Fresh Air - Best Of: Guillermo Del Toro / Cameron Crowe

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

The great filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro has a new adaptation of Frankenstein. He saw the 1931 film when he was 7. “I realized I understood my faith better through Frankenstein than through Sunday Mass,” he tells Terry Gross. “And I decided at age seven that the creature of Frankenstein was gonna be my personal avatar and my personal messiah.” His other films include Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water. Also, we hear from Cameron Crowe, who wrote and directed Jerry Maguire, Say Anything and the semi-autobiographical film Almost Famous, about writing for Rolling Stone starting at age 15. His new memoir is about being a naive teen, exposed to the excesses of rock musicians.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Our common nature is a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma and me, Anna Gonzalez, through this complicated country. We go into caves, onto boats, and up mountain trails to meet people, hear their stories, and of course, play some music, all to reconnect to nature. Listen to Our Common Nature from WNYC, wherever you get podcasts. From W. H.Y.Y. in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. Today, Frankenstein, the classic story reimagined by the great filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. He saw the 1931 film when he was seven. I realized I understood my faith better through Frankenstein than through Sunday Mass. And I decided at age seven that the creature of Frankenstein was going to be my personal avatar and my personal Messiah.

His other films include Pan's Labyrinth and the Shape of Water. Also, we hear from Cameron Crow, who wrote and directed Jerry McGuire, Say Anything, and the semi-autobiographical film Almost Famous, about writing for Rolling Stone starting at the age of 15. His new memoir, The Uncool, is about being a naive team, exposed to the excesses of rock musicians. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe,

When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit Wise.com. T's and C's Apply. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Dignity Memorial. When you think about the people you love, it's not the big things you miss the most. It's the details. What memories will your loved ones cherish when you're gone? At Dignity Memorial, the details aren't just little things, they're everything.

They help families. create meaningful celebrations of life with professionalism and compassion. To find a provider near you, visit DignityMemorial.com. Hi, it's Carrie. Our co-host, Tanya Mosley and I will be doing an end of the year

Fresh Air Plus bonus episode answering listener questions about the show and about ourselves. You can send the questions now to Fresh Air Plus at NPR.org with Plus spelled out. That's Fresh Air Plus at NPR.org. On this week's Books We've Loved, we're headed to the open range with Morning Editions Michelle Martin to break down Charles Portis's classic true grit.

Find Books We've Loved in NPR's Book of the Day podcast feed on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. Here's Terry with our first interview. The great filmmaker Guillemald D'Oryl. has written and directed a new reimagining of Frankenstein. It takes inspiration from the 1931 film Frankenstein, one of the first, best and most enduring horror monster films, but mostly from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, which many consider to be the first science fiction book.

She was only 18 when she wrote it. In Deltoro's movie, the final part of the story is told from the creature's point of view. Some of the themes of his new film echo themes that he's been obsessed with for years. Misunderstood creatures, men who behave like monsters, father-son relationships, religion, empathy, cruelty, misguided scientific experiments that take a terrible turn, and what Del Toro describes as the uneasy truce between science and religion, machine and man, and the realization that you are inescapably alone. His other movies include Pan's Labyrinth.

The Shape of Water, which won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, Nightmare Alley, a reimagining of Pinocchio, filmed in stop-motion animation, and two Hellboy films. In Del Toro's Frankenstein, Oscar Isaac plays Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the surgeon who wants to create new life, a new man built out of body parts from the newly dead. The creature he creates is played by Jacob Allorty, who's best known for co-starring in Euphoria, and also played Elvis Presley in the Sophia Coppola movie Priscilla. Del Toro grew up in Guadalajaro, Mexico, and lives in L.A. Guillermo del Toro, welcome to Fresh Air. Congratulations on your new film, which brings together so much of your other work,

and I know it's a dream come true for you to do your own version of Frankenstein. You first saw the movie, the 1931 movie, which is totally different from the book and your new movie. But that movie really had a hold on you. Tell us why it had such meaning for you. Well, it was curiously enough on a Sunday after Catholic Mass. We came back home and then we would watch horror movies on Channel 6 all day. And it was the first time I saw Frankenstein. And the moment Boris Karloff crossed the threshold, I had an epiphany. I had a St. Paul on the road to Damascus kind of experience. I realized I understood my faith or my dogmas better through Frankenstein than through Sunday Mass. I saw the resurrection of the flesh, the immaculate

