John Cusack opened up about one of 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 that he initially struggled to approach the moment that would define his character, Lloyd Dobler.
In the 1989 Cameron Crowe-directed film, Lloyd stands in front of Diane Court’s (played by Ione Skye) window, holding a boombox above his head along with Peter Gabriel’s. In your eyes blaring through its speakers.
Cusack admitted he didn’t know how to do this scene at first.
He worried that Lloyd would appear submissive rather than sincere.
“I didn’t know how to do it because I thought the character was, you know, he was sitting outside whining, saying, ‘Please come back to me,'” Cusack explained at the film’s screening at New York’s Kings Theater on November 30.
“The guys are proud, aren’t they?”
“He knew something fishy was going on, maybe with the father, or that someone was in his head,” he added, further revealing how he managed to figure it out.
“So I thought, I don’t really know how to do this. And then finally, at the end of the movie, I was like, ‘Oh, what if he’s really bad? And he’s more defiant.’ And that’s what made it work.
The boombox moment remains one of the most quoted and revisited scenes in romantic cinema.
