Cameron Crowe makes no bones about it: His next movie, "Vanilla Sky," is a remake of a 1997 Spanish-import hit "Abre los ojos" ("Open Your Eyes").
"A lot of people will remake a film and then scurry to find a way to sound like they didn't," said Crowe, who is putting the finishing touches on the Dec. 14 release from Paramount Pictures. "I say, let's honor this film in remaking it, but by using new elements, with the idea that you could watch both and have fun with the larger questions."
Casting about for a metaphor, the onetime rock critic hit on one: "This is like a song our band can play. Somebody else wrote it and now we're playing their song, with the elements that our band brings to it. It's our interpretation. I'm not tampering with the original, as much as I'm doing a cover version that honors the work."
Written and directed by Alejandro Amenabar ("The Others"), "Abre los ojos" was a 1997 what-is-reality thriller about a handsome young playboy who is disfigured in a car accident but subsequently has plastic surgery to restore his beauty. Or does he?
Like such films as "The Matrix," "The Thirteenth Floor" and the current "Waking Life" and "Mulholland Dr.," "Abre los ojos" holds out the possibility that what you've just seen is a dream, from which the central character is only just awakening. Or is he?
Crowe has his own ideas, but he hasn't discussed them with Amenabar, whose blessing he received to remake the film.
"I had this dream that he and I would sit and talk about what he meant with his film," Crowe said. "Sometime it would be fun to sit down with him. But I didn't want to talk about it before I had finished the whole movie."
Crowe went so far as to cast Penelope Cruz, who played the principal love interest in Amenabar's version, in the same role in "Vanilla Sky," with Tom Cruise in the lead. Her voice, whispering, "Abre los ojos," will open Crowe's movie in the same way it did the original film.
"She said if anybody did a remake and didn't cast her, she'd come after them with an Uzi," Crowe said. "So, obviously, she was someone I wanted to talk to. I loved that aspect of it: It felt like sampling part of the original."
Crowe is aware of the pitfalls of trying to remake any film. "I cringe when anybody brings up the idea of remaking 'The Apartment,"' said Crowe, who wrote a book about the director of that movie, Billy Wilder.
