Cameron Crowe’s shortlist of Hollywood movies—Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous and yes, Vanilla Sky—reads like a how-to text on the art of creating modern movies with meaning. In a remarkably short yet critically charmed ride, he’s made a career for Renee Zellweger, ditto Kate Hudson, given Tom Cruise the Meaning of It All in maybe his finest hour, and perhaps most memorably, recast a now legendary ‘80s boom box as Cyrano.

Today Crowe’s in town to talk about his latest pic, Elizabethtown, a seriocomic, semi-autobiographical tale. It stars first-time leading man Orlando Bloom as a disgraced shoe exec submerged in a personal meltdown, after a career cataclysm on the order of a billion big ones is followed by his distant father’s untimely death. And in a welcome staple of Crowe’s cinema cannon, a too-good-to-be-true saving grace—a smashing Kirsten Dunst in the Zellweger part—redeems him with a heart full of love and a bittersweet dose of pathos. We should all be so lucky to fall apart like this.

Lee Shoquist, ReelMovieCritic: Elizabethtown is a very personal film for you.

Cameron Crowe: Yes, inspired by my dad and the roots of my family, and wanting to write a story set in Kentucky. Some of the stuff is very true to what happened and my mom’s grief process. My dad died of a heart attack. But not everything is achingly personal in the movie. What I really wanted to do was honor that state and feeling of a stranger in a strange land, and a strange land is the core of your family root system.

LS: You seem to manage to be able to make these character-driven, affecting studio movies that are always quintessentially still ‘Cameron Crowe.’

CC: This one was hard to get made. We all had to cut our salaries and do this labor of love. I’m happy to do it. I do relate to a character like Kirsten Dunst’s who says, ‘Let’s just say what we’re not saying.’ So often trying to get a movie made in the Hollywood system you’ll be sitting there with somebody who is going, ‘I was just moved incredibly by your script.’ You’re hearing what they are saying but you leave the room and say, ‘I just got turned down!’ Guys like William Wilder made personal, idiosyncratic movies in the Hollywood system, so I still consider it a goal to get your movies through if you can, and see if you can reach people and be oddly true to a personal voice at the same time.

What happened from the very beginning, when we started showing this movie even at a far too long length, was that some people would feel like something deep inside them was reached. That always made me feel like we were on the right track. The movie started as a kind of whimsical, comic, let’s go into another world—Kentucky. But it became a little more serious and started to touch people in a way I’d only known from Jerry Maguire, where sometimes people would stand up after and say, ‘I’m breaking up with my girlfriend and it’s a good thing! I know I have to do it!’ It was like, ‘Wow. I didn’t realize that movie was saying that, or was going to reach you in a real way!’ But this movie has that in it in a far different way too, with people canceling trips for business in favor of going home to visit a parent—things like that.

LS: There is sort of a Cameron Crowe signature to your films that involves a strategic use of music. What does it do for you in terms of shaping the story?

CC: Yes. If it’s going to be a musical movie, which I thought this one was going to be, I played music a lot—in between takes and sometimes during takes. I hired the actors because they ‘worked’ with the music I want to use. I used that Elton John song in the auditions with the guys that were up for the part of Drew. Orlando matched with it best—that was a big plus in hiring him. Same with Kirsten and the Tom Petty song. It felt like a musical in that way. And Mitch, Drew’s father, is really represented in a lot of the songs. That’s kind of his voice winding through the movie. I also know that you don’t want to overuse that. It’s an elixir best used and not overused. I always wanted a lot of music. You want to really honor the music you love, and use it great.

LS: To me, Kirsten Dunst is the heart of Elizabethtown, and she’s at least as much of a catalyst for Drew’s life changes as his father’s death.

CC: Yes. She plays an angel, really. Somebody that is sent or that you find in your life that you didn’t expect, who is there to save you if you want to take the life raft and climb on. I’ve had people in my life like that—Nancy is one of them, and friends have ended up with people that they didn’t expect at all because when nobody else was around, there was the life raft. I just wanted her to be a people person, who comes on initially a little bit aggressive, hard to process and certainly you want to push them away. But ultimately by the end of the story I thought his whole goal is now going to be there for her and to give back and that was sort of the inner story of this movie.

LS: Can you sense when you are writing if something is going to go over? In Jerry Maguire, we can all recall lines from that film like, ‘show me the money,’ or ‘you had me at hello.’

CC: I was embarrassed about ‘you complete me.’ ‘You had me at hello’ was sort of a tribute to Billy Wilder-style dialogue. I was embarrassed about ‘you complete me’ because I thought it was just too on the money. Tom Cruise said, ‘Don’t cut the line out. Give me a shot at it.’ He did it and it was really important to him to say the line. He was saying it to Nicole Kidman—that’s what he told me. He wanted to put that emotion to his wife in a movie, and it stuck in a big way. When we were reading through the script I said, ‘The next line, forgive me. I think it’s cheesy.’ He said ‘No.’ I realized later that I think it comes from the Joni Mitchell song "Court and Spark": You complete me, I complete you. I think that was in my head.

‘Show me the money’ felt like it was going to be powerful in the rehearsals because Cuba just started yelling and just throttling Tom with the way he was saying, ‘Shout it, Jerry! I want to hear you!’ I think it’s on the DVD—the little piece of rehearsal video that I shot at the time—and it started to explode. I remember taking a little video back to the office where I was working at the time and saying, ‘Check this out. This guy beats Tom Cruise like a piñata!’

LS: You give Susan Sarandon a big scene late in the film where she plays a series of emotions back to back.

CC: The script has these big chunks—it had a road trip at the end, an all-night phone call, an eight-minute monologue and it had "Freebird." One of the goals of the movie was to earn it. Frankly, that’s why it took so long to edit. I didn’t want to cut the road trip at the end. We had Susan Sarandon and didn't want to have her come up there and just tap dance. We wanted the monologue, and we wanted to have "Freebird" play. As far as the emotion of it, she never got sentimental with it and that helped a lot. And I liked that "Freebird" actually was good! We showed the movie in Frankfurt, Tennessee. This guy comes up to me who ran the screening and says, ‘Lynyrd Skynard are here.’ My uncle and my cousin were already there, and that was enough! He said, ‘The three factions of the band who don’t really talk to each other are all here.’ I said, ‘Did you tell them that there’s a burning bird in the movie?’ He goes, ‘No, I told them to expect something out of the ordinary with Freebird.’ Afterwards, I was really nervous. One by one, I talked to the guys and they really loved it. I think they loved that it was the original version and that it dared to be what it was—a well-intentioned tribute that went horribly wrong! It made them laugh.