Capone Talks GRACE IS GONE And More With John Cusack!

Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here. It may go without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway: John Cusack has had a pretty good year. 1408 was an unqualified success both critically, among most Stephen King fans, and at the box office. And although THE MARTIAN CHILD didn't exactly set the world on fire, his latest film will show him in a light that we rarely get to see him. He doesn't even look like John Cusack, and he certainly doesn't act like the man who encapsulates both energy and mellow in a single performance. He's a tough actor not to like because he's been so good in so many great films (and a few not-so-great films). He and I are about the same age, and most importantly, we're both Chicago guys. Well, okay, Cusack grew up in Evanston, Ill., which is where I went to college. For most people in their 30s, Cusack wasn't just someone we grew up watching; he was a roll model for being cool while still being an individual. SIXTEEN CANDLES, SAY ANYTHING, BETTER OFF DEAD, THE GRIFTERS, BULLETS OVER BROADWAY, CITY HALL, GROSS POINTE BLANK, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL, THE THIN RED LINE, HIGH FIDELITY, THE ICE HARVEST, and now GRACE IS GONE. Following his career has led me to discover or rediscover some of my favorite directors, but really I just go because every time I watch Cusack don his familiar long trenchcoat or deadpan a great line of dialog or bug his eyes out just ever so slightly, I remember what I felt like to be young, slightly stupid, often lovesick, and still hopelessly optimistic. Indulge me here, folks. If you read my stuff, you know I don't tell stories often, and this won't take long. John Cusack was the first celebrity I ever met. Shortly after college, I moved to New York City for a couple years. I'd always intended on moving back to Chicago, but I had a friend that went to NYU who I used to visit every chance I'd get just so I could come to New York. So I pledged to myself that I would live in New York for a couple of years, support myself, and then come back to New York. I lived in an apartment across the street from the now defunct club The Bottom Line, which I thought was the coolest thing I could imagine, and I decided to go to a show there. It just so happens that Prince's old sidekicks Wendy & Lisa were playing a show at The Bottom Line shortly after I moved to New York, so I got a ticket and went by myself. The club was buzzing because Cusack was in the house…somewhere…I never saw him inside. And after the show, I left walked a couple blocks to a friend's house. Just before I got there, I ran smack into Cusack, accompanied by a couple that lived in the neighborhood: Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. I froze in my tracks, and for the first and only time in my life, I approached a celebrity on the street. I went right up to Cusack, told him I had just moved to New York from Evanston, and the four of us talked briefly about the concert. All three of them were very sweet and patient, especially Sarandon, from what I remember. When I met Cusack for this interview last October, I asked him if he remembered the concert (I wasn't quite ballsy enough to ask him if he remembered meeting me). He paused, thought about it, and said, “At The Bottom Line, right?” I then mentioned our exchange, mainly as a goofy icebreaker, but the soft-spoken Cusack seemed to get a kick out of this 17-year-old memory. This interview was conducted after I saw GRACE IS GONE during the Chicago International Film Festival, so it was done before THE MARTIAN CHILD was released and right after 1408 had come out on DVD. There are two other journalists doing this interview with me, so please keep in mind that the questions are kind of all over the place. But I like to keep them in because he responses and non-responses are as telling as anything about him. He tends to keep his answers short, but when he lights up, it's something to behold. I think you'll be able to tell when that happens. This is one of those interviews I've wanted for years, mainly based on that one weird New York moment all those years ago. The most important thing, however, is that Cusack's work in GRACE IS GONE is remarkable, and it's yet another war about Iraq that deals more with the cost back home. It's a quiet and strangely delicate work, with Cusack at the center of it giving one of his greatest, most unexpected performances. Enjoy… Capone: This is clearly the year where feature films are diving head first into this current war, either directly or indirectly. Why do you think that is, and why is now the right time for these films, so many years into it?

John Cusack: I don't know. I think we're all actually late. But there's also an impulse to make real-time responses to things. In the movie business, it takes two or three years [laughs] to do a real-time response. I've made this film [GRACE IS GONE] and another one called WAR, INC., that we just finished, which is about as unrestrained as GRACE IS GONE is restrained.

Capone: I've read that's got more of a humorous edge to it.

JC: Black humor, yeah. It's interesting, people are just stressing I think.

Question: This part was written for you, right? James [Strouse, writer-director] had you in mind writing this?

JC: That's what he said, yeah, which is kind of strange and cool.

Q: Did that surprise you at all when you found that out? You're certainly wonderful in the movie, but it's a very different direction for you. Were you surprised?

JC: No, I always like a really great piece of writing that you don't think of in terms of typecasting. For you, it excites your imagination and you think, “Oh yea, I really need to go do that.” So yeah, he wrote a terrific script.

Q: And you had this tension about you through the whole thing. You had to be sad and gloomy and tense. Was if difficult to stay in that mode?

JC: Yeah, it was a good challenging piece because it all takes places in this kind of twilight time, this time in between, this time of shock. All the emotions make time contact and expand like an accordion. Everybody's been though grieving when they've lost a parent or someone, you become so disorientated. It's unlike any other time you can remember.

