Daniel's got a whole thing this week about movies that aren't great but burrow into your head anyway, and his example is Vanilla Sky. The Tom Cruise one from two thousand one, the Cameron Crowe remake of that Spanish film about the guy whose face gets destroyed and then nothing is what it seems. Daniel's questions are pretty direct. How was this thing received and interpreted, what's the actual history of how it got made and written, and why do movie buffs keep referencing it as one of those films that drew them in and stuck with them, even though the Rotten Tomatoes score is sitting at forty one percent and it was never considered a masterpiece?
The critic score versus the audience score on this one is one of the sharpest splits in studio film history. Forty one percent from critics. The audience score is seventy two percent. And the CinemaScore, which measures people walking out of the theater opening weekend, was a D minus. That's the kind of score that kills movies. And yet this thing grossed two hundred three million dollars worldwide on a sixty eight million dollar budget.
A D minus from the people who actually paid to see it, and it still made two hundred million.
Because the D minus was about the marketing, not the movie. Paramount sold it as a Fatal Attraction style thriller. Here's Tom Cruise, here's Cameron Diaz looking dangerous, here's a love triangle with a dark edge. People walked in expecting a psychosexual thriller and got a metaphysical puzzle about lucid dreams and cryogenics and a hundred and fifty years of simulated reality. Crowe said a theater manager was literally walking the aisles opening weekend telling people this is not the movie you think it is, ask for a refund now if you want one.
That's a remarkable failure of expectation management. The movie was never going to satisfy the audience it was sold to, and the audience it was actually for hadn't been told it existed yet.
And that gap is exactly why it stuck around. The people who found it later, on DVD or cable or streaming, found it without the marketing frame. They found a movie that recontextualizes itself every time you watch it. There's a Screen Rant piece from last year arguing it only makes sense on a third viewing. Video Librarian did a twentieth anniversary retrospective saying it operates on the logic of dreams rather than traditional narrative. Crowe himself has said he watches it and comes away with a completely different take on what the story is, where the splice comes, what it's all about.
Let's back up to the actual history, because the scriptwriting story here is unusual. This is a remake, but Crowe insisted on calling it a cover. He said the original, Abre los Ojos, felt like a great song for their band to cover. Amenábar apparently agreed, said the original was a classical piece and this version could be the rock companion piece.
Right. So the original comes out in nineteen ninety seven. It plays Sundance in ninety eight. Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner see it and option the remake rights immediately. Cruise invites Crowe to his house to watch it. Crowe agrees to direct by the time he drives home, listening to Julie Miller's By Way of Sorrow on the radio. And here's the thing about Crowe's approach. He wasn't trying to translate the original for American audiences. He was trying to have a dialogue with it. He said there's one way to remake a movie, start from scratch, and another way, be a fan of what made the original great and start a conversation with it.
Which is a more interesting ambition than most remakes have, and also a riskier one. A straight translation would have been safer. A dialogue means you're adding your own themes and your own texture, and if those don't land, you've failed twice.
The texture here is the thing people remember even when they don't like the movie. The empty Times Square sequence, which they shot for real. November twelfth, two thousand, three in the morning. They lobbied Giuliani's office for a three hour window. Producers shut down Times Square, which basically never happened for a film shoot. They finished early. That shot of Tom Cruise running through a completely deserted Times Square is not a digital effect. It's a real place with the lights on and nobody in it.
It makes the dream feel real before you know it's a dream. An empty Times Square is wrong in a way that's hard to name, and the movie just sits in that wrongness.
And the title. Vanilla Sky. It comes from Monet. The Seine at Argenteuil, eighteen seventy three. There's a sky in that painting that Crowe thought looked like vanilla. The painting appears in the film. Crowe also admitted the phrase just seemed evocative, which is the most honest thing a director has ever said about a title.
The emotional seed is even better. Crowe wrote a whole Guardian piece about it. He was listening to an Elvis Presley radio interview where Elvis says I feel lonely, even in a crowded room. That line became the spine of the movie. David Aames has everything, money, success, a face that opens doors, and he's lonely in exactly that way. The movie is about the difference between having the things that should make you happy and actually being happy.
Crowe's definition of happiness in this film is earned joy. That's his phrase. David never earns anything. He inherits a publishing empire. His face is genetic luck. His charm is performance. The movie takes away the face first, and then it takes away the illusion of control, and only at the very end does David get the chance to choose something real. And even then, the movie leaves it ambiguous whether he's choosing anything at all or just jumping off a building because a voice in the sky told him to.
