’re the first ones to see the movie. That’s a cool thing!
You directed a film entitled Recipe for Disaster back in 2000. Was that a short film or a feature? Is it correct that humor writer Dave Barry wrote the script? Did that experience have an effect on your subsequent storyboard work? Do you hope to direct again in the future?
Yeah, that was a short film that my wife (before she and I met) had the script to. It’s based on a Dave Barry article that’s a spoof of disaster movies. It’s actually the project we met on, so thanks, Dave! I’ve made a few short films over the years, and you quickly learn that even if you can draw a sequence it doesn’t mean it’s shootable. Directing and storybaording feed off each other, so it’s a natural thing for me to go back and forth, figuring out new ways to stage action, interesting ways to portray an emotion. You can play on the page, try different things out, run the movie back and forth at no cost, it’s such an economical way to figure out your road map. Then when you go to shoot something, you’ve got a plan. You can always deviate from the plan, but it’s an amazing tool. And yes, I would love to direct again. I did second unit directing on It’s Complicated after boarding that film for Nancy Meyers, so the goal is to do more of that in the future.
You’ve worked with a wide variety of action and comedy directors in addition to Cameron (Jonathan Mostow, Simon West, Ivan Reitman, Peter Segal, Adam McKay, Nancy Meyers). In what ways are they different? How are they similar?
Some directors are very particular about what they want, so storyboarding becomes illustrating their vision. Others are very into collaboration. I really enjoy working with writer/directors, not only because I admire both those talents so much, but because they’ve lived with the story for a long time before anyone else gets involved. It becomes a matter of adding flesh to the bones, and discovering what sort of animal we’re all dealing with.
You’ve also recently worked with two directors who are more well-known as actors, both of whom are beginning their career as directors (Angelina Jolie and Ben Affleck). Any differences they might share, having come into directing with such strong acting backgrounds?
Angelina was great. Having come from in front of the camera, I think she’s really good with actors. There’s an immediate trust you have with other actors because you’ve been there and you understand the vulnerability. The unknown for her was in staging the action scenes, and again, translating the written word into interesting visuals, and that’s where I came in.
Argo is Ben’s third film as director, and it turns out he knows what he’s doing. Writing and directing is one thing, but acting and directing, I’m in awe of that! I don’t know how people do it. There are big crowd scenes in the film, as well as locations in other countries that needed to be married to sets in LA. I think early on Ben saw just how prepared he would be once filming began if he was armed with a stack of storyboards.
Alex's On-Set Workstation
I draw digitally using a Wacom cintiq tablet and Corel Painter. I lay out the dialogue and descriptions digitally, so I can email pdfs of entire scenes. Gone are the days of physically cutting and pasting paper, hand writing shot descriptions, whiting out my spelling mistakes… It’s a lot cleaner now. I’ll draw any given scene four of five times, there’s always changes with staging, or location, or whatever, so making changes digitally is fairly seamless. But with all this technology, it still has to feel hand-made and organic. I don’t want the fact that I’m drawing digitally to get in the way of the emotions of the scene.
I’ve been drawing 100% digitally since 2001. I was on a film in NY working with a director in LA, and it was insanely time consuming to fax everything at the end of every day. So I dove in and got myself a cintiq tablet and I’ve never looked back. The trick became how to find digital tools that mimic the physical tools (pens, pencils, and paper) that I’m used to, and Corel Painter does that beautifully.
What do you see as the primary role of the Storyboard Artist?
Ultimately storyboards are a communication tool. Ten people can read a script and have ten different ideas of what the movie will look like. Once there’s a drawing on a piece of paper, everyone can start rowing in the same direction. As a storyboard artist my job is to get the director’s vision out of their heads so others can see it. It takes a lot of conversation, a lot of thumbnail sketches, a lot of shared images, maybe a dash of mind reading.
Finally, if your career dreams came true, what would you be doing in ten years?
You know, I’ll always be drawing, and as long as directors are willing to have me, I’m there. But I’d also like to follow in the footsteps of some of my teachers and do the writing/directing thing. I’ve got stories to tell and it would be a shame if they never got off the page.
For more on Alex, check out his official site!
