John Cusack is going to say anything he pleases, and if you're smart you won't try to stop him. He attributes the genesis of his new anti-war film, War, Inc., to the moment seven years ago when Bush administration spokesman Ari Fleischer had the gall to look Americans in the eye and tell them that they "better watch what they say." "I was like, 'Oh, right. Fuck you!'" Cusack says, calling up SuicideGirls during a break on a London film set to vent about his many frustrations, ranging from the snake-oil strategems of corporate America to the seemingly eternal occupation of Iraq. Out today, War, Inc. is a broad, often over-the-top satire about a hit man in the near future -- he pilots his own futuristic single-occupant aircraft -- who finds himself on the payroll of a mega-corporation that is literally running a fictional Middle Eastern country called Turaqistan. Marisa Tomei and Hillary Duff handle the female leads, while a number of notable names turn up in smaller roles throughout the film, including Ben Kingsley putting on a Texas drawl, which must be worth the ticket price alone.
Ryan Stewart: You play with fire in this movie, making comedy of a scene where Marisa Tomei is captured by terrorists and seems on the verge of being executed.
John Cusack: I think one of the things we wanted to do was play with fire. Sometimes we'd succeed, sometimes we wouldn't. In a weird way, it doesn't have to matter that much, you know? We actually wanted to do that with tone, with different genres of movies. Who says you can't go from serious kind of political commentary to slapstick to surrealism to farce to melodrama to insincerity to Telemundo soap opera to political cartoon, you know? Who knows if it's good, but we thought it'd be fun to try that, to not explain any shifts in tone or style. The other thing about why you go for such broad humor sometimes is, to me and probably the other writers, we thought that if you don't look at things through an absurdist lens, this stuff is so dark and serious that you could never get out of bed. It's incredibly serious stuff, but I think that's one of the things you can do with absurdism and satire, is try to find a way to look at it that's enlightening, but that's also still provocative and makes you think. You could do a straight drama about this stuff, but it would be so intense and depressing. But those types of movies need to be made too.
RS: Right, like Grace is Gone.
JC: Yeah, I tried to make one of them last year.
RS: Why make two of these kinds of films so close together? Is it such a passion of yours that it has to take over your work?
JC: Yeah, I think so. The last eight years have been the darkest years, politically, certainly of my lifetime; they really represent a bottoming out of the United States. You're talking about creating entire new economies on privatizing war and disaster relief and jails and torture. Torture is a for-profit business in the Bush-Cheney mindset, which is basically the neoconservative mindset that's been working for 35 years, to destroy the New Deal. That's what's happening right now. We've outsourced torture to companies that are doing it for profit. We torture for profit. You can't get any lower than that. So, I thought that given that and given the immorality of trying to put the United States military -- the completely honorable people who fight in the military -- into this kind of a snake pit in the heart of Arabia for this crazed, profiteering-privatization fantasy ... If you read "Baghdad Year Zero," which I'm sure you did, while the place was still burning they just said, "100 percent ownership of foreign companies for all these businesses." They're straight-up plundering. It's not just a murder site; it's armed robbery. So, if you know that stuff and you know that there are 180,000 contractors and 150,000 troops, War, Inc. is just taking this trend to its logical conclusion. You know, a couple years down the road.
RS: This is your first screenplay credit since High Fidelity, right?
JC: I don't know if that's true. Is it? I've written a whole bunch of other screenplays that we haven't done yet and I've also written on some other films that I've done. I don't know if I've gotten credit, I haven't looked into it.
RS: What did you bring to the project as a writer that you couldn't bring just as an actor?
JC: Oh, I don't know, it's just a different thing to do, you know? You come up with an idea and then you get to follow it, the process of it. A lot of times you work on re-writing stuff or working on scenes with other writers, directors and actors, so if you make the first draft you can just pick up where you left off with your own script.
RS: Did you ever think about doing a straight adaptation of "Baghdad Year Zero"?
