Vanilla Sky Ending: Every Frame Explained

21. John Lennon's Apartment Building

The very first image we see in David's fateful montage is a glimpse of the outside of his apartment building - the very same shot that appears in the first minute of the movie, in fact.

This might seem pretty innocuous until you realise that David's lush apartment is actually housed within the Dakota Building on New York's Central Park West.

The iconic apartment building has served as the home for numerous Hollywood stars such as Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, and Boris Karloff, but most pointedly, it is also the apartment where John Lennon lived and was assassinated in 1980 - and where his late wife Yoko Ono still resides.

Given Crowe's roots as a music journalist, there's no way he chose the Dakota as David's home by accident, ensuring the film has an unconsciously ominous undercurrent from the outset.