John Cusack

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Since his breakthrough role in the 1989 teen drama Say Anything, John Cusack has managed to retain a young devoted following throughout his career. He prepares to take that following, many of which have staunchly opposed the war on Iraq since its launch in 2003, into more serious-than-usual territory.

Cusack's latest role is as Stanley Phillips, a husband and father of two daughters who tries to press on days after he learns that his wife, serving in Iraq, has been killed in the drama Grace Is Gone. Serving as both actor and producer on the film, the now 41 year-old performer, when he discussed the film with us, expressed that his first being involved with the film stemmed from his own personal anger on issues surround President Bush's handling of the war.

'Honestly, it stemmed from a sense of outrage when the Bush administration banned the photos of the dead or they stopped immediate coverage of that event,' John says, 'It's an interesting thing. I was talking to a reporter who was asking Sh'lan O'Keefe, who plays Heidi in this, she's one of the two remarkable actresses in this. And she says, what's your opinions on the war and how's this changed you and all these different things' And she goes, oh, well, it's a hard question, you know, it's been going on over half my life.'

'And that hit me really hard and you have these moments of revelation about this and so, it stems from really a place of outrage about that,' he continues, 'I thought, I want to tell the story, they don't want us to see that, so I want to tell the story of one those coffins coming home, but I wanted it to be outside my own opinions. I want it to be more than that. It's not just that, hopefully, you're trying to scratch at some truth that's bigger than you. So I guess it came from a place of outrage, but I wanted it to go to a place where that didn't really matter.'

That place, according to John, is on the suffering and grieving that many military families have gone through, losing their children in the war.

'I just thought it was a great way to tell or kind of dramatize what a lot of people are going through,' Cusack explains, 'And I thought in many ways that Stanley was an emblematic character of what the country is going through in some ways, even though if I say it, it sounds so self-serving. But I thought, my God, this guy, with this psychic battle he's going through, is going on all over the country with so many families, regardless of whether you sort of think like him or walk like him or whether he's wound too tight.'

'I'm talking about the specifics of his character and the kind of guy that he is, but the universal stuff is happening right now, so and then I thought dramatically, it was such an intense thing to do,' he adds, 'And I thought just the idea of just doing something, just dramatizing the first three days of stages of grief, something I hadn't seen or thought about and, I don't know, it just struck my imagination and I just thought it was worth doing.'

We also asked the actor how he channeled his emotions into being a grieving widow.

'I don't know, that's kind of a complicated answer, but use your life, your imagination, good writing sparks your imagination and you try to put yourself in other people's shoes,' John replies, 'And you know, I've had friends who died, family members, so I've been through grief, never been through what these military families are going through.

'I guess the most you can think about is whether someone is terminally ill or sick, you live with that kind of anxiety that they live with,' he adds, 'You know, being afraid to turn the television on, being afraid that the next knock on the door is the one Stanley gets. If you just have some empathy and compassion, it's pretty harrowing stuff.'

Cusack also notes about how an encounter with a former four-star NATO general and presidential candidate only emboldened his feeling of the irrational reasoning behind Bush's censoring of the war dead.

'If you talk to some people in the military, I spoke to General Wesley Clark, I had a chance to meet him and see him and he starts talking about, saying how these families are being ripped apart,' he recounts, 'He talks about the toll on the military and you could see care and compassion about how tough it is. And then you start thinking about all the people on the other side of the conflict, because all life has the same value, right''

I mean it's too abstract, you can't put your head and mind around the amount of stuff that's really happening,' John continues, 'It's very hard to process it, so maybe this is a way to helpfully make it more real and make it less abstract.'

Despite public sentiment having increasingly turned against Bush regarding the Iraq war in recent years, it did not stop films that tried to raise social consciousness on the war like In The Valley Of Elah, Redacted, and Lions For Lambs from being met with a fairly lukewarm reception. We asked John whether he felt the public's reaction to the film would be a deterrent for him.

'Just another box that you want to put it in,' he states, 'I don't know, it depends on how people write about it and how it's presented. And I don't think that will last forever. It's hard to get movies out there and it's hard to get that kind of traction these days, but there's no way artists are not going to make movies about the times they live in.'

'And even if we're in a collective kind of denial about the real cost of it, then people are going to make movies about that,' Cusack adds, 'The truth will out, so, not that I have a monopoly or that the film represents the truth, but people are going to write about what's happening in their country now. So, whether they've been successful or not, it's not going to stop.'

That collective denial over the cost of the Iraq war on American well-being, he believes, is another probable cause for audiences turning away from films that use the war as subject matter.

'I think there are a lot of people who believe that they can't believe that if our country's in where they're in, that there had to be a nobleness of purpose in their head and there had to be a nobleness of mission,' John notes, 'It can't have all been a waste. We don't even want to think about that. We don't want to dishonor the sacrifice that people have already made, all the loss of life, and then the young child asks what if you can't shoulder this burden. Literally, what if I can't do what you want me to do' And then she's asking on another level, what if I can't handle it''

'And then, Stanley, who has so much invested so much down the road, is so deeply involved on every level of his being, says, if we don't have that purpose, if there wasn't that nobleness in mission, then we are all lost,' he adds, 'And I think that's what a lot of people feel. The idea that America is an idea and the very idea of the country is in jeopardy. That's what I believe, so you could make those statements and people could arrive those statements without saying, alright, this is the type of movie that is, if you go in feeling this way, this is what you feel and here is what you feel in this scene by the end of the movie, here's my ideological theory and are you in or out, sign the form. That's not what we're trying to do.'

