Cameron Crowe on his long-lost Tom Petty doc and upcoming Joni Mitchell biopic

In 1983, Cameron Crowe was an ambitious young music journalist who had just released his debut film: a documentary about Tom Petty, titled Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party. It aired once on MTV in the middle of the night and was never seen again.

"MTV did show it once and felt it was possibly filled with illegal footage and maybe just too irreverent," Crowe tells Q's Tom Power. "It's kind of informed everything I've done since in a way, because Tom Petty said, 'Let's make it like you're in the band. You're with us, you're not just somebody looking through a prism at us. Be with us. This is our sense of humour, this is how we are on the road, and this is us having fun."

Now, more than 40 years later, the Oscar-winning director's lost film will be shown for the first time in theatres around the world, with two screenings on Oct. 17 and Oct. 20 (the latter being Petty's birthday).

Not only does the film give a rare look at the real, unfiltered Petty, but it also acts like a time capsule, showing what music journalism itself looked like in the early '80s. "There's so many outlets now that you get junkets or Zoom interviews, and you don't get to really hang with the person that much," Crowe says.

The director drew deeply on his time with Petty to make his 2000 film Almost Famous, which follows a teenage music journalist who accompanies an up-and-coming rock band on tour. 

Crowe says his dream had always been to write a cover story for Rolling Stone, but after he accomplished that dream with a profile of the Allman Brothers Band in 1973 (he was only 16 years old), he found himself wondering what was next.

"I always loved movies," he tells Power. "I kind of vectored into doing that and they fuzed in a way, because putting music in movies is still my favourite thing; that stage of making a movie is so thrilling for me."

His Joni Mitchell biopic, due sometime next year

Crowe's next big project is a biopic about Joni Mitchell's life, with input from the legendary Canadian singer-songwriter herself.

"We've been working on it for about two and a half years," he says. "We haven't talked about it much, but it's starting to come to fruition and hopefully we'll get it out for a year from now."

Though further information about the film is still under wraps, Crowe shares that it does include a "very nice lengthy sequence that takes place in Toronto," where Mitchell lived in the mid-'60s.

"Her memory of all the people that she knew who helped her, and that she lived with in Toronto and everywhere — people that you know, people that you don't know — is incredible. And it's filled with the characters that shaped her life. That's probably about all I can say right now, but my dream is to bring that movie to Toronto as early as possible."

The full interview with Cameron Crowe is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. He also shares the story of how Neil Young almost made a cameo in Almost Famous. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Cameron Crowe produced by Mitch Pollock.