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In the winter of 1997, I saw a Spanish film called Abre Los Ojos. I couldn't get it out of my mind. The movie felt like a folk song to me, part fable, part poem, partly a committed conversation that you'd have with someone late at night when big ideas flowed easily. I wanted to be a part of that conversation. As all movies do, Vanilla Sky, a title I thought had a kind of musical quality, acquired a driven 1)adrenalinalized personality all its own. Much of the same crew had worked on Almost Famous. We made the two movies 2)back to back and they couldn't have been more beautifully 3)dissimilar. Visuals mattered a lot on this one, especially the opening sequence where we emptied Times Square on an early November morning. Working with the great John Toll was key. He had been the 4)cinematographer on Almost Famous and while that movie had a free flowing documeturish feel, this one would be even more demanding. Not a shot would go unplanned, not an image wasted.
The goal was a movie filled with clues and 5)signposts, kind of like the cover of 6)Sergeant Pepper, every time you look at it, you might see something different. We all 7)pitched in to tell this odd and 8)intoxicating story about dreams and reality. Often after we'd rapped for the evening, many of us still stayed behind and talked about the layers of the movie even while we were making it. Not quite 2 years later, we still do.
Vanilla Sky isn't obvious. It's a movie to be watched closely, but it's also a movie you can let wash over you. It's a story, a puzzle, a nightmare, a 9)lucid dream, a 10)psychedelic pop song, a movie to argue over and most of all, a movie that extends an invitation. Wherever you want to meet it, it will meet you there.
