POP CULTURE: Is Cameron Crowe, director of Singles, Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, too nice for his own good? Maybe, concludes Donald Clarke, but we should still go to see his latest: Vanilla Sky, a 'cover version' of the panish Open Your Eyes, starring Cruise and Cruz (that's Tom and Penélope)
Cameron Crowe is infuriating. He will insist on being reasonable, on seeing the good in people, on just being so bloody nice. It's what is charming about his work, but also what often drains it of flavour.
The director's new film Vanilla Sky, an agreeably deranged remake of Alejandro Amenábar's excellent 1997 thriller Open Your Eyes, sees him trying to turn ugly on us. But it's got smiley Tom Cruise in it; the incongruously bubbly Cameron Diaz plays a psychopath; hell, it's even got ice cream in the title. What are we to do with him?
But this has been the story of Crowe's life. It's a story you will be familiar with if you have seen his sunny portrayal of early 1970s rock in Almost Famous. Like the film's protagonist, at the tender age of 15, this middle-class San Diego kid found himself travelling the country for Rolling Stone magazine. Yet fans of motorbike-crashing, Cher-marrying, southern rockers The Allman Brothers will search in vain for significant debauchery in either his 1972 profile of them or from the film's fictional band Stillwater, for which they were the model.
"I read their roadie Red Dog's autobiography, last year," the burly 44-year-old explains. "Apparently they were high on heroin all the time. But I didn't see it. I was looking for it, but I didn't see it. I went backstage once and saw one band - I shouldn't mention who they are - enacting this weird ritual and doing a lot of drugs during their show. And even as a little guy then, I thought: 'What else are they hiding from me?'
"I functioned as a mascot for some of those bands. But in exchange for not seeing some of those things, I got some very truthful stuff from them about why they became musicians."
It still beggars belief that this wide-eyed kid managed to hang out with notorious Dionysians such as Deep Purple, Yes and The Grateful Dead before his 18th birthday without falling into vice. In a 1975 Rolling Stone piece he tells of an incident replicated in Almost Famous where he once declined sex with a groupie to watch Steely Dan on TV. Huh?
"Well, I was nervous," he says. "Nervous that I wouldn't perform to the level of these highly-lauded rock stars. I'm just this guy from San Diego. I was scared to death of getting embarrassed in front of these professionals. It doesn't mean I didn't lust after those girls."
But it's not just the lack of pharmaceutically-enhanced hanky-panky that distinguishes his early journalism; it's the feeling that he genuinely likes everybody he interviews. Even the notoriously truculent Van Morrison comes over as a cuddly sort of guy. "Van Morrison was good to me. And I was a fan. But yes, my style wasn't always popular at the time and there were a lot of journalists at Rolling Stone who gave me shit about it. But, very honestly, I believe every life is a masterpiece.
"There's a line in Almost Famous, which I actually heard said at the time: 'Famous people are just more interesting.' Now, I didn't believe that. That's why I wrote Fast Times."
Fast Times at Ridgemont High was Crowe's bestselling investigation into American high-school life, a project which actually saw him return to class for a year. It was subsequently made into a highly enjoyable 1982 film starring a fresh-faced Sean Penn.
"I became the cheapest person available to adapt my own book," Crowe explains. "With the help of a few people who knew how to write screenplays. Amy Heckerling did a very good job directing that film. If she had done an exploitative teen version of that film just to get a job, to make a little money, then nothing that has happened in my film career would have happened. It came from loving the characters. So this thing of seeing the best in people did in fact put me where I am today, talking to you."
Fair enough. But it has been a hard business remaining hip in an environment where niceness is often equated with weakness. Nonetheless, his first film as director, 1989's charming Say Anything, won plaudits and allowed him to make Singles (1992), a lively ensemble piece set around Seattle's grunge scene.
The movie did not go down well with that city's hipper-than-thou musical elite. He cites this experience as a major influence on his Oscar-nominated script for 1996's Jerry Maguire, which saw Tom Cruise play an ostracised sports agent.
"It came out of being cast out of the groovy inner-circle of Seattle rock," he says. "They really did not like Singles up there. I thought of it as our version of Manhattan. But for some reason, because it came out during grunge, it was viewed by the hardcore - by Kurt Cobain himself - as an exploitation of the scene. And these people who I really admired weren't speaking to me. It hurt, it hurt a lot.
"At the same time, I was writing this movie and I saw that sort of thing happening in the sports business. My experience is expressed by Jerry Maguire being cast out by the woman he loves, by his cohorts and mostly by his clients. I saw the film on TV last night and it really brought that time back to me."
His impressive, Jay Leno-sized chin slumps a little. One feels towards him as one might towards one's honest, good-natured son who comes home from school after being taunted by the bigger, cooler boys.
He received another undeserved kicking from many critics recently for his undervalued book of conversations with the great director Billy Wilder (Conversations with Wilder). "I read some really nasty reviews," he says. "I'm really proud of that book. It will stand as a series of interviews with a great figure that wouldn't have happened if some guy hadn't worked his ass off to get them. Then I read these reviews: 'What right does this guy have to talk to the great Billy Wilder? This sweet, fan-like ageing child'."
The mighty chin sinks lower.
Crowe's affection for the 95-year-old director of Some Like it Hot, Double Indemnity and a million other classics is certainly deeply felt. "I think about Billy every day," he says. "Both as a guy and as a film-maker.
"How many people do you have in your life that can be a role model as to how you can be in your 90s? None, right? It gives me hope in a world that seems to suggest you are doomed, relevancy-wise, at 40."
On paper, Vanilla Sky's plot - playboy Cruise is forced to re-evaluate his life after a disfiguring accident - might suggest that some of Wilder's acidity had rubbed off on the younger man. But in fact, the mixture of Crowe's optimistic sensibility with this dark material is jarring, like adding honey to Marmite. The movie, which drifts in and out of a slippery dream world, is certainly weirdly entertaining, if not always in the way the filmmakers intend.
Much of the publicity has focused on off-screen matters, particularly that romance between female lead Penélope Cruz and her near-namesake Tom. "I just thought they had good chemistry," Crowe says. "But he also has great chemistry with Cameron Diaz and with Renée Zellweger in Jerry Maguire. You have to have a certain actor with Tom because he has such a strong presence.
"I thought Penélope was like a female Tom when I saw her abroad, so I felt that I could believe this on screen. They could go toe-to-toe. But they didn't actually get together until later."
There's a theory that people being in a real relationship acts against that sort of chemistry. "I agree," he says. "Don't you think when you see a married couple on screen it looks like they're playing dress-up. Why is that, I wonder? Yet I guess Hepburn and Tracy could do it."
Vanilla Sky begins with Cruise imagining himself in a deserted Times Square, takes in a spectacular view of the World Trade Centre and sees the protagonist identify George as his favourite Beatle. As the director puts it: "Our movie, which is sort of about pop culture, has been pummelled by pop culture. Every few months, something else would happen that would create another layer of relevance: George Harrison, the Twin Towers, Times Square.
"They told us you are never going to see Times Square empty again. 'Take a good look,' they said. The morning of September 12th I turned on CNN. It was the same shot. But it's like trying to get lightning in a bottle capturing pop culture, you can't take a snapshot of it."
Crowe's easy manner does further warm one towards Vanilla Sky. Maybe, as he suggests, it is a meditation on Tom Cruise's place in popular culture. Maybe it does add to the questions that Amenábar asked.
You should probably go and see it anyway; I can't help but think he'd do the same for you.
•Vanilla Sky is on general release