Vanilla Sky is a 2001 American science fiction thriller film directed, written and co-produced
by Cameron Crowe.
It is an English-language remake of Alejandro Amenábar's 1997 Spanish film Open Your Eyes,
which was written by Amenábar and Mateo Gil, with Penélope Cruz reprising her role from
the original movie.
The movie is described as "an odd mixture of science fiction, romance and reality warp",
Vanilla Sky stars Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, and Cameron Diaz, with Jason Lee and Kurt
Russell appearing in supporting roles.
It received mixed reviews, with critics comparing it unfavorably to the original film and criticizing
the screenplay.
It was a box office success, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original
Song, as well as Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe Award nominations for Cameron Diaz's
performance.
The soundtrack was also critically acclaimed.
Plot David Aames was the wealthy owner of a large
publishing firm in New York City which he inherited from his father.
From a prison cell, David, in a prosthetic mask, tells his story to psychologist Dr.
Curtis McCabe: enjoying the bachelor lifestyle, he is introduced to Sofia Serrano by his best
friend, Brian Shelby, at a party.
David and Sofia spend a night together talking, and fall in love.
When David's former girlfriend, Julianna "Julie" Gianni, hears of Sofia, she attempts to kill
herself and David in a car crash.
While Julie dies, David remains alive, but his face is horribly disfigured, forcing him
to wear a mask to hide the injuries.
Unable to come to grips with the mask, he gets drunk on a night out at a bar with Sofia,
and he is left to wallow in the street.
David is awakened the next day by Sofia, who apologizes for not helping him, and takes
him home.
The two continue to see each other, and David has his face repaired.
Despite the seemingly perfect life, David finds oddities, such as brief visions of his
distorted face, and a man at a bar that tells him he can change the world.
One day, when he goes to Sofia's apartment, he finds Julie there instead; all of the previous
mementos of Sofia now showing Julie's face.
Angry and confused, David suffocates Julie, and is later arrested and placed in a mental
institution.
The court psychologist Curtis talks about the incident with David over several sessions.
During one interview, David sees a nearby TV advertisement for "Life Extension", a company
that specializes in cryonic suspension, finding the name familiar.
Under Curtis's guard, David is taken to the Life Extension offices, where the salesclerk
explains they freeze people just after the point of death, until a cure for their ailment
is available in the future - placing them in a lucid dream state.
David becomes anxious and breaks free of Curtis, realizing he is in his own lucid dream that
has gone wrong, and calls for tech support.
David finds himself in the empty lobby of the offices, and the man whom he saw earlier
at the bar appears, claiming to be David's tech support from Life Extension, which is
now known as the Oasis Project.
As they ride up in an elevator to the top of an impossibly tall building, the man explains
that David has been in cryonic sleep for 150 years, after he killed himself with a drug
overdose.
Because of David's severe acrophobia, his anxiety increases as he rises, trapped in
an elevator while learning that when he signed a contract with the cryogenics company preserving
him, he opted to start the lucid dream shortly after his drunken night when Sofia left him,
under the "vanilla sky" from a Monet painting.
However, during his sleep, the dream went horribly wrong and attempted to incorporate
elements from his subconscious, such as substituting Julie for Sofia and creating a father-figure
like Curtis.
As they arrive at the top of the building, the man offers David a choice: either to be
reinserted into the corrected lucid dream, or to wake up by taking a literal leap of
faith off the roof.
David decides to wake up, and envisions Sofia and Brian to say his goodbyes.
Conquering his final fear, David jumps off the building, his life flashing before his
eyes, and whites out immediately before hitting the ground.
A female voice commands him to "open your eyes", and the film ends with David opening
his eyes.
