The iconic scene John Cusack didn’t want to shoot: “He felt it was subservient”
You don’t see an awful lot of John Cusack these days, due to a combination of his only doing roughly one film a year and those films not exactly setting the box office alight. In fact, it’s a tough job to name an even middlingly big film Cusack has been in since Hot Tub Time Machine, and that was 15 years ago now.
But that certainly wasn’t the case for about 20 years between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, because Cusack was undoubtedly a very big name and made some fantastic films in all types of genres, from the Stephen King adaptation 1408 to the Nick Hornby record store comedy High Fidelity to the brilliant Grosse Point Blank in 1997.
But it was his work in the ‘80s that people will probably think of him most prominently for, notably in the likes of the John Hughes’ coming of age movie Sixteen Candles, Rob Reiner’s The Sure Thing and Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything, which despite being almost at the 1990s, feels essentially like bottling the ’80s, shaking it up and and spraying it on a big screen.
Like many of Crowe’s movies, it was a mix of music, every day life and zeitgeist that is now remembered chiefly for one scene in particular, the moment where Cusack’s lovestruck character Lloyd drives over to Ione Skye’s house and tries to win her over by holding a boombox up over his head and playing Peter Gabriel’s ‘In Your Eyes’ as loudly as possible.
Aside from inspiring countless fancy dress outfits and parodies, it was a moment that summed the film up so well that it made the poster, but it was also a scene that Cusack apparently was reluctant to do. According to Crowe, originally Cusack didn’t even want to do the film full stop, so tired was he already of ‘80s teen movies. But Crowe convinced him otherwise, and had to do so again when it came to the scene that would later define it.
He told the New York Times: “He (Cusack) felt like it was a subservient act: Why does Lloyd have to be a wuss like that? We struggled with how to get that scene… 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.’ (The cinematographer) László Kovács leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Don’t worry, there’s no film in the camera.’”
Persistence paid off, however, and eventually Cusack was cajoled into doing the scene as Crowe envisaged – and a good thing he did, because Say Anything went on to be one of the defining movies of the decade. Crowe added, “On the last day, as we were losing the sun, László said, ‘I found a place across the street that would be good, and the car is parked there.'”
Adding, “Let’s get him across the street and see if we can get it.’ So we ran across the street. [John] said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’ So he’s holding up the boom box, literally 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.”
As the decades passed and the moment became even more iconic, even Cusack had to grudgingly admit the impact, in addition to Peter Gabriel himself. And in 2012, as Gabriel struck up the first chords of ‘In Your Eyes’ on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, Cusack walked on to join him, handing him a boombox and taking a bow before strolling off again. In the audience that night? Cameron Crowe.
