Writer/director/producer and Academy Award winner, Cameron Crowe. (Dave Abel, SUN)

TORONTO - The first thing you notice about filmmaker Cameron Crowe is that he has a huge cranium. That's a good thing. He's a bit of a brain, so he needs the space.

The writer/director/producer behind such films as Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous and Vanilla Sky has a new movie in Elizabethtown, a Film Festival gala film that is an homage of sorts to Crowe's late father. (In the same way, Frances McDormand's role in Almost Famous was a loving nod to Crowe's mother.)

Elizabethtown, which stars Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst and Susan Sarandon, among many others, concerns a disaffected young man's trip to Kentucky to retrieve his father's body and bring it home. Only now that his father is dead does the young man begin to get to know him and his own family roots; in real life, Crowe, who is 48, was just beginning to taste success in 1989 with Say Anything when his dad died of a heart attack on a visit to Kentucky to see family.

The exploration of love and family and serendipity that is Elizabethtown involves a sometimes surprising cast -- one that includes Loudon Wainwright, Crowe's musician cousin Charlie Crowe and Alice Marie Crowe, the filmmaker's mother.

"And she's a gas," he says, laughing. "But she is not the Katharine Hepburn of her generation," he adds. "She's kind of aware of the camera."

Elizabethtown is sprinkled with characters who are based on real people in Crowe's family and his life. Kirsten Dunst plays a fabulously optimistic flight attendant who changes the hero's life; Crowe says her character is partly based on his wife of 19 years, Nancy Wilson (of the band Heart), partly on his favourite movie heroines and partly on an angel, "who is not immediately identified as an angel, but she's a person you meet who's there to help you though you don't always see it that way."

Crowe says his father would have loved Elizabethtown because it's the sort of comedy/emotional combo he liked best. "He would have loved Jerry Maguire, too. He was a big fan of Tom Cruise."

Crowe's father was sort of his business manager, too. "Because I'm not that guy -- I'm not the son who was going to grow up and flip houses," says Crowe, laughing. "Anyway, he said to me, 'You and Tom Cruise seem like you guys would work well together,' and he didn't even know that Tom was from Kentucky, too, and so was his dad. So that's the first one that would have blown his mind, that I actually met and worked with Tom, and the second one is that I made this movie in his home state about that feeling, the feeling that led my dad back to Kentucky every summer. I always knew how much Kentucky meant to him, and I hadn't been back since I went back for the funeral."

Crowe's father was only 67 when he died. "That's pretty young," he says. "But my mom is carrying on for both of them. And more."

HAWAII DEEP SIXED: Filmmaker Cameron Crowe has the film Elizabethtown in the film festival, but he's already thinking about what he'll do next.

"I think I'd like to do an out-and-out comedy," says the writer/director. "But maybe not," he adds, changing his mind.

"They asked me to do Hawaii Five-O as a movie," he says next. "Remember the TV show? It was my favourite TV show as a kid!" he enthuses.

So he'll do the movie?

"I don't think so."