Arizona Dream is a 1993 indie surrealist comedy drama film co-written and directed by Emir Kusturica and starring Johnny Depp, Jerry Lewis, Faye Dunaway, Lili Taylor and Vincent Gallo.
[4] Axel has a dream about an Eskimo who catches a rare halibut and brings it back to his family in an igloo.
He decides to play Cary Grant's role from North by Northwest with the famous crop duster scene.
[citation needed] It was trimmed down to 2 hours 22 minutes for theatrical release as Arizona Dream.
The music video for the 1991 Tom Petty song, "Into the Great Wide Open," was shot during the filming of the movie.
[citation needed] Arizona Dream received a generally positive response from critics, garnering an 87% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 15 reviews with an average score of 6.82/10.
[6] Janet Maslin of The New York Times liked the film, praising it as "enjoyably adrift, a wildly off-the-wall reverie" and opining that its best feature is "its lunacy, which is so liberating".
[7] Referring to Arizona Dream as "the quintessential Nuart movie", Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas sees it as "a dazzling, daring slice of cockamamie tragicomic Americana envisioned with magic realism by a major, distinctive European filmmaker".
[8] In his affirmative review Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert called Arizona Dream "goofier than hell" while adding that "you can't stop watching it because nobody in the audience, and possibly nobody on the screen, has any idea what's going to happen next" and referring to Kusturica as "a filmmaker who has his own peculiar vision of the world that does not correspond to the weary write-by-numbers formulas of standard screenplays".
Warner Brothers initially reduced it to two hours and tried to market it for the middle-of-the-road audience; when these attempts failed, they released the full version.
[11] In the United States, the Warner Archive Collection released the 119-minute cut of the film on a made-on-demand DVD on March 16, 2010.
Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl has revealed that the song "Enough Space", from their album The Colour and the Shape, is based on Arizona Dream.