JC: Well, we didn't really base it on that. It wasn't an adaptation of "Baghdad Year Zero." As we were writing it, I think a lot of people knew about Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Perle and all the neoconservative crew, so everybody had a good idea of what we were in for when they got into office. When you research into what they were doing in Iraq, it became pretty clear what they were doing. Naomi, as is her usual custom, is there first and puts it into a sort of clarity and has a precision, puts the pieces together and paints a larger picture, and makes that connection. So we were already writing it and then I read "Baghdad Year Zero" and it just took us deeper into the direction we were going. It gave us some new ideas, it was very inspiring. I wouldn't know how to do a straight journalistic adaptation of that. Unless you did a story about Naomi going to Baghdad. Which would be a good movie.
RS: Americans have sort of shown that they won't really go see movies that deal with this subject though, right?
JC: Yeah, maybe not. We hope they will with War, Inc. Maybe that's the reason to make it kind of absurd or grotesque or silly or camp, you know, all those things. What else can you call it? If you have to name it, then call it what it is. That's how you get people to listen. What did you think of it?
RS: Well, at times I wondered why it needed to be so broad, but I could tell that the spirit was one of throwing up your hands, creating a farce to depict a farcical situation.
JC: That's the spirit. That's the spirit we were trying to go for, which was, "When you're past being being outraged, what else can you do?" I think that's right.
RS: Do you feel that we're really approaching the day of fully outsourced war?
JC: Fuck yeah, that's what it is. There's an entire new economy that's built around this stuff. If you want, check out this article, I interviewed Naomi for her fantastic book on The Huffington Post. I did a kind of interview series with her and there's text and video and all of that. Just check out some of the facts. They're not subtle. They're not debatable. You might not want to think about it and you might not want to write about it, but it's some heavy shit. It's a total, total, radical, radical transformation of the country. What are the core things that make up a state? You've got to have a government, you've got to have an army, you've got to be responsible for security, you have to have jails, you have to have all these things. If you don't, then there's really no state. There's just a bunch of corporations.
RS: Why not run for office, if you feel this strongly?
JC: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I would be a bad person to do that. Put it this way. You know the Blackwater guy? He said he wants to do for the military what FedEx did for the post office. He compared running a for-profit occupation in Iraq to delivering the mail. He said it with a straight face. Do you want corporations to run a FedEx version of the military? And by the way, the great ruse of this all, the great kind of horror of this is these guys all talk about the free markets. It's all free market stuff. So let's say you went down the road and said, "It's a good idea for ExxonMobil to have their own corporate armies." Let's just give them that, which is an insane thing to say. Let's just give them that point of view. Then you go, "Well, they're making all these profits from the oil cause the price is up and they gotta protect it." Well, forget about international law and the sovereignty of nations. So, corporate armies, let's give them that. Let's go down the rabbit hole and give them that. The problem is it's not true, because Exxon is not paying for Blackwater. We are. We're paying so that Blackwater can make a profit to do whatever Exxon wants it to do, regardless of international law. That's where we are now. Totally accountable to no one. There's no checks and balances. Nothing.
RS: So you feel culpable, as a taxpayer?
JC: We're funding it! These guys are the biggest welfare freaks on the planet. They're taking money, like an ATM, directly from the State Department. They're not out there in the free market. If these guys want to do all this shit, why don't they just leave America and go take over a country? Take your chances on the open market. Don't ask me to pay for it! It's really crazy stuff. I really recommend that you check out Naomi's stuff. It's pretty crazy. I also thought with this, why not at least be subversive with it? You know, fuck with the stuff. It feels good to be subversive, you know?
RS: Do people in your circle ever advise you to take it easy on the political films, to keep yourself accessible to the soccer moms and such?
JC: I don't care. I liked doing it. I had a great time doing it with my friends and we've had a great reaction from people who loved the movie that are totally outside the corporate media, traditional movie people. They're all political writers or culture writers or Internet writers or they write about foreign affairs and all that stuff. Those are the all people who've driven the publicity for this movie. For me, it's great fun. I've had that sort of cultural snobbish thing where people try to build you up and I've had it where they try to take you down. I've been on both sides of that kind of taste-making stuff, where people are kind of snobs about you one way or the other, saying you're great or you suck. So, you can't really take it seriously either way. You just do what you want and keep doing what you want.