conception, ecstasy, you know, stigmata, everything made sense, and I decided at age seven that the creature of Frankenstein was going to be my personal avatar and my personal Messiah. It was a really profound transformation, and it made an impression that lasted my whole life. Can you compare how you saw the story as a seven-year-old to how you see it now? Well, I saw it as a son when I saw it first, and now I see it as a father, and more poignantly, I have become my father, while trying to run away from the same mistakes of absence or, you know, mysterious emotions that I couldn't figure out as a kid. And I had a really profound moment to be able to reconcile this knowledge with a beautiful talk

with my own kids and stop this lineage of pains and, you know, fathers are a big shadow, particularly in Latin American families, I imagine. What's the pain you're referring to in talking about your relationship with your father? It is. My father was always a mystery, and he was really funny and warm, but by turns he was also aloof and distant and had a lot of problem. Even, you know, when he came back from the kidnapping, he was taken 72 days, and I said, I'm going to get to know him real well. And our conversations never lasted more than a few minutes, you know, and he just couldn't. I didn't understand that, and I realized that, particularly with my profession, I had a huge alibi to repeat this distance, and I unfortunately couldn't, I believe, on time to really change

it and become a very dedicated father. You mentioned the kidnapping. He was kidnapped and held for a million-dollar ransom, and you managed to get the money to pay the kidnappers and rescue your father. Yes. And my understanding is that's why you moved to the U.S. because of death threats. Yeah, well, it was the constant threat and the PTSD, et cetera. But a lot of the moments that happened during that kidnapping are actually obliquely reflected in the film.

I tried to make it an autobiography of the soul for me. There's three parts of the movie. There's the introduction. Yes. Then there's the story told pretty much from Dr. Frankenstein's point of view. and then the final part is told from the creature's point of view. I really wanted to read Mary Shelley's novel, which I've never read before speaking to you again,

and I wasn't able to find the time to do it. Yes. I did, however, read your introduction to, like I think it's a 2021, anatoated version of your novel. But anyways, in Mary Shelley's original telling of the story, is there a chapter that's from the creature's point of view, or is that just something you wanted to do? No, no, no, no. There are so many things that are in the novel. That is one of them. When the creature meets Victor in the Frozen North, he says, well, this is what happened to me. And he proceeds to tell him his itinerary of degradation and humanization and learning the language with the family of the hermit. You know, all of that is in the novel, but it's been rarely articulated. And I found that.

that hinging the movie in the middle was structurally the best way to make the audience almost get a jolt and say, oh, I'm never seen this before. Even if it's been dramatized briefly in other versions, this is the one that tracks the creature in a distinct chapter. It stars in the frozen north and is very discreet in color. Then you have childhood and a young age of Victor which is idealized and very heightened visually by the fact that Victor is telling the story and then the fairy tale like... Yeah, I'm glad you said fairy tale.

Yeah. Because that seems to me like the part from Dr. Frankenstein's point of view has elements of like horror film and monster film. But the second part, it's set in the woods. It's like a fairy tale. In a little cabin. Yeah, and the old blind man, it's kind of a very fairy film. tale benevolent character, there's spirits in the woods.

And he's guided, the creature is guided by all sorts of animals into understanding the world. Yeah, and the blind old hermit thinks that, because he can't see, he doesn't see the monster that other people see, and in fact he thinks the creature is the spirit of the woods. Yes, that was very important to me that the three chapters were very distinct in style and very distinct in energy. The camera work is very different. The color palette is very different.

And I think that I would say, having seen most every version of Frankenstein on film, this is very unique. The scale of the movie, both being epic and intimate, is very unique. But the fairy tale breath of it all, and the parable, it feels like a parable of the prodigal father, I'd say. jokingly. Are you trying to interpret Frankenstein? People always call the monster Frankenstein.

Yeah, that's a mistake that came from a play. Yeah. So are you trying to compare the creature in Frankenstein to Jesus? I think so. I mean, I think the parallels are very, very curious. I triangulate the creature with Jesus and Pinocchio. Yeah, in your version of Pinocchio, and I don't know if this is in other stories or in the original fairy tale, Jepetto, who creates the puppet Pinocchio, also has built or carved, I should say, a huge depiction of Jesus being crucified and for the church.

Yeah, no, that's completely original to... That's original? Yes. To me, the myths are very related. The two biggest mysteries in the Bible for me growing up, and I am a lapsed Catholic, but the two mysteries were the Book of Job in which man questions God, why do bad things happen to good people? And the answer, basically, of God, is why not?

