Film scenes featuring major cities completely deserted are always fascinating. It is one thing to shut down a city block or two, but the entire Westminster Bridge in London for “28 Days Later“? Or how about shutting down Times Square so Tom Cruise could run around (in signature Tom Cruise style) while looking very confused? This opening scene sets the stage for the weird, thrilling, meditative and lonely world of “Vanilla Sky,” but also takes another, eerier layer during this global pandemic where Times Square is looking deserted almost around the clock.
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In an interview with Vulture, writer-director Cameron Crowe discussed filming the iconic scene, and how no one else, including Danny DeVito, has been able to replicate it. As Crowe puts it, the idea of an empty Times Square was part of the story from the moment he decided to adapt Alejandro Amenábar‘s “Abre Los Ojos,” which has a similar scene set in a deserted Madrid. “Very early on, our producers Don Lee and Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise went to see Rudy Giuliani and his people to see if we could do this,” says Crowe. Turns out, the former New York Mayor had only one condition before agreeing to shut down one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world. “I said, ‘Great news! What’s the condition?’ And they said, ‘You! Somebody there has done some research on you, and heard that you do a lot of takes.’ I was like, ‘What?! I’m a thorough director, but this intel is in the mayor’s office?’ They were like, ‘Yeah, somebody there is worried. They don’t want you in Times Square running around with Tom Cruise, with you shooting stuff, with no clear plan.'”
Crowe and his team then spend weeks prepping and rehearsing for the sequence. On the day of the shooting, the production had Times Square for three hours on a Sunday morning, and everything runs smoothly, way too smoothly. According to Crowe, they managed to do multiple takes, and they still had more than an hour left. “And Tom Cruise says, ‘I’ll just run. I’ll just run back and forth and you can do running shots.’ Which was what the mayor’s office was afraid we’d be doing,” Crowe explains. “We had an hour and 15 minutes or so left, so Tom just ran. And it was beautiful. It was just — we were in gravy land. We got even that done early, and I’m telling you, it was a count of 15 before all of the traffic and the people just returned to Times Square. It was stunning. It was like, what we’d done never happened.”
After the production wrapped, other people put in requests to shut down Times Square, but got denied. “The thing they told us from the beginning to the end is that this will never happen again. And I wish that it hadn’t,” says Crowe. As for who else put in a request, “Danny DeVito. I’m not sure for what movie, it was a couple of months after us. Sorry, Danny.”