The production itself was fast. Six weeks of principal photography. Crowe called it the punk rock set because there was no time for overthinking. Which is funny, because the movie is nothing but overthinking. It's a hundred and thirty six minutes of nested realities and dream logic, and they shot it in six weeks.
Nancy Wilson, Crowe's wife at the time, did the score. She spent nine months on sound collages, which is the opposite of the shoot. Paul McCartney wrote the title song, got an Oscar nomination. The whole production was this weird mix of improvisation and obsessive detail.
Let's talk about the crash, because that's the hinge of the whole thing. David's face is destroyed. Amenábar's critique of the remake was that Cruise still sort of looks like Tom Cruise with some scars, that some guys would still be happy looking like that. Which is a fair shot. The original makes the disfigurement more visceral.
Crowe's response to that, and I think this is where the happiness versus success theme gets sharp, is that the disfigurement in his version is about something broader than the face. It's about the loss of the thing you took for granted. Daniel called this out in his prompt. David's appearance was his passport. It was the thing that made everything effortless. When it's gone, he doesn't just lose his looks. He loses the person he thought he was. The mask he wears, the prosthetic, becomes the symbol of the split between who he is and who he presents to the world.
And the movie keeps asking whether the mask is worse than the face. The prosthetic is technically well made. It's not grotesque. It's just not him. And the horror is in the gap.
The reception when it came out was brutal in places. Stephanie Zacharek at Salon called it a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything Crowe has proved he knows how to do right. Peter Bradshaw called it an extraordinarily narcissistic high concept vanity project for producer star Tom Cruise. A Village Voice critic said it was hauntingly frank about being a manifestation of its star's cosmic narcissism.
The narcissism reading is interesting because the movie is aware of that reading. David Aames is a narcissist. The movie is about a narcissist losing the thing that fed the narcissism. Whether the film itself is narcissistic is a separate question, but the critics who hated it mostly couldn't separate the two.
Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and called it a scrupulously moral picture. He said it's the kind of movie you don't want to analyze until you've seen it two times. Richard Roeper put it at number two on his best films of two thousand one list. So the critical response was never uniform. It was split between people who thought it was incoherent and people who thought the incoherence was the point.
And Cameron Diaz was the thing everyone agreed on. She won Boston and Chicago critics awards, got a Golden Globe nomination and a SAG nomination. Her performance as Julie Gianni is the movie's center of gravity. She's the jilted ex who crashes the car, and then she keeps reappearing inside the dream as the thing David can't escape.
Penélope Cruz got a Razzie nomination for playing Sofia. Which is wild, because she played the same role in the original and was praised for it. The remake put her in a position where she's playing a woman who may or may not be real, and the audience is supposed to fall in love with her through David's eyes, and a lot of people just found her character thin. But I think that thinness is deliberate. Sofia in the dream is a projection of what David wants her to be. She's not supposed to be a full person. She's the idea of a person.
The five interpretations thing is where the movie buff obsession comes from. Crowe has said there are five ways to read the ending. Tech Support tells the truth and it's a hundred and fifty year lucid dream. The whole film is a dream. Everything after the crash is a coma dream. The whole film is the plot of Brian's book. Everything after the crash is a drug hallucination during surgery.
And Crowe's personal secret reading is the Brian Shelby one. He calls Brian the keyhole character. Jason Lee plays David's best friend, the writer who actually loves Sofia. Crowe's hidden interpretation is that the entire movie is Brian's book, written to teach David what true love feels like. That's why the movie opens with David waking up and ends with him jumping off a building. It's a story within a story, and the author is the guy you barely notice.
That reading reframes the whole thing. Brian is the one person in the movie who actually loves someone else without needing to possess her. He writes Sofia into the story as the thing David chases and can never quite hold. The movie is Brian's gift to David, or Brian's revenge, or both.
And the movie supports that reading in the details. There's an impossible date sticker on David's car. February thirtieth, two thousand one. February thirtieth doesn't exist. That's the kind of thing a writer slips into a manuscript, not something that happens in reality. The movie is littered with those little tells.
The two thousand one release date matters too. This came out two months after September eleventh. The Twin Towers are visible in the movie. Crowe deliberately kept those shots in. He said we shouldn't destroy them again, they should be there and live on. And the climax is Tom Cruise jumping off a skyscraper. Crowe said when Tom jumps off that building you could feel the wave go over the audience. People were electrified, whether positive or negative.
That timing probably hurt the movie commercially and helped it artistically. Audiences in December two thousand one were not in the mood for a puzzle about simulated reality and suicide as liberation. But the movie now reads as an accidental post nine eleven text. The empty city, the skyscraper leap, the question of what's real after reality has been shattered. It's all there.