Q: In the scene where you finally tell the girls [their mother had died in Iraq], I know they initially shot that one way and then muted it later…

JC: No, it was always the idea that we shot it straight, and we knew at some point we would remove ourselves from it and watch it play out on their faces. When Jim and I were making it, we thought, “Oh, yeah, it might play like this.” So we all knew.

Capone: It's rare that you make such a drastic physical transformation for a role. Was that bulk under that jacket really you? It really changes the way you carry yourself.

JC: Yeah, I don't know what that is. It's the way you wear your clothes with a little extra weight or by not losing the weight, which is even harder sometimes. I've done it in a movie called MAX or in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. It's one of those kind of character types.

Q: What's something that surprised you about diving into this role? Was it more difficult to come out of it once the camera stopped rolling? Or when you looked in the mirror?

JC: It was kind of find to do something where you cannot be involved in any of the vanity aspects of acting. There are so many traps you can fall into trying to look good.

Q: Is that a problem for you?

JC: No, it's the business, it's all about that. People want to do roles, but it's a movie and they want to look good.

Q: What do you think about the story, where you typically have the story of the man going off to war and ends up leaving behind the wife and the kinds. This story turns that around. Was showing the other side of that important to you?

JC: Yeah, it attracted me, because I thought the story worked. And certainly I think it's happening more. But it seemed to be a very honest meditation about loss and grief.

Q: The brother role is also important too. On the one hand, he could have been kind of a political statement from the director, but I think it worked too. His more liberal views are out there. What do you think about that character?

JC: Alessandro [Nivola, who plays John's brother] is a great actor, so I loved it. Basically, those arguments would mirror what was going on in the country. Actually, when we made the movie, the war was looking more popular that it is. People weren't talking out about it as much because they were afraid to do that. I remember when I knew I wanted to do the film was when the Bush administration banned photos of the dead, you know, the coffins. That's the most disgraceful, political cowardly act I've seen in my lifetime. These soldiers are making the ultimate sacrifice, and we're censoring it. There's no draft, and they're willing to pay mercenaries more than soldiers and not give them body armor, send them over there, and then you want to deny what's happening and let Fox News tell us how we should view the war. No, I'm going to do a story about some of the coffins coming home. And I think we have the right intention and the universe meets you half way. What I thought was beautiful about the story was…I mean, I have strong opinions about things. You can go to The Huffington Post and read an interview I did with Naomi Klein about what I think about the ideology of the policy maker. I'm very clear, and only an idiot would think that has anything to do with the troops who are actually serving. I wouldn't even engage in that argument with anybody because it would be so insulting to even thing I didn't support the troops in every way. What I loved about this piece was that it pierced through all that partisan bickering. You're a liberal, you're a conservative. This is a story told from the point of view of somebody who has invested a lot in this military culture, and his daughters are asking a lot of really tough questions. And hopefully we show as much respect as we can for something lost, so that this war, which is an abstraction to so many people, would feel real. Besides those troops and the people who are killed in Iraq and all the suffering that is going on between the soldiers and the civilian, who's sacrificing for the war? Nobody. Cut some more taxes for the rich. Go shopping. So, for me, I felt like, “What can I do?” I'm an actor and an artist, and so I made a movie about it, and be at least one small part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Capone: It seems like that's the approach some of these recent films are taking: telling an individual's story and turning these statistics into human being.

JC: That it, that's exactly it. That's the whole point. What can you do? You can tell stories, and do it with enthusiasm and make it all human.

Capone: The portrait of this kind of staggering mourning process, I've never seen it done quite like this before. You really do get a sense that your character, even in his own eyes, felt he was a better person when his wife was around him. When we meet him, he's by himself and isolated, and then he finds out she's dead and withdraws even more. In some of the phone messages he leaves himself, you get the sense that he's afraid he won't be able to handle this. It's so sad.

JC: Yeah, I think that's right. And if that's painful to watch, great [laughs]. Because I've had friends who've died and lost loved ones, and that was in a strange way when my relationship with them was straight. They knew I loved them, and I knew they loved me, and it's sad and it's horrible but it's part of life, right? If you invest everything and believe the American cause is just, and we're going here to support a certain set of ideals and beliefs. We have to listen to and trust our leaders, otherwise we have nothing. And then if you lose everything juxtaposed to that, that's a kind, to have that sense of betrayal, that I haven't gone through and that's what kept my imagination up at night, because I could hardly deal with loss when I was straight with them. This is just a part of life, and I'm one of the lucky ones. Everybody has to deal with death, and you hope that you're approaching it where you have tied up your loose ends a bit and you feel whole. But to feel like this all happened for a lie, I don't know how I would deal with that. But my own politics and my own partisanship, I don't think have anything to do with this film in a strange way. It's bizarre, but it really doesn't have anything to do with…it isn't an extension of my ideology. I just thought this was a very pure thing to be seen on its own.

