Hollywood.com chats with multi-hyphenate John Cusack on his new film War, Inc., a dark satire in which he plays a troubled assassin hired to kill a Middle Eastern oil minister while posing as a trade show organizer.
Hollywood.com: What was it about this project that made you want to co-write, produce and star in it?
John Cusack: I think that Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser wanted to do a movie and we were always inspired by Terry Southern and Dr. Strangelove, the traditions in theater and film that made a mockery of the power elite, aristocracies. We sort of wanted to make one about the corporate aristocracies and thought about mixing that with a soap opera and a Samurai movie--and a Telemundo soap opera. We tried to mix all these hybrid genres together to tell this absurd story. It's more like a political cartoon, an incendiary cartoon. I think that a lot of it had to do with the Iraq war because of the war profiteers behind it and the outrage from that. It's trying to turn that outrage into something creative that questions it.
HW: We've seen several pictures earlier this year relating to topics on the war. Do you think the time is right to do it in a more satirical way?
JC: I don’t really know. We'll see. I think the movie is very experimental and crazy, but it also has a bunch of very fun and comic and weird things in it. It's got Ben Kingsley, Marisa Tomei. Hilary Duff playing a kind of Central Agent pop star with a mysterious past--we're poking fun at her pop-star fame. She's very absurd. She plays a pretty out there character and she literally puts a scorpion down her pants at one point. So it's out there in a kind of crazy and absurd comic sense. Life is hard so you want to have an escape. This is definitely not that kind of movie, but it’s still fun to watch in a strange way. When you're absurd, you can have a little more delight and you can make fun of things. In fact, we have heavy truth, but it's not as heavy an experience as a drama. But it's definitely a film where some people are going to love it and some people are going to hate it.