The prescience angle is the one that gets me. The movie has a company called Life Extension that offers cryogenic preservation and a lucid dream afterlife. You can curate your own private world. You can be the hero of your own story forever. Video Librarian's retrospective made the point that we've grown accustomed to thinking, like David, that all of us can be the hero of our story, curating our own private worlds.
That's social media. That's the metaverse pitch. That's the entire promise of modern tech. You can be whoever you want to be, and the algorithm will reinforce it. David Aames buys a dream where he's still handsome and still successful and still loved, and it turns into a nightmare because he can't control the subconscious material that keeps leaking through. The dream gives him what he asked for, not what he needed.
Crowe said the theme is that David can crave that feeling so much you purchase it. It's actually for sale in Vanilla Sky. Happiness as a product. That's the dark edge Daniel was talking about. The movie says you can buy the simulation of happiness, but the simulation will eventually show you what you're running from.
The alternate ending on the Blu-ray is worth mentioning. The theatrical cut explains more. Test screenings pushed Crowe toward clarity. The alternate ending is more open, more violent, there's a Michael Shannon shootout that got cut. Crowe has said the pendulum swung too far toward explaining things. He thinks the theatrical cut over explains.
Which is the eternal tension with this kind of movie. The audience that wants the puzzle solved is never satisfied with ambiguity. The audience that loves ambiguity is annoyed by every line of explanation. Vanilla Sky tries to serve both and ends up frustrating both.
But that frustration is part of why it sticks. The movie doesn't resolve cleanly. It leaves a residue. You walk away with the image of Cruise jumping off the building, or the empty Times Square, or Cameron Diaz's face in the car right before the crash. Those images don't get processed and filed. They sit there.
The Elvis line keeps coming back. I feel lonely, even in a crowded room. David has a crowded life. He has a crowded dream. He's lonely in all of it. The movie is about the gap between the life you've built and the life you actually feel.
And that's the success versus happiness thing. David is successful by every external measure. He runs a publishing empire. He has a spectacular apartment. He has access to beautiful women. None of it makes him happy. The movie's argument is that happiness has to be earned, and David never earns anything. He's given everything, and the giving is the problem.
The car crash is the first thing that happens to him that he didn't choose and can't buy his way out of. It's the first real thing in his life, and it destroys him. That's the cruel irony. The thing that could have made him real is the thing that unmakes him.
And then the dream gives him the chance to go back and unchoose it, and that's the trap. He chooses the simulation because the simulation lets him pretend the crash never happened. But pretending the crash never happened means pretending the only real thing in his life never happened either.
The movie buffs who reference this thing are usually referencing that tension. It's not a clean film. It's not a masterpiece. But it's a film that keeps asking questions after it's over. The ambiguity isn't a bug. It's the feature.
The Screen Rant piece from last year made exactly that point. First two watches, pretty average, maybe frustrating. Third watch, minor masterpiece. The movie recontextualizes itself. The scene where David says I'll see you in another life, when we are both cats, that line lands differently once you know the whole thing is a dream. It's not a quirky romantic line. It's a promise about reincarnation inside a simulation.
The cats line is a good example of how the movie rewards rewatching. First time through, it's charming nonsense. Third time through, it's a thesis statement.
And Crowe's fan mail is apparently from strippers, doctors, and rappers. That's his list. Which is a strange demographic spread and also completely believable. The movie hits people who live in their bodies, people who live in their heads, and people who live in performance.
A stripper, a doctor, and a rapper walk into a movie theater. They all come out thinking about the nature of reality.
The McCartney song is doing work too. It's a simple song. But it's placed at the end, over the jump, and it turns the moment into something almost peaceful. The title song got an Oscar nomination. It lost to If I Didn't Have You from Monsters Incorporated.
I did not need to know that last part.
The six week shoot is still the thing I can't get over. This movie has a hundred and fifty years of in story dream time, and they shot it in six weeks. Crowe said there was no overthinking or second guessing. The punk rock set. Which means all the overthinking happened in post production, in the editing room, in the nine months Nancy Wilson spent on the sound collage.
The sound design in this movie is doing a lot of the dream logic. The audio shifts before the visuals do. You hear the dream before you see it. That's part of why it feels so uncanny.
And the mask. The prosthetic mask David wears after the crash. It's blank. It's smooth. It's not a face. It's the absence of a face. The movie uses it as a screen onto which everyone projects their own discomfort. The doctors see a patient. Sofia sees the man she remembers. Julie sees the man she destroyed. David sees nothing.
The mask is the movie's best visual idea. It's more frightening than the scars would have been. The blankness is the point.