It's very comforting the way you put it. Well, that's the way God put it. He says, who are you to question my wisdom? You were not there when I created the world. basically. When we talked a few years ago, you mentioned that your grandmother, who was very Catholic, very. Exercised you, not exercised, but as an exorcism.

She exercised you twice. Yeah, with the holy water, yeah. Did you feel like people saw you as unholy and a sacrilege in the same way that people see the creature in Frankenstein? Yeah, in some other ways. When Pinocchio was kind of rowdy in church, because he's never been there before he doesn't understand what church is, the people in the church call him unholy and a sacrilege. Well, you know, I'm very used to not fitting. I'm always looking through the window into the world, you know, a little bit with a set of thoughts and a set of principles and ideas that don't necessarily conform. So my grandmother was in great pain that I would draw monsters all day. I would talk about the Bible asking questions that were maybe too poignant.

But we loved each other. And that is salient in my movies. No matter how different we were, we can love each other. And that is, again, in Frankenstein, there's Frankenstein in all my movies. From Chronos all the way to Pinocchio, every single movie, I hesitate to think of one that doesn't have elements of it. We're listening to Terry Gross's interview with Guillermo del Toro. He wrote and directed the new film, Frankenstein.

We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. There is so much happening in politics in any given week. You might need help putting it all in perspective. As your week draws to a close, join the NPR Politics podcast team for our weekly roundup. Here are best political reporters zoom into the biggest story. of the week, not just what they mean, but what they mean for you, all in under 30 minutes.

Listen to the weekly roundup every Friday on the NPR Politics Podcast. We are now in spooky season. And on this week's episode of Books We've Loved, we discuss all things interview with the vampire, with NPR's Barry Hardiman. So turn on the lights, grab some garlic, and listen to Books We've Loved in NPR's Book of the Day podcast feed on the NPR app, or wherever you. you get your podcasts. You could say in some ways that the creature in Frankenstein is like artificial intelligence

because he's created by man but then lives on its own and can destroy men without even understanding quite what he's doing. So what are your thoughts about AI and did that kind of inform the movie in any way? It didn't. It didn't. It didn't in the sense that my concern. It's not artificial intelligence, but natural stupidity. I think that's what drives most of the world's worst features.

But I did want it to have the arrogance of Victor be similar in some ways to the tech bros. He's kind of blind creating something without considering the consequences. And I think we have to take a pause. and consider where we're going. If you have to teach an AI to think in once and zeros, you know, oh my God, I would love for a generation to get raising kids right one time, one time. In the entire history of mankind,

there hasn't been a single generation that was raised right all across the globe. And I think that's our biggest failure in a way, you know. Once and zeros don't get the alchemy that you get with emotion and experience. You get the information, but you don't get the alchemy

of emotion, spirituality, and feeling. I'm not saying it's impossible to replicate, but we have it readily available with the next generation of children. And that's why the painful thing that Jacob Elorty and Victor enact

is a father-and-son relationship that is very relatable in the film, very relatable and very moving by the end. Did you take advantage of any AI in making Frankenstein? AI, particularly generative AI, is I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested. I'm 61, and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak. I really don't.

The other day, somebody wrote me an email, said, what did you stand on AI? My answer was very short. I said, I'd rather die. Oh, those are strong words. Man, not for me. I'm Mexican. But I think, Terry, that even when a human sings a song that has already been recorded six, seven times, they're filtering, their experience, their life. I often think of, you know, Johnny Cash singing Hurt, the Trent Resnor song and making it entirely his own, or Joe Cocker singing the Beatles, you know, that's not aversion, that's not remixing, that is filtering through alchemical pain and experience.

and work of art into making it your own. The creature in Frankenstein is endowed with eternal life in your film. Cursed, cursed, cursed. Well, that's what I was going to ask you. What do you think about, you know, his eternal life is hell. The creature is alone, and he wants to end his tormented life, but he can't. There's no one in the world who's like him, and Dr. Frankenstein refuses to make a companion for him. and the creature says there was only one remedy for pain, death, and you took that away from me too.

After the creature survived something that other people assume would have killed him, he says there was silence and then merciless life. I felt lonelier than ever. So when you think of eternal life, do you think that that's torment? Oh, I do. I'm a huge fan of death. I'm a groupie for death. I think it's the metronome of our existence. And without rhythm, there is no melody, you know. It is the metronome of a dead that makes us value the compass of the beautiful music, you know. I'm going to say, this comes when my father was taken, every day was torment. And I used to see the sun rising and resented.