RS: Is this movie as far out there as you can really go? I mean, what kind of political film could you make after this?
JC: I don't know. Who knows? I think what happened was the statue had fallen and it was so fucking depressing that this was what we were doing. These guys take the 9/11 tragedy and use it to ram through their crazy, messianic privatization-fantasy-hypocrisy-clusterfuck agenda. Then they tell people, "You better watch what you say." They're standing behind podiums and warning people to watch how they talk. And I was like, 'Oh, right. Fuck you!' It was like, 'Let's just do something' and we didn't really have any money, so we finished the script and then we said "Let's just go make it." We didn't really have any money or time or anything like that, but we had great actors who wanted to come do it, so we said "Let's just go make it." I had remembered their spokesman saying "Everybody should watch what they say" so I said, "Let's try to be as disgusting as they are immoral." So that was the spirit of it. How much we succeeded or whether we did, who knows, but I think the movie's got a spirit to it and it's definitely a little punk rock movie in that way. Do it yourself, do it now and make the rough edges a virtue.
RS: Think the upcoming election will change anything?
JC: I hope so. I really do. I'll be working for Obama, big-time.
War, Inc. opens in theaters today, May 23. For more information, check out the official site here.
Ryan Stewart: You play with fire in this movie, making comedy of a scene where Marisa Tomei is captured by terrorists and seems on the verge of being executed.
John Cusack: I think one of the things we wanted to do was play with fire. Sometimes we'd succeed, sometimes we wouldn't. In a weird way, it doesn't have to matter that much, you know? We actually wanted to do that with tone, with different genres of movies. Who says you can't go from serious kind of political commentary to slapstick to surrealism to farce to melodrama to insincerity to Telemundo soap opera to political cartoon, you know? Who knows if it's good, but we thought it'd be fun to try that, to not explain any shifts in tone or style. The other thing about why you go for such broad humor sometimes is, to me and probably the other writers, we thought that if you don't look at things through an absurdist lens, this stuff is so dark and serious that you could never get out of bed. It's incredibly serious stuff, but I think that's one of the things you can do with absurdism and satire, is try to find a way to look at it that's enlightening, but that's also still provocative and makes you think. You could do a straight drama about this stuff, but it would be so intense and depressing. But those types of movies need to be made too.
RS: Right, like Grace is Gone.
JC: Yeah, I tried to make one of them last year.
RS: Why make two of these kinds of films so close together? Is it such a passion of yours that it has to take over your work?
JC: Yeah, I think so. The last eight years have been the darkest years, politically, certainly of my lifetime; they really represent a bottoming out of the United States. You're talking about creating entire new economies on privatizing war and disaster relief and jails and torture. Torture is a for-profit business in the Bush-Cheney mindset, which is basically the neoconservative mindset that's been working for 35 years, to destroy the New Deal. That's what's happening right now. We've outsourced torture to companies that are doing it for profit. We torture for profit. You can't get any lower than that. So, I thought that given that and given the immorality of trying to put the United States military -- the completely honorable people who fight in the military -- into this kind of a snake pit in the heart of Arabia for this crazed, profiteering-privatization fantasy ... If you read "Baghdad Year Zero," which I'm sure you did, while the place was still burning they just said, "100 percent ownership of foreign companies for all these businesses." They're straight-up plundering. It's not just a murder site; it's armed robbery. So, if you know that stuff and you know that there are 180,000 contractors and 150,000 troops, War, Inc. is just taking this trend to its logical conclusion. You know, a couple years down the road.
RS: This is your first screenplay credit since High Fidelity, right?
JC: I don't know if that's true. Is it? I've written a whole bunch of other screenplays that we haven't done yet and I've also written on some other films that I've done. I don't know if I've gotten credit, I haven't looked into it.
