As a filmmaker, Cameron Crowe is the equivalent of the guy who bellies up at a local watering hole and proceeds to share moments from his life with you, only his stories are usually more thought-provoking and enjoyable.

This is the guy who turned the story of a once-cynical sports agent in "Jerry Maguire" into a tour de force for Tom Cruise. It's also the man who took his personal remembrances of life on the road as a teenage rock journalist and gave us a modern classic coming-of-age story, "Almost Famous."

Ever since breaking on the scene with his realistic look at high school in the early 1980s with his first script, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," he hasn't been able to resist sharing little nuggets of himself.

His latest, "Elizabethtown," which opens today, is the same. The film follows Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) as he goes to his father's small Kentucky hometown to claim his body. The movie is a tribute to Crowe's late father, James, who grew up in Stanton, Ky. It's a trend that hasn't gone unnoticed by the filmmaker.

"This one sort of chose me, and I thought that after 'Almost Famous' that that probably wasn't going to be a road that I was going to go down again soon," he said on the phone from Dallas. "But I think that after 'Vanilla Sky,' I knew that I wanted to write something more personal, or at least coming from me. I had another project going at the time and then this one arrived like a plane that needed to land quickly."

The story of Drew, an athletic-shoe designer whose career suddenly runs into a dead end, and who has been a part of his father's life only in spirit in recent years, explores the father-son relationship in a unique way, but Crowe wanted it to be more than that.

"(It's) about cherishing life, hopefully in a nonsoapbox-type way. I just love doing movies packed with characters that you don't forget immediately," he said. "And then from there the story started to come as a little bit of a tribute to my dad and a little bit of a way to tell a story that would begin with an ending and end with this beginning."

Because he chose to honor his father's memory, it was important to him to remain true to his Kentucky roots. He avoided broad Southern stereotypes and encouraged the many regional actors in the film to act in the normal voice instead of using a typical drawl.

"If you traffic in stereotypes, you're on the wrong movie. If you're trying to put people in clothes they wouldn't naturally wear, you're in the wrong movie," he said. "(Authenticity) was the real desire because at the studio they will tell you that you don't have to go all the way to Kentucky. They will give you a list of places nearby that look like Kentucky.

"That's what they'll say, but they don't look like Kentucky and they aren't Kentucky, and there's nothing like the people from the region. And the whole idea was always to tell a story that didn't originate in L.A. or New York. I think that hundreds of years from now, they may look back at movies made during this time and wonder, 'Did anyone live in between these cities?' "

There's no telling how those cities will receive "Elizabethtown," but the movie was engulfed in a maelstrom when critics at the recent Toronto International Film Festival proved unkind toward what Crowe called his work-in-progress cut of the movie. He has reportedly cut more than 20 minutes.

"I knew that the movie needed to be a little shorter, but (general audiences) in Venice and Toronto, they all loved the movie and wanted it at that length," he said. "I told everyone that I thought I was going to learn something from seeing the movie with three audiences of people and knowing that the best way to cut a comedy, to finish cutting a comedy is to see its rhythms and how it's working with audiences."

He said he warned everyone what they were seeing was not a finished project, but in the world of movies, that's code for "there are problems."

"Yeah, I knew that going in and now it's the right length ... but this was the journey of this movie, and I've had good reviews and I've had bad reviews. I don't discount the bad ones any more than I happily accept the good ones. It's part of the ride."

But, he says, "Would I do it differently the next time? Probably."