John Cusack has opened up about one of the cinema’s most enduring romantic gestures: the boombox scene in Say Anything.
More than three decades after the film’s release, the 59-year-old revealed he initially struggled with how to approach the moment that would define his character, Lloyd Dobler.
In the 1989 Cameron Crowe-directed film, Lloyd stands outside Diane Court’s (played by Ione Skye) window holding a boombox above his head with Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes blaring through its speakers.
Cusack admitted he didn’t know how to do the scene at first.
He was worried it might make Lloyd appear subservient rather than sincere.
“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 shared during the screening of the film at New York City’s Kings Theatre November 30.
“Guys have pride, right?”
“He knew something fishy was up, maybe with the father, or that somebody was in her head,” he added, further revealing how he managed to understand it.
“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 boombox moment remains one of the most quoted and revisited scenes in romantic cinema.