Cast Tom Cruise as David Aames
Penélope Cruz as Sofia Serrano Cameron Diaz as Julianna "Julie" Gianni
Kurt Russell as Dr. Curtis McCabe Jason Lee as Brian Shelby
Noah Taylor as Edmund Ventura/Tech Support Timothy Spall as Thomas Tipp
Tilda Swinton as Rebecca Dearborn Michael Shannon as Aaron
Ken Leung as Art Editor Shalom Harlow as Colleen
Oona Hart as Lynette Ivana Miličević as Emma
Johnny Galecki as Peter Brown Jhaemi Willens as Jamie Berline
Alicia Witt as Libby Jennifer Aspen as Nina
Steven Spielberg as Guest at David Aames' Party
Production Development
After the American debut of Alejandro Amenábar's 1997 Spanish film Abre los ojos at the 1998
Sundance Film Festival, Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner optioned the
remake rights.
Hoping to entice director Cameron Crowe, who previously collaborated with Cruise on Jerry
Maguire, Cruise invited Crowe over to his house to view the film.
"I’ve been offered a lot of films to buy and remake, and I never have because I felt
it was too connected with the culture of that place, whatever country it was from," said
Cruise.
"But this was a universal story that was still open-ended, that still felt like it needed
another chapter to be told."
The title of the film is a reference to depictions of skies in certain paintings by Claude Monet.
In addition to Monet's impressionistic artwork, the film's tone was derived from the acoustic
ballad "By Way of Sorrow" by Julie Miller and a line from an early interview of Elvis
Presley in which he said, "I feel lonely, even in a crowded room."
Filming Principal photography for Vanilla Sky began
in late 2000 and concluded in March 2001.
On November 12, 2000, shooting for the scene of the deserted Times Square in New York took
place in the early hours of the day.
A large section of traffic was blocked off around Times Square while the scene was shot.
"There was a limit on how long the city would let us lock everything up even on an early
Sunday morning when much of NYC would be slow getting up," said Steadicam operator, Larry
McConkey.
"Several times we rehearsed with Steadicam and Crane including a mockup of an unmovable
guardrail that we had to work the crane arm around.
[Cruise] participated in these rehearsals as well so we shared a clear understanding
of what my limitations and requirements would be."
Filming lasted for six weeks around the New York City-area, which included scenes shot
in Central Park, Upper West Side, SoHo, and Brooklyn.
One prominent location in the area was the Condé Nast Building that served as Aames
Publishing and David’s office.
After filming finished in New York, production moved to Los Angeles, where the remainder
of interior shots were completed at Paramount Studios.
Despite the film's distorted aspects of reality, the style of cinematography remains grounded
for much of the film.
"I didn't do anything that was overtly obvious, because the story revolves around the main
character not knowing whether he's in a state of reality, a dream or a nightmare, so we
want it to feel a little ambiguous," said cinematographer, John Toll.
"We want the audience to make discoveries as [Cruise]'s character does, rather than
ahead of him."
American Cinematographer magazine wrote a feature story on the lighting designer Lee
Rose's work on the film.
Music
The musical score for Vanilla Sky was composed by Crowe's then wife, Nancy Wilson, who previously
scored Almost Famous.
Wilson spent nine months working on the film's music, which was done through experimentation
of sound collages.
"We were trying to balance out the heaviness of the story with sugary pop-culture music,"
said Wilson.
"We made sound collages of all kinds.
We were channeling Brian Wilson to a large extent.
I was recording things through hoses, around corners, playing guitars with cello bows,
and with [music editor] Carl Kaller, we tried all kinds of wacky stuff.
In the murder–sex scene sound collage, Cameron even used Brian Wilson’s speaking voice
from a Pet Sounds mix session."
Interpretations According to Cameron Crowe's commentary, there
are five different interpretations of the ending:
"Tech support" is telling the truth: 150 years have passed since Aames killed himself and
subsequent events form a lucid dream.
The entire film is a dream, evidenced by the sticker on Aames' car that reads "201".
The events following the crash form a dream that occurs while Aames is in a coma.
The entire film is the plot of the book that Brian is writing.
The entire film after the crash is a hallucination caused by the drugs that were administered
during Aames' reconstructive surgery.
Crowe has noted that the presence of "vanilla skies" marks the first lucid dream scene—all
that follows is a dream.