And I said, the son doesn't care about my pain. but then eventually I realized it was my pain that didn't care about the son and that I needed to change that, that I needed to accept it, I needed to understand that the rhythm of the cosmos is different than that of my little heart, you know? You mentioned the fear of death

every day that your father was held hostage, kidnapped for ransom. Of course, you'd be worried about death then. I mean, it was the threat of death hanging over him, and his life was in your hands to save. Putting that aside, as major as that is, did you have a fear of death growing up and as a young man? Yes, as a young man, my grandmother and I had a very precarious sense of death and life. My grandmother would say good night to me every day and say, let us pray that I'm here tomorrow. And that is very intense for a four or five-year-old to hear.

And I would spend, sometimes I would sleep at the foot of her bed and I would be listening in the dark for her breathing. And if the breathing ceased even for two seconds, I would be jolted and take a look to see if she was okay. And that stayed with me for many decades. I don't fear it anymore. I don't fear that anymore. I feel losing people, yes, but me, I'm not afraid of dying, I hope.

You know, really, Terry, all these great questions, you know, when they get resolved, right when the lights flutter and you are no longer a director or a general or a pope, right when you become just you and the lights are flickering out, that's when you realize what you did or didn't do in your life. And that's the most momentous thing anyone can experience. And you can go with great agitation or great peace. We were talking earlier about the book of Job. Yes.

You asked your cast to read the book of Job. Yes, and the Tao. What did you want them to take from it? Because ultimately that's the plea of the creature, too. The plea of the creature is why. You know, why do this thing happen to me? and the answer comes at the end. The final image of the film is what tells you what we can do.

I mean, acceptance is so profound. You know, we are building a culture in which we have the idea of what things should be, and when they don't happen, you can feel frustrated, rebel against them, but at the end of the day, they are what they are. Marty Scorsese tackled the same sort of question in the Irishmen, and the answer is very, very beautiful. He says, it is what it is. You know, that's the book of Job.

It is what it is. The Tao says all pain comes from desire, which is absolutely true. You want more awards. You want more money. You find yourself in pain. I do, you know. But if you don't, if you don't want more, there's a zero that gives you peace. And the same with life.

So you found feeling insignificant. Oh, great. Liberating. Liberating, which can happen with reviews. Do you read them? Not anymore. Not anymore. I'm 61, I don't.

But I did. I did, oh, my God. When I was younger, I would read every single one until I found the one that would never leave my brain. I remember a few that are really well phrased. Do you want to quote one? Well, Jay Hoverman of the Village Voice wrote a great, he put down Blade 2

beautiful. He said, the only thing remotely scary about Blade 2 is that is done by the same man that did Devil's Backbone, which is beautiful. Giam Al-Zotura, it's been such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for coming back to the show. Always a pleasure, and thank you

for the wisdom and the careful guiding of this lengthy interview, which I adored every second of. I really appreciate you saying that. I love talking with you. Same here. Guillermo del Toro wrote and directed the new film, Frankenstein.

Now let's hear Terry's recent interview with another season director, Cameron Crow. My guest, Cameron Crow, is known for writing the screenplay for fast times at Ridgemont High, and writing and directing, say anything, Jerry McGuire, Vanilla Sky, and Almost Famous for which he won an Oscar for Best Screenplay. It's the story of a 15-year-old who in 1973 manages to become a rock critic and somehow get backstage interviews with important musicians. By the age of 16, he's published in Rolling Stone and even writes a cover story. As improbable as that may sound, it's based on Crow's own life as a teenage music writer. His new memoir, The Uncool, is about that period of his life and more, including his adventures and misadventures, writing about music.

musicians like Greg Allman, Chris Christopherson, Jimmy Page, and David Bowie. He also writes about what life was like in his family when he was growing up and how reluctant his parents were to allow him to go on the road with musicians before it even graduated high school. Let's start with a clip from early on and almost famous. The Cameron Crow character, William, is about 11, listening to an argument between his mother, played by Francis McDormand, and his older sister, played by Zoe Deschanel. The mother speaks first.

You've been kissing. No, I have. Yes, you have. No, I haven't. Yes, you have. I can tell. You can't tell? Not only can I tell.

