Fiona Apple – Across the Universe
1998 · Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
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Best comments
1.“It's so sweet that the Beatles decided to cover this Fiona Apple song. She really launched their careers.”
More comments
- 2.“A really sad fact about 'Across the Universe': about a month before he died, John Lennon said the Beatles never embraced the song – they never took the time to record it properly. It makes me happy that decades later, Fiona recorded an absolutely breathtaking version.”
- 3.“This was one of my grandma's favorite songs. We played it at her funeral after she was mauled to death by a grizzly bear. The whole family was camping when it happened. At just 9 years of age, I wasn't very fast... but I was faster than her that day. Rest in peace, Nana.”
The story
In 1998 Gary Ross was making Pleasantville, his movie about a black-and-white world that falls apart once a little color sneaks in. He recruited Fiona Apple for the soundtrack, and she slowed the Beatles' Across the Universe down into something dreamy and soulful. Her version opens the film's score. She covered Percy Mayfield's Please Send Me Someone to Love for the same record.
Her boyfriend at the time directed the video. That would be Paul Thomas Anderson. He shot it in black and white in the diner from Pleasantville and turned the place into a riot. Teenage boys and grown men wreck the restaurant around her, some of it in slow motion, while Apple wanders through in big over-ear headphones, singing like none of it is happening. John C. Reilly, one of the film's stars and an Anderson regular, shows up as the guy swiping records out of the jukebox. The best shot: the camera rolls a full 360 with her, head toward the floor and back up, while she grins straight at you.
Calm in the middle of the smashing. Which was more or less the movie's point, too.
