Cameron Crowe is gearing up to bring Joni Mitchell to the big screen.
The “Almost Famous” director is working closely with the folk icon for an upcoming film about her life, with Anya-Taylor Joy and Meryl Streep reportedly eyeing to star as past and present-day versions of the “Blue” chanteuse. In a recent interview for his new memoir “The Uncool,” Crowe couldn’t share specific casting details about the project, but elaborated on how he plans to approach the highly anticipated movie.
Mitchell, 81, has not only been exceedingly “honest” in sharing her story, but she’s also a real “blast with a great sense of humor,” Crowe tells USA TODAY.
“This is a person that said, ‘I’m gonna open the doors for you to the real experiences I had, the people you know, the people you don’t know, the clothes and instruments that I kept, the notes that I took, all the music,’” Crowe says. “She said, ‘I always saw my life as a collection of little movies, and some of them are songs.’ So the thing that I can say about the movie is that it definitely would transcend what you’d call a traditional biopic.”
Crowe says his favorite biopic is the 2007 drama “Control,” about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. The film enriched his appreciation for the English post-punk band and made him love their music even more.
“That’s what’s been the dream for the Joni Mitchell film,” Crowe says. “If you knew the music, you could go back to it and experience it even more deeply, and with a sense of wonder and fun that comes from Joni herself. And if you’ve never heard of her before, you can see a movie about a character that you’re going to miss when it’s over. She’s pretty darn unforgettable and no holds barred, so it’s been one of the greatest creative experiences ever.”
Crowe, 68, first profiled Mitchell for the cover of Rolling Stone in 1979 around the release of her album “Mingus,” a collaboration with jazz great Charles Mingus. Mitchell despised the magazine after it ran a gossipy story about her personal life, but Crowe assuaged the “Both Sides Now” singer by agreeing to show her the article before it published.
Back then, “if you’re writing for Rolling Stone and you want to interview Joni Mitchell, forget it. It’s never going to happen,” Crowe recalls. “They were cruel to her early on, and she was like, ‘Get lost.’ Then to be able to actually do the cover story for Rolling Stone after she hadn’t done any interviews for a long time was amazing, and still the best interview I did in the magazine.
“It had nothing to do with me – it was all her,” he continues. “I asked the questions anybody might have asked, but what she had were the answers, and she gave them with the clarity and precision of a painter. I remember leaving her house with that interview and going, ‘It’s never going to get better than that.’ And it hasn’t.”
Joni Mitchell told Cameron Crowe she loves ‘We Bought a Zoo’
Mitchell’s film will be Crowe’s first movie as a director since the 2015 romantic dramedy “Aloha.” The Oscar-winning filmmaker has struggled to connect with critics and awards bodies these last two decades, between the darkly fascinating “Elizabethtown” in 2005 and well-meaning grief drama “We Bought a Zoo” in 2011.
Crowe maintains the latter didn’t get a fair shake upon release, but he praises the performances from Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson and Elle Fanning, as well as the score by Icelandic musician Jónsi. The movie’s title and poster have become memes on social media, although some online circles have reappraised its merits in recent years.
“’We Bought A Zoo’ has a possibly unfortunate title,” Crowe says. Nonetheless, “that movie is sitting out there waiting for people to discover it. One day I went over for my weekly meeting with Joni, and she was like, ‘I watched “We Bought A Zoo” and I loved it. Did you write that dialogue? It’s really, really good.’ So ‘We Bought a Zoo’ is still out there making friends, which is good.”