The prescience angle extends to the Life Extension company itself. It's a startup that sells immortality through curated dreams. The sales pitch is basically the metaverse pitch. You can live forever in a world you design. The fine print is that your subconscious comes with you, and your subconscious is not your friend.
That's the part the tech companies never put in the brochure. Your subconscious comes with you. You can't curate your way out of your own damage.
Crowe's five interpretations are all defensible. That's the thing. He didn't pick one for the audience. He built a movie that supports all five, and then he has his own private sixth reading that he only revealed twenty years later. That's not a failure of clarity. That's a deliberate design.
The Brian Shelby reading is the one that reframes the title. Vanilla Sky. The sky in Monet's painting. Brian is the painter. He's painting a sky for David. The whole movie is a gift from the one person who actually saw David clearly.
And Brian is the one who says the line about the sweet and sour. He says the sweet is never as sweet without the sour. That's the movie's actual thesis. David tries to buy all sweet and no sour, and it turns into a nightmare. The sour is what makes the sweet real.
Daniel's prompt asked why this movie sticks with people despite not being great. I think the answer is that it's a movie about the thing most people are afraid to admit about themselves. That they might be living in a simulation of their own making, and the simulation might be the thing keeping them from what they actually want.
And it's a movie that respects the audience enough to leave the question open. It doesn't tell you what to think. It gives you five answers and lets you pick, or lets you hold all five at once. That's rare in a studio film with a sixty eight million dollar budget.
The marketing failure is almost poetic. Paramount sold a thriller and delivered a philosophical puzzle. The people who wanted the thriller were furious. The people who wanted the puzzle didn't know to show up. The movie found its audience slowly, over years, through word of mouth and late night cable and DVD commentary tracks.
The DVD commentary is a whole other layer. Crowe explains the easter eggs. The February thirtieth sticker. The Times Square shoot. The Twin Towers decision. The movie becomes a puzzle box that keeps opening.
Cameron Diaz's performance deserves more attention than it gets in the standard retrospectives. She plays Julie as a woman who is simultaneously pathetic and terrifying. The scene in the car before the crash, where she's driving and talking and you can see the decision forming in her eyes, that's the scariest moment in the movie.
And then she keeps coming back inside the dream as the nightmare version of herself. The dream can't process her, so it turns her into a monster. David's guilt about Julie is the thing that corrupts the simulation. He never dealt with what he did to her, so she keeps returning.
The movie is saying that you can't outrun your guilt by building a better fantasy. The fantasy will just give your guilt a new costume.
Crowe's Guardian piece about the Elvis interview is the emotional key to the whole production. He heard Elvis say I feel lonely, even in a crowded room, and he built a movie around that sentence. David Aames is Elvis. The most successful man in the room, the most desired, the most watched, and the loneliest person in the building.
And the movie makes that literal. David's apartment is enormous and empty. His birthday party is full of people who don't know him. His face is famous and nobody sees him. The crowded room is the dream, and the loneliness is the dreamer.
The two hundred three million dollar gross is the part that surprises people. A movie with a D minus CinemaScore made two hundred million dollars. That's not a flop by any measure. It opened number one. Twenty five million opening weekend. The movie was a commercial success even as it was a critical punching bag.
Which tells you the star power was real. Tom Cruise could open anything in two thousand one. Even a movie that confused and angered its opening weekend audience still made money because enough people showed up to be confused and angered.
And then the home video market gave it a second life. The movie was made for rewatching. The DVD era was perfect for it. You could watch it three times, freeze frame the easter eggs, listen to the commentary, argue with your friends about which interpretation was correct.
The Rotten Tomatoes score is forty one percent. The audience score is seventy two. That gap is the whole story. The critics saw a movie that didn't work on its own terms. The audience saw a movie that worked on terms the critics weren't using.
Hilbert: You keep saying the word gap. The gap between the critics and the audience. The gap between the life you built and the life you feel. The gap between the face and the mask. That's not what the movie is about.
Go on.
Hilbert: The movie is about a man who pays money to dream forever. And the dream goes bad because he can't stop being himself inside it. That's not a gap. That's a container. The dream contains him. The mask contains his face. The building contains the party. The movie contains the movie. Everything in Vanilla Sky is a container, and the containers are all leaking.
That's a better frame than gap, actually. The dream is a container for David's unresolved life. The mask is a container for his ruined face. The movie itself is a container for five different interpretations, and Crowe built it so none of them fit perfectly.
Hilbert: I worked in a warehouse in the late eighties. Shipping containers. Big metal boxes, forty foot, eight foot six high. You'd get a container that was supposed to be full of auto parts, and it would arrive full of something else entirely. The manifest would say one thing. The box would say another. And the guy who ordered the auto parts would stand there looking at a container full of children's toys and he'd say, well, the manifest says auto parts.