I know who it is. It's Daryl. What'd you got on to you, coat? It's unfair that we can't listen to our music. It's because it is about drugs and promiscuous sex. Simon and Garfunkel is poetry. Yes, it's poetry. It is a poetry of drugs and promiscuous sex.

they're on put. First it was butter, then it was sugar and white flour, bacon, eggs, bologna, rock and roll, motorcycles. Then it was celebrating Christmas on a day in September when you knew it wouldn't be commercialized. What else are you going to ban? Honey, you want to rebel against knowledge. I'm trying to give you the cliff notes

on how to live life in this world. We're like nobody else I know. Cameron Crowe, welcome back to fresh air. It's a pleasure to talk with you again. Thanks, Terry. Was your mother at all like the Francis McDormon character and how unusual she was and how opposed to rock and roll? Even Simon and Garfunkel, who she probably hadn't even heard yet. Well, first of all, hearing that clip, it's uncanny how much Francis McDormon is my mother.

I mean, the dialogue was straight out of our family and our home, but somehow she... Let me just kind of interrupt by saying your mother died, I think it was last year. She died in 2019. 2019, yeah. On September 11th. Born on the 4th of July and passed away on September 11th. Two days before, almost famous, the musical, opened in San Diego. So it was a dramatic exit from the earth, from my mom.

Yeah, so I didn't mean to interrupt, except I wanted to express my condolences. Thank you so much. She was a huge character and completely inspiring. But listening to that clip, it just made me appreciate how sometimes real life is the best writer. And it was just lodged in my head forever as this classic thing that happened where my mom made us believe that she could tell if you've been kissing. And of course it was a stunt to get the truth out of us,

or my sister in that case, but just hilarious how life kind of puts in front of you the best stuff to write about. With a mother who was so controlling in terms of like food and vehicles and not even listening to rock and roll, which was kind of band in your house. You had to sneak it in. How did you manage to get away at the age of 15 and start going on the road with bands

so that you can write cover stories about them? She was all about as a teacher and a counselor who had many great counselors who loved her so much. She always respected intellectualism. If I could somehow pin it to intellectual success, I had a way in. So to go on the road with Led Zeppelin at 15, I had to really sell Led Zeppelin to her as, like, music that's based on Tolkien. This is like lofty material that's like good for the soul. Ultimately, I think she said because we loved the interviewer Dick Cavett in our family, go and take this journey, put on your magic shoes, call me every night, and do you.

Don't take drugs. And that was my ticket out. Don't take drugs is like the refrain of the movie. Like your mother's always calling. Always. Anytime you call her, it's like, don't take drugs. Yeah. Because it was about brain cells.

It was about brain cells. Oh, you had to stay smart. Yeah. Yeah. Did you end up taking drugs? I'm sure you offered them all the time. I was offered drugs for sure. And I learned early on, Terry, that like the best response is no.

Because the person offering you the drugs generally then says, smart kid, more for me. And that made me, I don't know, it made people know that I wasn't there to join the band, party with the band. I was there with a notebook full of questions based on loving music. And that really swung the door open. Was the writer aspect of being a music writer what your mother approved of because that is a more intellectual pursuit? Exactly. And it was true, you know. I really felt like the best of the music.

that we loved, that did sneak into our family, had its roots in wonderful writing, for example, Joni Mitchell. Simon and Garfunkel, there was something about the song Mrs. Robinson that rubbed my mom the wrong way. And I think it was the way they said, cuckoo-cook-c-c-choo. Totally, you got it. She thought it was sneering. And she did.

She pulled out the book-ins album cover and showed us the pupils of Paul Simon, and promised us that he was high on pot. And the funny thing is when the movie came out with that scene in it, I think it was on CNN. Somebody was interviewing Paul Simon, and they said, you know, what about this movie almost famous, holding up the bookends album cover, you know, Francis McDormand saying, they're on pot. He's like, we were. So she was right. I think she's right. I think she's also right of being like a sneering song about middle-aged women.

Absolutely. So she saw clearly. And it was inevitable, I think, that music was going to come in. You know, underneath the door or through the window, somehow the power of rock was going to find my sister and me. And it did. To this day, that's our favorite language with each other, sharing music and the things that happen when music kind of takes over and transports you and gives you that feeling that you really can't get any other place. The first concerts you went to, including a Bob Dylan concert very early in his career, you went to with your mother. Yeah.

That could be a very wonderful or a very embarrassing experience with both mother and child being uncomfortable. Oh, yeah. Their child doesn't want to be seen as needing to be escorted by a parent, and the parent feels like 100 years old compared to all the kids that are there. Yeah. What were those experiences like for you? I was just...