Reception Box office
Vanilla Sky opened at #1 at the box office in the United States when it was first presented
on December 14, 2001.
The opening weekend took in a gross income of $25,015,518.
The final domestic gross income was $100.61 million while the foreign gross income was
slightly higher at $102.76m for a worldwide gross income of $203,388,341.
Critical response Critical reaction for Vanilla Sky was highly
mixed.
It holds a "rotten" rating of 40% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 162 reviews.
Metacritic reported, based on 33 reviews, a "Mixed" rating of 45 out of 100.
Roger Ebert's printed review of Vanilla Sky awarded the film three out of four stars:
Think it all the way through, and Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky is a scrupulously moral
picture.
It tells the story of a man who has just about everything, thinks he can have it all, is
given a means to have whatever he wants, and loses it because — well, maybe because he
has a conscience.
Or maybe not.
Maybe just because life sucks.
Or maybe he only thinks it does.
This is the kind of movie you don't want to analyze until you've seen it two times.
Ebert interpreted the ending as an explanation for "the mechanism of our confusion", rather
than a device that tells "us for sure what actually happened."
Film critic Richard Roeper identified the film as the second best of 2001.
A more mixed review from The New York Times early on calls Vanilla Sky a "highly entertaining,
erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory",
but then it notes: As it leaves behind the real world and begins
exploring life as a waking dream, Vanilla Sky loosens its emotional grip and becomes
a disorganized and abstract if still-intriguing meditation on parallel themes.
One is the quest for eternal life and eternal youth; another is guilt and the ungovernable
power of the unconscious mind to undermine science's utopian discoveries.
David's redemption ultimately consists of his coming to grips with his own mortality,
but that redemption lacks conviction.
A negative review was published by Salon.com, which called Vanilla Sky an "aggressively
plotted puzzle picture, which clutches many allegedly deep themes to its heaving bosom
without uncovering even an onion-skin layer of insight into any of them."
The review rhetorically asks: Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe
had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him?
It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right....But
the disheartening truth is that we can see Crowe taking all the right steps, the most
Crowe-like steps, as he mounts a spectacle that overshoots boldness and ambition and
idiosyncrasy and heads right for arrogance and pretension — and those last two are
traits I never would have thought we'd have to ascribe to Crowe.
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian and Gareth Von Kallenbach of the publication Film Threat
compared Vanilla Sky unfavorably to Open Your Eyes.
Bradshaw says Open Your Eyes is "certainly more distinctive than" Vanilla Sky, which
he describes as an "extraordinarily narcissistic high-concept vanity project for producer-star
Tom Cruise."
Other reviewers extrapolate from the knowledge that Cruise had bought the rights to do a
version of Amenábar's film.
A Village Voice reviewer characterized Vanilla Sky as "hauntingly frank about being a manifestation
of its star's cosmic narcissism".
Despite the negative reviews, Cameron Diaz's performance was critically acclaimed, with
the Los Angeles Times' film critic calling her "compelling as the embodiment of crazed
sensuality" and The New York Times reviewer saying she gives a "ferociously emotional"
performance.
Edward Guthmann of The San Francisco Chronicle similarly says of the film, "most impressive
is Cameron Diaz, whose fatal-attraction stalker is both heartbreaking and terrifying."
For her performance Diaz won multiple critic's group awards, as well as earning nominations
for the Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, Critics' Choice Movie Award,
Saturn Award, and AFI Award.
Penélope Cruz's performance, however, earned her a Razzie Award nomination for Worst Actress.
See also Lucid dream
Simulated reality in fiction References
External links Eyes and Ears for Vanilla Sky at Cameron Crowe's
Official website Vanilla Sky at the Internet Movie Database
Vanilla Sky at AllMovie Vanilla Sky at Box Office Mojo
Vanilla Sky at Rotten Tomatoes Vanilla Sky at Metacritic
The "secrets" of the film at the Wayback Machine, copy of a fan's now-offline website