John Cusack Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

Well, you want the characters to be better

than you so you can learn something from them.

And if they're much worse than you,

then you can learn something from that too.

[upbeat music]

Grosse Pointe Blank was the first film

that I actually made myself.

I wrote the script and was a producer on it.

We were working with Joe Roth at the time,

who had run Disney,

so he was a great friend to me and to filmmakers.

And so it was a great time.

The studios were still makin' weird movies like that,

that probably wouldn't get made today.

So I sort of wrote the character for myself.

And we'd hired George Armitage,

who had made a film that I really liked

with another psychotic lead,

Miami Blues with Alec Baldwin in the lead,

Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

So I thought he understood the tone

that we were going, that I was going for.

And then we wrote parts for Alan Arkin

and Dan Aykroyd and Minnie Driver.

It was a good time.

So that was the first kind of film that I produced.

When I started to become a filmmaker,

what I would do is I'd get the script

sort of 70, 80% done.

And then I would know that you're gonna

have all these great actors coming in

and they're gonna have great ideas.

So Dan Aykroyd's gonna come in,

and you know he's an improvisational genius.

So he'll come in with stuff

from the book of Revelations and crazy stuff.

Hey, mental telepathy,

astral projection, you know. [chuckles]

Here you are, right.

What do you want?

So you wanna get the script sort of pregnant,

but not fully, not fully done.

And then just sort of let the actors finish it.

They all came in and had things that they wanted to do,

and I was happy to let 'em do it.

Alan Arkin came in and said,

Let's rewrite the scene before we shoot.

And some of the other producers, they were worried.

I was like, Don't worry.

That's Alan Arkin.

Anything he's gonna do is

gonna make this thing even better.

Whatever level it's at,

it's gonna go up two or three levels.

Don't kill anybody for a few days.

See what it feels like.

[Martin] I'll give it a shot.

No, no, don't give it a shot.

Don't shoot anything.

Ugh.

And so then you would just incorporate

all this stuff in.

When I started making films,

I didn't have to worry about offending the writer

if I was the writer.

I just wanted to be open,

especially in a comedy,

things that happen on the set

and things had happened in the moment

and surprises and accidents.

So it's really just sort of not only being open

to those things, but actually cultivating them.

Obviously, I didn't know who would play Debi,

but as soon as Minnie came in to audition,

that just seemed right.

So we knew that right away,

and then, from that point on,

we started tailoring around her.

I had a feeling we would get Alan to do it.

When he said yes then I knew that that.

So I was writing it to try to get him

at least interested enough to come play

and work on it a bit.

Dan Aykroyd, the same thing.

I just knew that, you just better buckle up.

And the best thing with those actors is

that you end up getting run over

by a cement truck on screen,

and then you wanna make sure that the camera's rolling.

That's what happens with my sister.

She's just basically runs you over

with a cement truck,

and you wanna make sure you're filming for it.

[upbeat music]

Brian's life had been,

he was sort of like he was in a kind

of a musical arms race with the Beatles,

where John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Harrison,

Ringo Starr, and those great producers

were creating these sounds.

And there was Brian writing

for all the Beach Boys with one ear.

From about 18 to 26, he was either making a film,

making an album, they were on TV.

And then he really sort of went away,

and sort of went to a bit of an abyss for awhile.

When he emerged from that 15 years later,

that part of his life wasn't chronicled or filmed.

It was secret.

So I was very lucky

that Brian and Melinda gave me access to them.

Let me ask a lot of questions

and let me hang out with them

and try to find out what that was like for him,

going into that dark place

and then coming out of it.

And also just trying to have a sense of,

getting a sense of who he who he really is,

an incredible combination of things.

He's the most vulnerable, sensitive person

you could ever meet,

almost like a heart with two legs.

But then he's also very tough, like really tough

and really committed to his art and what he wants to do

and really, really tough.

So he's this strange combination of things

where it's almost like water and steel.

And he's kind of a wizard

and a bit of a magician in so many ways.

When he's talking to you,

he'll talk to you and look above your head,

like he's seeing colors or something.

I don't even know what he sees,

but he's definitely a heavy kind of cat

in a lot of ways.

He said he was happy with it,

which made me really happy.

Are these your shoes?

What, yeah, yeah, they're my shoes.

I didn't want to, you know, mess up the car,

because I jog.

You see, I jog on the beach.

And I get sand in my shoes, you know.

[Woman] Ah.

So.

[Woman] Well, that's very considerate.

You know, I also get sand in my socks.

And I get holes in my socks,

so I did make a mess anyway.

So I'm sorry about that.

What are you gonna do?

[upbeat music]

The project came about

'cause I'd made Grosse Pointe Blank

with Disney, with Joe Roth and Kathy Nelson.

And then Kathy called Joe

and said, You know, we have this 'High Fidelity' project.

And he said Why don't you get John to write that

or adapt that?

And so Joe and Kathy called me,

and they said, What do you think of this book?

And I loved the book.

And I said, Oh yeah, I could do that.