Knowing that she hated rock and roll. Yeah. Well, Bob Dylan, you know, we were pretty young, and he was appearing at a gymnasium at the college near where we lived in Riverside, California. And she had read something about this young protest singer that had something to say. And so she came to us and said, let's go see this protest singer and brought a blanket for us to sit on the floor of the gymnasium. And we did see Bob Dylan in 1964, like right after he had written times they are a change in. And he was kind of a Charlie Chaplin type figure, I remember.

Like he just kind of like was a little jaunty and these loose-fitting. jeans and he was funny and serious at the same time. And that affected us for sure. But real rock was banned for the longest time because it was, as she said, a vehicle for sex and drugs. And, you know, sometimes it really was. But I was able to go to another concert, which was Eric Clapton, Derek and the Domino's, with her. And it was so electrifying that even she kind of understood what the power of rock sometimes could be. And after somebody sitting next her offered her cocaine, which was, you know, striking to see. But she, you know, politely turned it down and everything. But when the concert was over, we were walking out. And she said,

you know what? Your music is better than mine. Wow. And that was my mom. She was a truth teller. So that was her truth. And that was another moment where the door swung open a little wider. We're listening to Terry's interview with Cameron Crow. His new memoir, The Uncool, is based on the same period of his life as his film Almost Famous, which he wrote and directed. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. This is Fresh Air Weekend. When you were 15 writing about bands, the bands were older than you were. Yeah.

But looking back now, they were probably mostly in their 20s. I know. Which is really young. Really young. So what's your take on some of those musicians now, thinking of their? them as young people or not as older people. Yeah. Well, I thought they were, you know, seasoned adults at the time.

And you're right. They were 22, for example. And being 15, you know, the distance between 15 and 22 is enormous. It's like a generation. But really, we were all kind of young together. And Rock was young. There wasn't video assists and all the bells and whistles and dancers and stuff. It was really just a naked stage.

and people playing songs. The power of the songs was the power of the concert. And what I thought as a young guy led into some of these dressing rooms to glimpse how bands prepared for a show or how they struggled to figure out who was right in an argument about how to play a song. I started to see a dynamic that was so human

that it was kind of beyond what I had been able to see as a high school student, for example, when my mom had skipped me, two grades and later three. I didn't have a lot of friends, but somehow... Because you were much younger than your fellow students, your classmates. But then, you know, somebody like Chris Christofferson deigns to give me an interview and tries to sneak me into a bar where I'm underage.

And then when we get caught, he says, well, I'll sit out here in this big red-leatherette chair. And I'll do my interview with you as fans and people stream by. he treated me like an adult and talked to me about the power of movies and music and all this stuff that ended up speaking to me so strongly later. But as a young guy, you're kind of in this position where, you know, this person is allowing me to ask them whatever I want to about music that I love. It was a blissful time and I still love writing about it. So how did you manage to convince anybody that at the age of 15 still in high school that you were worthy of being taken seriously, that your opinions were informed enough and deep enough, when deep enough, to be a spokesperson for whether this album was good or not, to be worthy of talking to a band? I'm just laughing because so much of it was just where I lived. We lived in San Diego, and San Diego is not a primary market.

San Diego usually happens at the end of a tour after a band or an artist has been in, you know, San Francisco, L.A., New York, big reviews. They had to worry about San Diego, it's like a, it's surfers, you know, so they would just be partying early for the end of their tour a lot of times. And so here's a kid that comes to the door with a notebook full of questions based on the music that nobody was really asking them about in the hands of an older journalist. Here's some guy with an orange bag full of cassettes, like ready to talk to you about your album Aqualong. You know, they're like, get that kid in here. Come on, we're bored. Let them ask us those questions. And so many of the bands were just nice to me because they were bored in San Diego.

And I got to tell you, going back and listening to a lot of those. interviews because I kept everything, they really talked to me. They really opened up. And that informed the life I was lucky enough to have later as a writer and a director in movies because I knew how people spoke. I transcribed all my interviews myself. So I knew that people don't talk elegantly, but they can pour their heart out in half sentences. So it was really one big magic carpet ride of learning about people. And it started early. I'm a lucky guy. So Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Lester Bangs and Almost Famous. And I want to play a scene where he gives you some very interesting advice. But first, I want to explain who Lester Bangs is.

