John Cusack had some notes for his character Lloyd Dobler in 1989’s Say Anything.
Cusack recalled that he only agreed to star in Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut on the condition that he’d be allowed to make some changes to the script.
He felt that most movies about young people put a “45 to 50-year-old professional writer in the mouth of all these people.”
“The character was more optimistic, but didn’t have any darker sides to it,” John Cusack pointed out, adding that he made it so Lloyd was “choosing to be optimistic,” which made him “sort of heroic.”
He also recalled strugglign to create the most memorable scene in the romcom.
Cusack couldn’t get in the mind of his character Lloyd and understand why he would hold up a boombox blaring Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes outside the window of Diane Court, played by Ione Sky.
“I didn’t know how to do it because I thought the character was, you know, he’s sitting outside whining, kind of saying, ‘Please come back to me,'” Cusack explained during a screening of the film at New York City’s Kings Theatre, per People.
He highlighted the reason, saying, “Guys have pride, right?”
Ultimately, he “figured that part out.”
“He knew something fishy was up, maybe with the father, or that somebody was in her head,” he continued of his character in the Cameron Crowe-directed film.
“So I thought, I don’t really know how to do it. And then finally at the end of the movie, I thought, ‘Oh, what if he’s really bad? And he’s more defiant.’ And that was what made it work,” the 1408 star explained.