And I read the book,

and I thought that I could adapt it for Chicago,

because the only difference, really,

was, when I was growing up, we were obsessed

with English, like the punk, the new wave stuff,

and, in the book, they were obsessed

with Wilson Pickett and Solomon Burke

and all those kinds of sounds.

But besides that and the accents, it was the same guys,

and it was the same kind of story

about male insecurity and insanity.

So I knew the record store where I grew up,

and I knew those guys.

And I knew everybody.

You just have to take away the British accents.

I thought of sending it to Stephen Frears,

who I'd worked with.

And he liked the idea.

And then he came and worked to do it with us.

I sort of had a little secret secret information

because I'd worked with Tim Robbins a lot,

and he had an acting company in LA that did

a lot of cool, radical theater called The Actors' Gang.

And I'd worked with them.

So, during some of those midnight shows,

I'd seen Jack play with his band Tenacious D.

And he hadn't really had that great breakout role yet,

but I knew how talented he was.

And I knew what a great musician and singer he was

and how hilarious he was.

So, in the book, when Jack's character finally plays

at the end and kills it,

I knew Jack was the,

as soon as I was writing it,

I knew Jack should be Barry.

Jack didn't know that, but so I had to convince him.

But I think he thought maybe me and Stephen

were scary at first.

Or we might be scary people.

But then I was like, no, no, we're nice, we're nice.

So I think he was, he, might've been

a little bit spooked by Stephen.

'Cause Stephen can,

he's this British guy,

and he just sort of looks over at you and studies you.

And he's super intense.

And so I said, Ah, don't worry about him.

Finally, Jack said yes.

But I knew it was perfect.

And I knew that I knew what the rest

of the world didn't know,

which was the Jack was a brilliant comedian

and a brilliant musician.

I knew that it would just sort of,

that part would just explode.

And just happy for him.

He's such a great guy,

such a great actor.

♪ I've been really tryin', baby ♪

[crowd cheering]

[upbeat music]

That was a cool, weird one,

'cause I was at an agency in LA at the time.

I remember saying to them,

I want to know what's your,

the most unproducible, weirdest script.

You guys have all have a black box

or the red book or whatever those things are

where it's like the scripts that can never get made.

And they said, Well, there's these things.

I go, No, no.

I mean what is the most unproducible script you have.

I wanna know what's your jewel

of kryptonite for commerciality.

What is that?

I know you guys have it somewhere in your vaults, right?

And he goes, Well, you mean 'Being John Malkovich'?

I said, What?

And literally I found the script there,

and I said to them, Okay, here's the deal.

'Cause I read the script, and it was insane.

So I said, I want to be first in the door

to the financier whenever this gets,

if this ever gets made.

And if you guys do that,

I'll stay with you.

And like Indiana Jones, I'd found this,

I'd gone to the jungles and found this rare treasure.

It was just good.

It was, like kind of being in a Wonka

fun house all the time.

And so I do remember they had a chiropractor on set,

'cause by the end of the day, everybody was all twisted.

So everybody'd get cracked at the end of the day.

Charlie's script was so brilliant

that it was kind of perfect tonally.

But even within that, there were still things

that you'd come up with on the day.

I remember the character in the film

that Malkovich is friends with was,

in the script, it was Kevin Bacon.

John Malkovich and I were talking,

and then we said the guy you should really get

is Charlie Sheen.

John just started laughing at the idea that

in his great hour of need

he would call Charlie Sheen

to come over and confide in.

So there was still some give and take in that way.

It was great fun to make that film, great fun.

[upbeat music]

I'd seen John Sayles' film Matewan

and Brother from Another Planet.

He was a guy that I admired a lot.

So I heard about the project,

and he wanted to meet me.

And he offered me the role of Buck Weaver.

And I knew a lot about the Black Sox history.

I'd grown up going to the Wrigley Field

and the old Comiskey Park.

And the old Comiskey Park was where

the Black Sox had actually played.

So I knew all about the history.

So I was very excited to do it.

Excited to work with John.

I was a big baseball fan,

and I was also, I'd seen a lot

of the Bang the Drum Slowly

and some of the other, Fear Strikes Out.

But there hadn't been a really good modern baseball film.

And then I thought this could be really, really great.

Immediately, I read the Eliot Asinof book,

which is a real page turner.

And then you just go back

and would read about the letters

that Weaver wrote, and there's footage

and there's archives of him.

You just tried to capture the spirit of him.

[upbeat music]

Roland Emmerich asked me to do it.

And I read the script

and thought it was pretty wild and outrageous.

I knew it would be sort of a huge movie.

But I really liked Roland.

He was a really great guy to work to work with,

very collaborative and very interested

in your opinion about things

and how you can make it better.

So it's always interesting working with people like that.

What I thought was interesting about him as well

is that the sets in the scope of the thing

were so complex, but he managed it so effortlessly.

So he would have huge sets

with cars and trucks and boulders and all that stuff.

But then in the back of the set would be a green screen.

So it wasn't all green screen,

with just people in front of the green screen,

it was a mixture of sets with green screen.

And then you would have three or four different cameras.

But he would manage to do these things every day.

He'd have an entire city block

that would be on a moving machine or a shaking machine.

