Kathy Nelson—who had worked
with Cusack on the offbeat 1997
comedy Grosse Pointe Blank—told
the actor they had the rights to
Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel, he read
it, and soon began working on a
script. First up: moving the action
from London to Chicago. “I knew
the exact scene and those record
stores from growing up,” Cusack
tells EW. “Except in the book,
the Brits were more interested in
American R&B and soul, like
James Carr, Wilson Pickett, theHIGH FIDELITYTHE STARS OF 2000’S DEFINITIVE TALE OF SEX,
REGRETS, AND RECORD STORES REVISIT THE
FILM—AND SOLVE A FEW LINGERING MYSTERIESBy Leah GreenblattUNTOLD STORIES Muscle Shoals sound. My genera-
tion, we loved all that music too,
but we were obsessed with British
punk and new wave— Gang of
Four, the Jam, the Clash. Once you
switched those around and took
away the accents, they were the
same guys.... So I wrote it with
a couple partners, and we got a
green light.”The Danish girl
It was director Stephen Frears
(Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen)
who landed on the movie’s main
love interest, Danish actress Iben
Hjejle. “Stephen was at a film fes-
tival in Berlin,” Cusack says, “and
he called me up in the middle of
the night and said, ‘I found Laura,
and she’s in Denmark!’ I said,
‘What?’ He said, ‘Look at Mifune’s
Last Song’—which is one of the
Dogma movies—and I did, and I
could see it right away.” Because
Hjejle, now 49, had just had a↑ Love is an
infinite playlist for
Rob Gordon
(John Cusack)IT MAY HAVE BEEN ONLY A MODEST
box office hit, but High Fidelity,
with its wry humor and endless
top 5 lists, keenly captured the zeit-
geist of an era. The cast—including
John Cusack, now 53, whose music
obsessive Rob Gordon became an
icon of damaged Gen-X romanti-
cism—looks back at a modern cult
classic 20 years on.A British invasion, in reverse
When then Disney studio head
Joe Roth and music supervisor56 APRIL 2020 EW ● COM© BUENA VISTA PICTURES/EVERETT COLLECTION (3)APRIL2020.MOVIES4.LO A.indd 56 FINAL 3/3/20 10:07 AM