The next day, Diane meets with the IRS investigator, who explains that they have evidence suggesting Jim has been embezzling funds from his retirement-home residents. The IRS cuts off Jim's credit, and his credit cards are declined when he tries to buy Diane a luggage set, as the investigation drags on.Īt dawn, Lloyd plays " In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel, the song that was playing when they became intimate, on a boombox while standing under her open bedroom window. Devastated, Lloyd seeks advice from Corey, who tells him to "be a man".
Diane, worried about her father, tells Lloyd she wants to stop seeing him and concentrate on her studies, and tells him to take her pen. Jim urges Diane to break up with Lloyd, feeling he is not an appropriate match, and suggests she give Lloyd a pen as a parting gift. Lloyd's musician friend Corey, who has never gotten over her cheating ex-boyfriend, Joe, warns him to take care of Diane. Their relationship grows intimate and they have sex, to her father's concern.
Diane takes Lloyd to meet the residents of the retirement home and he teaches her to drive the manual-transmission Ford Tempo that her father gave her as a graduation present. Their next "date" is a dinner at the Court household, where Lloyd fails to impress Diane's family, and Jim is informed that he is under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service. She agrees, to the surprise of her classmates. Lloyd asks Diane to accompany him to their after-graduation all-night party. She is due to take up a prestigious fellowship in Britain at the end of the summer. Diane comes from a sheltered academic upbringing and lives with her doting divorced father Jim ( John Mahoney), who owns the retirement home where she works. Lloyd's parents are in England on Air Force duty, so he lives with his sister Constance ( Joan Cusack, uncredited), a single mother, and has no plans for his future. Skye was a 17-year-old making her major-film debut with "Say Anything," and admits she was experiencing feelings of a different kind, separately shooting Court's moments as she hears the music played by her first love, with whom she had broken up.Near the end of their senior year of high school, noble underachiever Lloyd Dobler ( John Cusack) falls for valedictorian Diane Court ( Ione Skye) and plans to ask her out, though they belong to different social groups. He’s still doubting whether the boom box scene is going to work at all. That's why he’s so heroic in that moment. The way he performs it, it’s just blatantly defying you to consider it cheesy. The defiance that he has when he’s doing the scene is what makes the scene great," says Crowe. "(Cusack) thought it was too subservient. Crowe had to convince him to shoot the final scene, but Cusack's resistance is still visible. These fears resurfaced with the boom box bit, which came on the last day of production. 'When Harry Met Sally' reunion: Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan, Rob Reiner deconstruct that fake orgasm sceneĬusack, who was 22 at the time, got over the fear of falling into teen romance clichés even before making the movie.
#WHAT SONG IS PLAYING IN SAY ANYTHING BOOMBOX SCENE MOVIE#
'The Matrix' at 20: Why Keanu Reeves and the movie will still blow your mind "But I have this feeling when I watch it that it’s filled with double emotion – both with the story and the actors, whose own trepidation bleeds in." "That scene is like Romeo under the trellis," says Crowe. Trench coat-wearing Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) holding his boom box over his head at arm's length, rock serenading his true love Diane Court (Ione Skye) in 1989’s “Say Anything,” remains one of the most enduring images of film romance.Įven those too young to have cranked a boom box revere the scene from Cameron Crowe’s directing debut, released 30 years ago Sunday, with Dobler defiantly blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” while Court listens from her bedroom.īut a big part of what makes the scene subtly effective is the real-life apprehension both actors were feeling shooting the scene.