Cameron Crowe talks Jerry Maguire Dashboard Dashboard

The Guild Screenings is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Jerry Maguire with a screening and a Q&A with writer-director Cameron Crowe. Here are five questions for Crowe to whet your appetite.

From the February issue of WriteNow

On February 18, it’s all Jerry Maguire at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills (members +2 guests each are invited) with a screening  at 5 PM, followed by a Q&A with Cameron Crowe. In anticipation of this special event, WriteNow talked to the screenwriter about the challenges of writing his film, Tom Cruise and that enduring line – “You had me at hello.”

What is Jerry Maguire about?
It’s actually a movie about being 35 and starting the second act of your life. Can you live up to the dreams you had for yourself when you were a kid? How do you deal with moral compromise… marriage… children… what kind of adult will you be in this world? It’s also a movie about failure, and how failure sometimes presents you with the greatest victories of all. Sometimes when you’re truly down, friends disappear, and it’s the people you never expected who are the most loyal of all. For Jerry, it’s Dorothy Boyd and Rod Tidwell.

What was the toughest part of writing the screenplay?
Structure. Structure is usually what takes the time. After the giddiness of deciding what you want to write about, and finding the idea that makes your heart sing… then begins the tough work. I once read that Elaine May and Mike Nichols would begin every writing session by reciting to each other what the story was. In other words, they were always keeping an eye on the spine, making sure they weren’t going rogue. Luckily I had James Brooks to work with as the producer on Jerry Maguire, and there are few on the planet who celebrate the written word like Jim. The script took almost five years to get right. And even then, we stayed working on it through production.

Twenty years later, is there anything you would change?
Nope. I love the actors and how they embraced the words and the story and the project… that’s always the dream. Every time I happen upon it, I’m forever grateful. Also love the cinematography by Janusz Kaminski. We were very conscious of being romantic but not too cheerful with the look. Plus, the editing… working on the Blu-Ray recently and watching the outtakes, I was very grateful that Joe Hutshing and I found a rhythm in the editing room pretty quickly. The outtakes are fun to watch but they belonged in the outtakes bin. Actually there’s a Hootie and the Blowfish joke that could come out, but what the hell… it was 1996. Sometimes it’s good to leave a little time-marker in there.

Why do you think Cruise was so good as Jerry?
Right time, right place, right actor. Tom is also a big sports fan, and knew sports agenting. He had also just made Mission Impossible and had shown the world that invincible character. Now he was ready to show the world what it was like when that invincible guy hits a huge speed bump and derails. Tom Cruise is a very generous actor, and he absolutely loved letting Cuba Gooding Jr. thrash him when the character was down. The first time Tom rehearsed the scene where he nearly cracks, and pleads “Help me, help you” to Cuba, Jim Brooks and I couldn’t stop laughing. For days. There was the character.

Do you recall how you came up with “You had me at hello”?
Yes, it was a tribute to the last line of Billy Wilder’s great film The Apartment. They’re playing cards and Shirley MacLaine memorably cuts off Jack Lemmon’s “I love you” with “Shut up and deal.” My father used to say that line around our house growing up. I never knew until years later that he was quoting The Apartment. So I did too, in my own way. Thanks to Renee Zellweger, it stayed in the movie. I asked her to say it thirty different ways, in thirty different takes. I wasn’t sure we had it. When we put the movie together, she’d nailed it early. She had me at take two.