Q: You did BEING JOHN MALKOVICH a while back. If there was going to be a movie called BEING JOHN CUSACK that got inside your mind, what would that be like and who would you want it to star? [Please be reminded, this is not one of my questions.-- Capone]

JC: It would be like a Class 1 Hurricane, just wandering off out at sea, never striking the mainland. I don't know what that means, but that's what came out.

Q: So who's starring in that then?

JC: Who's starring in the movie about me inside my head? It would be a cross between Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Bill Madlock, Julia Child, that's it.

Q: What was it like working with the girls who played your daughters, first-time actors? Do you like the innocence of new actors?

JC: Yeah, I love the talent of actors like that, and they don't know enough to have any bad habits. They don't know how to really lie. I just think somewhere around the age of 10 or 13, my friend who's smarter than me says, everybody knows everything at 12. They have the greatest bullshit detectors on the planet, and yet they haven't lost their innocence, the world hasn't beaten them down yet.

Q: Did being a character who takes his kids on a trip make you reflect on roadtrips you went on as a kid?

JC: Yeah, yeah, of course. Or the roadtrips I went on as an adult. I think there's that space where you get into open space, it's a time when you can clear your head because you're not anywhere yet. You're en route, and you can feel that mythology of the open road has some truth to it. It's time to think. We had five kids in the car, so there was a lot of bickering on our family trips.

Capone: 1408 just came out on DVD this week. When you get involved in a Stephen King project, as you did in STAND BY ME, you definitely fall under a whole new level of geek microscope. Was there a point where you realized that people were actually paying close attention to how that film was coming together?

JC: There's definitely a subculture when it comes to Stephen King, people in that horror genre, there's a whole community of them. But they're kind of fun, and I liked talking to them. It was fun; I liked doing that movie.

Q: Looking down the road, you want this great piece of art and you feel like you haven't done that yet. What might that be?

JC: I don't know. I don't know if you ever do. You're just striving to do something where you transcend yourself. That's the great white buffalo, you never know if you can catch it.

Capone: You talked earlier about working with new actors, but you also have made a point lately of working with new directors. When you first sit down and talk to a new director, is there something that you're looking for from them to convince you that it's safe to work with them?

JC: I want to see if they're open and willing to be collaborative and learn something about the process.

Capone: Have you been in a situation where someone convinced you that was the case, and it turned out not to be once you started shooting?

JC: I have a pretty good radar, but not all the time.

Q: When you turn a film down, why do you usually turn a film down?

JC: Because I don't have the confidence that the person is going to put their money where their mouth is. Everybody talks a good game, but sometimes they don't want to respect a certain process when it comes to making movies.

Q: You seem to be pretty savvy about not having too many ridiculous things said about you or having your face all over the tabloids. Are there tricks to staying about the tabloids, or is it a matter of not doing certain things?

JC: Hide, from that, yeah. But if I knew tricks, I wouldn't tell you because then they'd find out. I think that a sure-fire way to go down if you play into that culture. There's only one way to go, down. I know you have to work with that kind of stuff.

Q: If you knew someone coming to town, and you could take them to three places in Chicago, where would you take them?

JC: I think Wrigley Field is like the Taj Mahal of baseball. And I'd think of some other places too, but I don't want to say which ones.

Q: The three films you have coming out right now—1408, THE MARTIAN CHILD, and GRACE IS GONE—seem very different from the films that people associate you with. Is this a deliberate move on your part, or are these the three best films that came to you at this time?

JC: A combination of those things. With MARTIAN CHILD, I've never really done an adult family kind of movie before, but it's very sweet.

Capone: It did strike me that you you've done films in a row with child actors that aren't traditional kid films. They try to be something a little more mature.

JC: Yeah, I think THE MARTIAN CHILD is a family movie, I guess, but it's more mature. And GRACE is a great acting role, and I loved it for what it was saying about the war.

Q: Have you seen Alison Eastwood's RAILS & TIES yet? [Eastwood being Cusack's co-star in MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GHOOD AND EVIL; also Clint and Kyle Eastwood do the score for GRACE IS GONE]

JC: No, I haven't. Is it good?

Q: I don't know, I was wondering what you thought about it. Capone: It is good. She was just here a couple days ago. Q: If I may ask, what cell phone provider do you have?

JC: Um, I don't know. I can check. I forget. Why? What's interesting about that? Are you trying to get my sister in trouble? Here we go: AT&T at the moment, but it's always changing.

Q: Do you and Joan ever have conversations about that?

JC: About cell phones?! No, we don't really care about cell phones. That really will get her in trouble. [laughs] It doesn't come up; it's not the first topic of conversation. “How's your provider doing?” “Good!” “Really? Do you prefer this?”

And with that slightly obtuse question, the interview was called to a close. I know it's a bit tough to tell from this transcription, but this was actually fairly spirited discussion. Cusack's dead-pan delivery had us rolling sometimes. Anyway, I've got to spread my wings and fly down to Austin for BNAT 9. See you soon. Capone