For many of John Cusack's more successful films like Grosse Pointe Blank, Con Air, Being John Malkovich, and High Fidelity, there have been the occasionally less-than-stellar receptions of films like his most recent The Martian Child. When asked about how he handles the occasional commercial disappointment, Cusack had a rather simple reply.

'It's onto the next,' he replies, 'Success and failure isn't relative. You could make a piece of art and if something's good. I'm not saying that The Martian Child's a piece of art, but who knows, people might find it in five or ten years or may find it in three years.'

'There are movies that didn't do box office that people are still talking about today ten years later,' Cusack continues, 'It's A Wonderful Life, when that came out, was a box office and critical dud, and now that's watched every year at Christmas, so you got to take the long view and you either do something because you love it or you're passionate about it and you do your best.'

The actor says he's confident that people will ultimately appreciate what the film tries to accomplish and says Grace Is Gone had gotten great reception from military personnel and their families that attended the premiere.

'A bunch of them came to the premiere, a colonel, a few sergeants and a bunch of families and stuff and they felt they were very moved by it,' Cusack notes, 'And we felt like we were telling their story and that the story was rightly expressing or I guess, with dignity, telling the story that they were all going through and the community is going through.'

'And that was a great relief, you know, because the only real critic I would care about would be those,' he continues, 'And the gentleman who advised us, who advised me, and had lost his wife and had gotten that knock on the door, he also came in and he liked it, too. And that was a great relief to me.'

Since the start of the war, the usually very private Cusack has been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's Iraq war policies through controversial essays he's written on the popular political blog site The Huffington Post. However, the actor insists Grace Is Gone is more than a vehicle for his own personal anti-war beliefs.

'What I wanted this thing to do was to transcend my own opinions and people are going to just put this movie in a box and go, you're an angry this and this and they're going to say you live in Hollywood, and I go, no, I live in Chicago,' he explains, 'And anyway, they'll put you in a box and all the attack dogs will attack each other and then the movie doesn't stand on its own.'

'But this movie, I wanted to transcend my own beliefs and try to get at some core thing, because my opinion about the ideology and the policymakers have absolutely nothing to do with the people that are making the real sacrifice and the victims on both sides of the conflict, that's like the North Pole and the South Pole to me,' John adds, 'You know, I agree with everything I've said. I agree with myself about how I have the right to feel what I feel, but this movie is not a megaphone for my own opinions. I try to get inside Stanley.'

John also stresses that he stands by his convictions on his controversial attacks on the Bush administration. He also makes it 100% clear that criticism of military policy has absolutely no relevance with how he feels regarding the soldiers who have served in Iraq.

'I do believe that war profiteers are bastards,' he states, 'The people that are trying to profit from this thing, illegally, mercenaries, all those type of people, yeah, I have nothing but contempt for them. But that has nothing to do with the military families. So we have to understand that I'm not trying to get into a partisan thing and I'm not with the Democratic Party, you know. I'm not even with progressive, I'm not with any label, that's just my opinion. Let's throw bricks, why not''

With that in mind, we also asked the actor whether he had any concerns of his public critiques against the Bush administration regarding the war being used against him to try to dissuade people from seeing Grace Is Gone.

'The passion definitely could be picked out and used as a battering ram to disqualify the movie,' Cusack acknowledges, 'I'm not sorry for what I wrote, I believe it passionately. But I think the big idea would be to let the movie stand on its own two terms. It's about the human cost of the war and it's a family drama and it's about families who are paying to sacrifice. That's like all my sons, it's all about war profiteering. It's a different story related to the same reality. It's about grief and loss and how to cope with it. It's about all those things.'

We asked Cusack, whether he planned to continue to make smaller, more character-driven films like The Martian Child and Grace Is Gone.

'Yeah, probably (laughing),' John replies, 'I don't really have an agenda as much as you follow stuff that you're interested in and that you're passionate about. So I guess the agenda is I really didn't want to go and make just an escapist movie in these times. I think there are really dark times in America and really serious times. So, hopefully, I wanted to be a part of the conversation in a really constructive way.'

However, he does add that it doesn't mean he won't do the occasional studio film from time to time, if it interested him enough. The one he discussed with us that he was doing is a thriller titled The Factory, which is set for release in 2009.

'It was a studio movie,' Cusack says, 'I liked the director. The script was pretty good and it's much more of a big-budget, commercial kind of movie. Those sort of finance these and I go back and forth. But I liked it. It's more plot-ty and more kind of Hitchcock-ky. It's much more about what's revealed when and it's a little more clever. It's not really Silence Of The Lambs. But it's more of a CSI, I guess, kind of movie.'