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Cameron Crowe dropped a major bombshell about the most iconic scene in “Say Anything.”
The director of the 1989 teen rom-com revealed that John Cusack did not want to film the sequence where Lloyd (Cusack) plays “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel from a boom box outside Diane’s (Ione Skye) window to win her back.
“He felt like it was a subservient act: Why does Lloyd have to be a wuss like that?” Crowe, 68, told the New York Times in an interview published Saturday.
“We struggled with how to get that scene,” Crowe added.
The filmmaker explained that cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs “knew that we’d been battling” with the scene, so they tricked Cusack, 59, into thinking he shot an alternative sequence.
“We had actually shot the scene where Cusack had the boom box on the hood of a car and he was saying, ‘That’s more what I would do,'” Crowe recalled. “László leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Don’t worry, there’s no film in the camera.'”
“On the last day, as we were losing the sun, he said: ‘I found a place across the street that would be good, and the car is parked there. Let’s get him across the street and see if we can get it,'” Crowe continued. “So we ran across the street. [John] said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.'”
Cusack, according to Crowe, held up the boom box and was “kind of pissed that he’s having to do it one more time.”
“And you knew it watching in the monitor: That was the perfect emotion for the scene,” the director added.
Cusack plays an average high school student who falls in love with his class valedictorian, Diane, as they graduate in “Say Anything.”
During a screening for the film in Dallas in 2023, Cusack admitted that he didn’t want to do the boom box scene.
“I thought it was too corny, and that sort of was the tension of making the movie,” the actor shared. “The character I liked, but I thought he was a little too soft. He was like a Paul McCartney song without John Lennon.”
“I was like, ‘C’mon, he can’t be such a sap,'” Cusack continued. “So we sort of went back and forth on it, and finally, I just said, ‘Let’s just put the boom box on the car or something.’ And then Cameron said, ‘Will you just do it one time?’ And I said, ‘Alright, I’ll do it once.’ And so I held it up once, and that’s the only time we ever did it.”
In Crowe’s NYT interview, he acknowledged that Cusack “grew up on that movie in a lot of ways.”
“He wanted to dial down his Cusackness when I met him,” Crowe said. “He was like, ‘I can’t do another teen movie.’ I’m like, ‘It’s really not a teen movie, I swear.’
English (US)