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‘War, Inc.’ Q&A with John Cusack

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.

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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 TomeiHilary 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.[PAGEBREAK].

HW: Marisa Tomei just turns in one amazing performance after another.
JC:
She’s someone that I’ve been wanting to work with since I can remember. She’s an underrated physical comedian. She’s kind of like a mass of intelligence and contradiction and fire and sexuality. She’s sort of very, very remarkable to me. I think that Marisa and my sister Joanie are probably my two favorite actresses, and I think probably two of the best comic actresses that I’ve ever seen.

HW: Was it the different edges around this film that allowed you to get such great talent?
JC:
I think [the actors we got] wanted to do something different– shifting from satire to soap opera to piercing sincerity to kind of gross absurdity. Some of it’s not funny, and it can be uncomfortable. There’s the political component of it as well. It’s kind of brave to be saying things especially in a time when people were being attacked for dissenting or questioning the government, questioning our country. Of course, we all know that dissent is the greatest form of patriotism, really, but there are still some that are horribly short-sighted that way. I don’t cede my love of country over to those people who wrap themselves in the flag and decide that they can just create new markets with wars and make money on the war–and then come back on television and pretend like they’re speaking for the country. They don’t own my country. They don’t own my brain and my conscience and my spirit. So I think there’s an element of that in a lot of the other actors, too. They were into it. They were into making a punk rock movie about this.[PAGEBREAK]

HW: Was it a bit of an antidote after Grace Is Gone?
JC:
Yeah [laughs]. This is not that light actually, but it’s definitely politically incorrect and raw and unrestrained as Grace is Gone was restrained. It’s pretty far at the other end of the spectrum.

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HW: You and your sister Joan [Cusack] have done some fun collaborations in the past. How do you guys show up on set together, is it actor to actor or are you still siblings?
JC:
Oh, I don’t know. She’s just my sister. She’s just Joanie to me. When we come on set, she wants to cook, play and do things and we just go there and everybody turns the camera on and gets out of the way because she’s going to do something pretty hilarious.

HW: What do you love about watching her work?
JC:
Some people just have an unbelievable gift and you just have to sort of stand in awe of it and she’s just a hilarious human being. She’s very magnetic and you can’t take your eyes off of her. She usually does things that make you double over with laughter and that’s just the way it is. It’s always amazing to have her around on a film because whenever she’s onscreen you know it’s going to work and you don’t have to worry about it.[PAGEBREAK]

HW: When you produce a film, are you looking for something with a sharp edge and a commercial appeal or is it hard to find both of those things?
JC:
You sort of try and find both, but in this case I just wanted to do something experimental and work without a net and see what we could do and just try to do something new. We knew we might fail, but we wanted to try and get out there and do something that we hadn’t done before. That’s just what we tried to do.

HW: Were you looking forward to playing another hitman? Did you think at all about connecting to your character from Grosse Pointe Blank?
JC:
Only in the sense that I didn’t feel like I couldn’t play one again. It’s like saying that you can only play one cop or you can only do one romantic comedy. I definitely thought that it was on a bit of satirical ground and was a different character. I’ve sort of played darker comic characters before, quite a bit, but I definitely thought that this was like doing a samurai movie or playing a soldier of fortune. They’re sort of archetypes, and you can work with that archetype a little bit. They were out wandering the wasteland, waiting for a way to apply their trade, but there was too much corruption. That was the kind of mythology that we were playing with.

HW: How much work is left in terms of getting people to go see this movie?
JC:
Well, this is a pretty crazy piece. It’s may have to go viral where it gets that sort of underground counterculture movement, and if it does, it’ll do well. People will need to be interested in seeing a provocative political cartoon with some great acting in it. But it’s definitely unsettling and strange. If they expect to go see Wedding Crashers they might not like it [laughs]. If they expect to go see a Terry Southern movie, they might like it. So it’s not for everybody, but maybe the timing is right. You never know. Look, I’d love it if they turned it into the Rocky Horror Picture Show and started throwing garbage at the screen at the right moments. That’d be great. I’m just hoping that it’ll be a crazy and surreal experience.

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