I mean, he was a really eccentric guy and such strong feelings and unwavering in his confidence in his opinions about what was great and what was garbage. Oh, yeah. And he pretty much became a cult figure, you know, and died young. Sadly, yes. Yeah. So when you start writing for Cream, he gives you some advice. So this is a scene between Patrick Fuget, who plays your surrogate in the film, and

Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Lester Bangs. Once you go to L.A., you're going to friends like crazy, but they're going to be fake friends. You know, they're going to try to corrupt you. You know, and you got an honest face, and they're going to tell you everything. But you cannot make friends with the rock stars. You're going to be a true journalist, no, a rock journalist. You're first your number you get paid much. But you will get free records from the record company. This is nothing about you that is controversial, man. God, it's got. going to get ugly, man. They're going to buy you drinks. You're going to mean girls.

They're going to try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs. And I know it sounds great. These people are not your friends. You know, these are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars. And they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it. Right? And then it just becomes an industry of cool. I mean, I'm telling you, you're coming along in a very dangerous time for rock and roll. And that's why I think you should just turn around, go back, you know, and be a lawyer or something. I can tell from your face that you won't. I can give you $35.

Give me a thousand words on Black Sabbath. An assignment? Yeah. Yeah. Hey. You have to make your reputation on being honest. and, you know, unmerciful. Unmerciful, honest and unmerciful.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that was true of Lester Bangs. Absolutely. Were you capable of being unmerciful? Intermittently. When I listen to that, it takes me right back to when I first met him. He said almost exactly those words. And can you imagine being 15 or 16 and somebody,

enters your life who speaks that kind of truth with that kind of passion and treats you like an equal? Yeah, and unmerciful isn't something you usually strive to be in your life. Yeah. But as a critic, you have to be honest, and sometimes that means unmerciful. But that's still a harsh word to use for a 15-year-old who's starting in a very harsh business. Yeah. Well, let me give you the context. His stance when I met him that day was, it's over. You know, it's gone that passion that thing that flame that is true rock true music it's over they've taken it over so i was like a straggler to something that was like a flying saucer and had left to him so he's telling me it's over but here you are and just watch out because they'll try and corrupt you

too and i'm warning you right now because they already ruined rock it was like A lot of information, but his thing about unmerciful was you've got to fight back. You have to fight back in the homogenization of something that is important to you. And that's why he used that strong word. And he was sometimes not unmerciful. Sometimes he was very kind. He was kind to me, for example. But he was a politician for the soul of rock. And to me, he was legend instantly for that and men. any other reasons. Lester Bangs also warned you about not making friends with musicians or publicists. You probably really wanted to be the musician's friends, but did you try not to be? Like, how did that work out for you? Well, I think generally I was able to witness people that would come through a tour or backstage, and you could tell the people that were there to, like, party and act like their arrival.

and act like they're a rock star too. And that person would leave the room and you'd hear how they were talked about by the bands. And you just go, wow, okay, well, I get it. You know, I don't play an instrument, so I'm not going to be in a band or try to be in this band. But generally, I thought, like,

be the guy that's there to document it. And when you're done, go home. don't stay out or try and, you know, hang out in the hotel rooms. Go back to your room and transcribe the interview. I remember something Terry that happened early on. I was on the road with the Alman Brothers Band. And I loved the Alman Brothers band. And they were staying at the Continental Hyatt House in Los Angeles.

And I was covering them for Rolling Stone. And after their show at the forum, they all came back to this kind of communal room to party and jam. And so there's Greg Alman. playing, you know, this blues song, come in my kitchen. And I'm just loving it. He's like eight feet away. And there's some people singing and there's another guy playing guitar over there. And there was a guitar right next to me.

And, you know, I only knew two chords, but I picked up the guitar and I started to strum. And I was thinking, this is cool, man. I am like jamming with the Allman Brothers band. And it was like hands appeared kind of behind me. lifted the guitar out of my hands. Almost like a hand from heaven is just coming to like relinquish the guitar from my grasp. And I just felt like, oh, that's cool. I'm in heaven and there goes the guitar now.

It's like, don't jam with the Allman Brothers band, particularly when you only know two chords. I thought that was the most gentle way to teach me a lesson early on. You followed David Bowie around off and on for a year and a half. And wrote a piece. You know, was it a cover story? Yeah, it was a cover story in Rolling Stone. It was also the Playboy interview. And I did some other stories for, like, Cream and some other publications.

It was a David Bowie factory I had going for a while because he wasn't talking to anybody else. Life puts you at a crossroads and you go one way and it turns into 18 months with David Bowie. I had no assignment. He said to me, hold up a mirror to me. I want to see what you show me. So, like, spend some time around me, ask me anything you want. I want to see the mirror that you hold up. And that's what I did.