So we could have a limousine driving

on a city block and you'd see a white picket fence,

and you'd see four houses, and it would all be shaking

like it was an earthquake.

Somebody had to make that in Vancouver,

a football field worth of moveable stuff that can do that.

And it seemed like every day

you'd come on and there'd be another

massive major contraption that he would

just be like, all right, let's go.

And he would have it all sorted out.

So just technically amazing,

brilliant kind of filmmaker that way.

He would say, I think today, you're getting out

of this thing, and you're running,

and there's this huge ash cloud.

And it's the size of Las Vegas.

And you're running, and I think you're really scared.

Got it.

So he did a lot of Harrison Ford running away from things.

[upbeat music]

That was interesting.

That was a Sony thing.

I did a couple of things for Sony.

And I think John Calley was running the studio then,

who was another great consecutive.

And James Mangold had the project.

He asked me to do it.

And the whole thing sort of centered

on the reveal at the end of the third act.

And if you sort of had disguised it well enough,

it would really be shocking.

And so it's kind of fun to have everything,

to be on a tightrope, where if you screw it up at all,

and the audience knows what's going on,

the movie's dead.

But I think we seemed to manage to pull it off.

I was very excited to work with Ray Liotta,

who I always admired.

I think also, when you're,

if you're doing a thriller

or a psychological thriller,

you withhold information about the characters

and so people are leaning into it a little bit.

So yeah, it's a little bit more of an austere thing,

where you're playing silences

and are working with the ambiguity

that people don't know who the person is.

And so it was more of kind of a straight leading man role

with a twist, because as it went on,

you realized that people weren't who they seem to be.

[upbeat music]

That was a strange one.

When I was in high school, I was a big fan of Jim Thompson.

And I remember Jim Thompson made

the Kubrick film The Killing.

I was a huge fan of Jim Thompson's stuff.

And I tried to option the book as a kid,

'cause I thought I'd love to play Roy Dillon.

And I thought the whole thing

with the mother and the Oedipal theme there

was very intense and cool and twisted.

And then, as I got older,

I found out they were gonna make the film,

that Stephen Frears was gonna make it.

And I think I'd made Say Anything

a few years before.

So I was a little bit hot in the business at the time.

So he met me and just sort of walked

around and stared at me and then asked me to do it.

I always loved movies about the con, the grift.

So it was great to do that

and to work with that kind of source material,

which is as good as it gets.

To work with Angelica Houston,

Annette Benning, Stephen Frears, it was.

I felt like Jack.

I was like, oh boy, I'm with the big boys now, I'm scared.

[upbeat music]

I think the Dostoevsky quote at the beginning

that you can know all you need to know

about a civilization by looking at its prisons.

So I added that to the proceedings.

But then it was such a crazy kind of whacked-out cartoon

that I thought all these people

on the plane are so eccentric and crazy.

so I said, what can I do?

So I thought what I'll do is,

I'll be the first non-biblical action star.

Charlton Heston did a lot of stuff

with no shirt and sandals,

but I've never seen a modern movie

with a action star wearing sandals.

So I wore Birkenstocks,

and that was sort of the extent

of my thinking on that one.

Once I had the sandals,

I think everything was came from there.

[upbeat music]

When I did 1408, I loved being

in that Stephen King mindset.

He doesn't get the credit as a writer that he deserves.

'cause he draws, I don't think it was a 20-page short story,

but it filled up 2 1/2 hours,

and it could have felt up four hours.

It was like walking into Dr. Who's telephone booth.

And you see this small little thing,

but it's just gotten way more space in there than you think.

That's sort of the way his writing is.

But it came about,

and I read it, and I thought it was really interesting.

And I just thought it had that feel

that Identity had where it was

like a supernatural, psychological thriller

or even like in that Being John Malkovich way,

where you questioned what ground you're actually on.

I love that sort of that element more than

the jump scares or the gore.

I like that Rod Serling kind of psychological,

supernatural horror.

[upbeat music]

It was a thing where I was sitting at,

and this happens sometimes,

you just get a phone call.

Somebody'll say, do you want to come to China

and do an action movie with Jackie Chan?

And you're like excuse me?

What?

Uh, yeah.

That just sounds like way too crazy an adventure to pass up.

Of course I'm gonna go do that.

And this was sort of like that.

Gillian Flynn had reconceived this show Utopia.

And she wanted to shoot in Chicago.

So I was like, wow, that sounds great.

And then she sent me the scripts,

and I read them all.

I read them until four in the morning,

'cause I couldn't put it down.

It was just great writing

and very provocative and shocking.

I thought this could be good.

So I think this character was,

in a way, a captain of industry.

He's what is marketed these days

as one of the great benevolent billionaires,

who are just there working

for all of our safety and our future.

A glorious, unified, multi-racial, democratic,

green new world that we're all moving towards.

So it's set up that way.

And then, as usual with Gillian,

however you think you've pegged it,

the floor's gonna drop out.

And it's gonna drop out another six times after that.

To me, it was a good take on this idea

of change coming from the apex of power down

from the 1% of the 1% down.

It was a good twist to take on that.