The band in
the movie is called Stillwater, a fictional group that is obviously
an amalgam of several groups that Crowe toured with and wrote about
during his many years with Rolling Stone. Asking who the band is
based on is one of those questions that's usually sidestepped. "A
lot of it's the Allman Brothers," Crowe says up-front and without
hesitation, a band that he went on tour with for several weeks while
he was just 16.

How do you
feel about going to Toronto?

I'm totally
thrilled that we're going to Toronto. Movies that I've loved started
out in the Toronto Film Festival. It's just a great tradition. The
cast and everybody is just jacked about it, so we'll see what happens.



Who is the band based on?



A lot of it's the Allman Brothers. At one point I thought about
doing it as the Allman Brothers, to be honest with you, but they
deserve their own movie, and not some VH1 biopic, either. That story
has got a lot of pain and heartache and obviously death. I accessed
part of that experience, and also just combined it with the Eagles,
Leonard Skynnard, the Who, and a lot of the American bands that
don't get written about in rock movies. It's easier to write the
English guys. They dress more flamboyantly and they speak GRANDLY,
whereas the American guys are more like, 'Let's go get some barbecue.'



How does William Miller differ from a young Cameron Crowe?



I looked older than Patrick looks in the movie and I was a little
different than Patrick. Which helped me direct him, I think. I was
more of the clown. I would play the prankster character more, which
helped me to fit in. Patrick plays the observer.



What it would be like if the main character was named Cameron Crowe?



That would be too weird. That would be just narcissistic. I'm sorry.

But what
would be different if he used his real name?

Here's what
would be different: I wouldn't make the movie. It would be in my
drawer. Lester [Bangs], I thought it was okay to use his real name
because I wanted people to know about Lester... Lester said almost
everything that's in the movie, and more. The point of all this
is, I was there and I saw sexual abuse and I saw TVs going out the
window and I saw all that stuff, and I observed enough of what that
era really was about to be able to say that the poetry of that era
is under-represented. I never got into music because I thought the
guy used a mud shark [on a groupie] in a hotel room. I never got
into a song more because I knew a guy was on heroin. What I've not
seen in the many that tried to capture the rock era is something
that waves the flag for fandom, and that's what I tried to do with
this movie.