I'm not sure he appreciated totally the mirror that I held up to him. But he did know that it was an accurate portrait of what he was going through in those 18 months, which are kind of referred to as a lost weekend when he was living untethered in Los Angeles. and not sure if he was going to become a movie actor for a while. He fired his manager and he was just kind of learning what was going to be next and trying to reinvent. And he was playing around with this character called the Thin-white Duke. And one day he put 12 pages of an autobiography in my hand

and signed it and said, I wanted you to have this. And it was called The Return of the Thin-white Duke. He never finished it. It's 12 pages. it's striking and this was the time David Boy was trying to figure out what was coming next and I was lucky enough to be around and I asked him all kinds of stuff and he was both warm and engaging, steely and brilliant and lost well you know that kind of fits in a way with the fact that He had so many characters that he embodied.

And when he said to you, I want to see the mirror you hold up, do you think he didn't really know who he was in some ways? It's so funny that you asked that. I asked him at one point, because his real name was David Jones, right? So I asked him at one point, am I meeting David Jones or am I meeting David Bowie, the creation? And he said, you're meeting David Jones who's aggressively throwing David Bowie at you. Oh, wow. I know. I know. I know. He even, I asked him at one point, I was like, how do you think you're going to die?

Do you think you'll die on stage? Because Ziggy Stardustard was one of his characters, I think, was based on somebody who had died on stage. And he said, no, no, no, I don't think that's going to happen to me. I think my, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but he said, I think my death will be an event, something that I manage and produce and make my own statement. and that is exactly what happened. Remind us how he died. Well, he died of cancer at a young age

and he knew he was dying. He didn't tell anybody except a small group of collaborators. And he did this album Black Star, which is his statement about the death that was coming. And it's profound and it's managed and it is an opportunity that he did not throw away. And he also said in one of the songs, you know, I can't give you everything.

So he kept a lot for himself. I think he found a life where he was in love and living in New York and he loved his family. And the mirror that I held up to him, Terry, was a glimpse of a time when he almost died and wasn't looking after himself and involved in drugs. And too many of his friends, he said,

were drug dealers, and he's lucky that he made it out alive. One of the things that you portray in the movie, Almost Famous, is the teenage girls and young women who followed the bands and partied with them afterwards and went to their hotel rooms afterwards, and people would call them groupies, but the leader of the group of girls and almost famous says, we're not groupies. We love the music. That's why we're here. We're a band AIDS, A-I-D-E-S. And, you know, we're here to help the band because we love their music. The name of the character in the movie, the leader of these girls, is Penny Lane. That's what she was known by. It wasn't her real name. In your memoir, she's also using the

name Penny Lane, but her real name is Penny Trimble. In the movie, she's a main character, played by Kate Hudson, in your memoir, she gets a paragraph in which you talk about her importance in the band world or the groupie world and her importance to you. But that's it. Are you trying to protect her privacy by not saying more?

A little bit. I've talked about Penny quite a bit. Penny Trumbull is an open book. She always said at the time, when she got older, She wanted to use whatever money she'd saved to put together an old folks home for old rock stars up in Oregon, which she did with a little bit of the money that she made, which wasn't that much, to be able to use her story in the movie. So she loved music and behaved exactly that way. I was pretty young at the time. And so for Penny and the Flying Garter girls, who was like her clan, you know,

who would fail at not getting emotionally involved with the bands. The other thing was like, watch out. They all would fall for some of the guys and get their hearts broken, whatever. But Penny Trumbull was one of the ones that really opened up to me and told me what it was like emotionally to follow a band and to crave that experience of being in an empty arena after you'd seen the show that meant so much to you and you could still feel the spirits in the air of that empty arena. That's my favorite scene in Almost Famous

when Kate Hudson is dancing in the Garden of Trash left behind where Stillwater has played. And that's what I was left with, not trying to protect them. I think, you know, I've written about it and you get the emotional carnage that can happen. That's an almost famous. But I always felt that Penny Trumbull was an open book. and was a friend as well as a kind of a, you know, flamboyant figure who was true to her word.

She loved the music. Cameron Crow, it's really been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. Really enjoyed this. Cameron Crow's new memoir is called The Uncool. He spoke with Terry Gross. I'm an alligator.

I'm a mama, papa coming for you. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Sam Brigger.