So the manifest is the marketing.
Hilbert: The manifest is always the marketing. The box is what actually shows up. Vanilla Sky showed up full of something nobody ordered. The critics checked the manifest and wrote their reviews about the discrepancy. The audience opened the box and stayed inside it.
The container that leaks is a good image for the dream logic too. The dream is supposed to be sealed. David is supposed to live in a perfect simulation. But his subconscious leaks through. Julie leaks through. The February thirtieth sticker leaks through. The container was never sealed.
Hilbert: We had a container once that leaked. It was supposed to be dry goods. Paper products. It had a hole in the roof about the size of a fist. Everything inside was ruined. The insurance guy came out and said the hole was too small to have caused that much damage. But the water didn't need a big hole. It just needed time.
The dream had a small hole. David's guilt. That was enough.
Hilbert: The thing about a container is you can't see inside it until you open it. And once you open it, you can't unsee what's in there. Vanilla Sky is a container that people keep opening because they're not sure what they saw the first time. Or the second time. Or the third time.
That's exactly what the Screen Rant piece said. Third watch is when it hits. The first two watches are just opening the container. The third watch is when you realize the manifest was wrong on purpose.
Hilbert: I never saw the movie. I just know containers.
You've been holding that in for twenty minutes.
Hilbert: I've been holding it in since the eighties.
The container idea also explains the five interpretations. Crowe built a box with five possible manifests. The box supports all of them. The box is the movie, and the movie is the box, and the whole thing is a container for the question of what's real.
And the answer is that the question is the point. The movie doesn't resolve because resolution would close the container. The movie stays open because an open container is the only kind that can hold five answers at once.
Hilbert: We had a supervisor at the warehouse who used to say a closed container is a coffin. An open container is a possibility. He was a strange man. But he was right about the containers.
That supervisor would have liked this movie.
Hilbert: He only watched westerns.
The prescience angle is worth one more pass. The movie predicted the thing we're all living in now. Curated feeds, filtered realities, the ability to be the hero of your own story. David Aames buys that and it destroys him, or it saves him, depending on which interpretation you pick.
The ending is either a suicide or a liberation or both. The jump off the building is either the end of the dream or the beginning of a new one. The movie doesn't tell you which. It just shows the fall and the voice saying open your eyes.
And then the screen goes white and the credits roll and you're left with the vanilla sky, which is Monet's sky, which is Brian's sky, which is the sky inside the dream, which is the sky outside the dream. The container is the sky and the sky is the container.
The movie earns its ambiguity. That's the thing. It's not ambiguous because Crowe couldn't decide. It's ambiguous because the ambiguity is the point. The movie is about a man who can't tell the difference between what's real and what's simulated, and the audience is put in exactly the same position.
That's why it sticks. The movie makes you feel the confusion instead of just explaining it. You don't watch David Aames lose his grip on reality. You lose your grip alongside him.
And the happiness versus success theme is the emotional core of that confusion. David is successful in the simulation and miserable. He was successful in reality and miserable. The only time he's happy is when he's with Sofia, and Sofia is the one thing he can't hold in either world.
The sweet and sour line. The sweet is never as sweet without the sour. David tries to buy all sweet. The movie says that's not how it works. The sour is what makes the sweet real.
Brian Shelby wrote that line. The keyhole character. The one who actually understood.
Daniel's question, why do movie buffs keep referencing this thing, the answer is that it's a container that never closes. It holds five interpretations, a real empty Times Square, a Monet painting, an Elvis quote, a Paul McCartney song, and a question about whether happiness can be purchased. And every time you open it, something different falls out.
The forty one percent Rotten Tomatoes score is part of the appeal at this point. It's a badge. The movie was misunderstood on release, and the misunderstanding is now part of the text. You watch it knowing it was sold wrong, and that knowledge changes how you see it.
The D minus CinemaScore is the same. The audience that was promised a thriller walked out angry. The audience that found it later, without the promise, found something else entirely.
Crowe said the fans are adamant and passionate. The mail comes from strippers, doctors, and rappers. That's not a demographic. That's a container full of people who opened the box and found something they didn't expect and kept it.
The movie's final line is open your eyes. That's the title of the original. Abre los ojos. The remake ends by returning to the source. The container opens, and the last thing you hear is an instruction to see clearly.
Then the sky. The vanilla sky. The painting. The dream. The whole thing opens up and stays open.
We should wrap this up. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping us on track and for the container theory.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to send us your own weird prompt, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back soon. Open your eyes.
