'Vanilla Sky' sneak peek: Cameron Crowe on Tom Cruise

An exclusive clip from a 20th anniversary 'Vanilla Sky' featurette

Video Transcript

CAMERON CROWE: I think the first conversation I had with Tom where we discussed doing "Vanilla Sky," I said, "What if we empty out Times Square?" Which I think would daunt most people, but not him. It was, yeah, let's do it. But I remember Tom Cruise saying like we gave them our word that you're going to get this quickly.

So every night after filming for about three weeks, we'd practice our shot in Times Square. The day came. And it was an early, early Sunday morning. And we knew that we had two hours. And it was only going to be two hours.

We're set. We do the shot. Pretty good. We do a few more takes. And it works. And so now, we're kind of standing around going, OK, we were super efficient. What do we do now?

And Tom Cruise, in classic form, says, "How about if we do some running shots? And I just run back and forth across empty Times Square, and you'll get your running shots. And it'll be great for the whole sequence really." Yeah, let's do it.

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So we finished. And we had only a few more minutes left before our time frame was done. So we took some pictures together of all of us kind of strangely oddly ecstatic in Times Square. And then, we had it. We say we're done. And I think it was probably 90 seconds before all the cars reappeared. Everybody reappeared. And it was like it had never happened.

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