RS: What did you bring to the project as a writer that you couldn't bring just as an actor?
JC: Oh, I don't know, it's just a different thing to do, you know? You come up with an idea and then you get to follow it, the process of it. A lot of times you work on re-writing stuff or working on scenes with other writers, directors and actors, so if you make the first draft you can just pick up where you left off with your own script.
RS: Did you ever think about doing a straight adaptation of "Baghdad Year Zero"?
JC: Well, we didn't really base it on that. It wasn't an adaptation of "Baghdad Year Zero." As we were writing it, I think a lot of people knew about Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Perle and all the neoconservative crew, so everybody had a good idea of what we were in for when they got into office. When you research into what they were doing in Iraq, it became pretty clear what they were doing. Naomi, as is her usual custom, is there first and puts it into a sort of clarity and has a precision, puts the pieces together and paints a larger picture, and makes that connection. So we were already writing it and then I read "Baghdad Year Zero" and it just took us deeper into the direction we were going. It gave us some new ideas, it was very inspiring. I wouldn't know how to do a straight journalistic adaptation of that. Unless you did a story about Naomi going to Baghdad. Which would be a good movie.
RS: Americans have sort of shown that they won't really go see movies that deal with this subject though, right?
JC: Yeah, maybe not. We hope they will with War, Inc. Maybe that's the reason to make it kind of absurd or grotesque or silly or camp, you know, all those things. What else can you call it? If you have to name it, then call it what it is. That's how you get people to listen. What did you think of it?
RS: Well, at times I wondered why it needed to be so broad, but I could tell that the spirit was one of throwing up your hands, creating a farce to depict a farcical situation.
JC: That's the spirit. That's the spirit we were trying to go for, which was, "When you're past being being outraged, what else can you do?" I think that's right.
RS: Do you feel that we're really approaching the day of fully outsourced war?
JC: Fuck yeah, that's what it is. There's an entire new economy that's built around this stuff. If you want, check out this article, I interviewed Naomi for her fantastic book on The Huffington Post. I did a kind of interview series with her and there's text and video and all of that. Just check out some of the facts. They're not subtle. They're not debatable. You might not want to think about it and you might not want to write about it, but it's some heavy shit. It's a total, total, radical, radical transformation of the country. What are the core things that make up a state? You've got to have a government, you've got to have an army, you've got to be responsible for security, you have to have jails, you have to have all these things. If you don't, then there's really no state. There's just a bunch of corporations.
RS: Why not run for office, if you feel this strongly?
JC: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I would be a bad person to do that. Put it this way. You know the Blackwater guy? He said he wants to do for the military what FedEx did for the post office. He compared running a for-profit occupation in Iraq to delivering the mail. He said it with a straight face. Do you want corporations to run a FedEx version of the military? And by the way, the great ruse of this all, the great kind of horror of this is these guys all talk about the free markets. It's all free market stuff. So let's say you went down the road and said, "It's a good idea for ExxonMobil to have their own corporate armies." Let's just give them that, which is an insane thing to say. Let's just give them that point of view. Then you go, "Well, they're making all these profits from the oil cause the price is up and they gotta protect it." Well, forget about international law and the sovereignty of nations. So, corporate armies, let's give them that. Let's go down the rabbit hole and give them that. The problem is it's not true, because Exxon is not paying for Blackwater. We are. We're paying so that Blackwater can make a profit to do whatever Exxon wants it to do, regardless of international law. That's where we are now. Totally accountable to no one. There's no checks and balances. Nothing.
RS: So you feel culpable, as a taxpayer?
JC: We're funding it! These guys are the biggest welfare freaks on the planet. They're taking money, like an ATM, directly from the State Department. They're not out there in the free market. If these guys want to do all this shit, why don't they just leave America and go take over a country? Take your chances on the open market. Don't ask me to pay for it! It's really crazy stuff. I really recommend that you check out Naomi's stuff. It's pretty crazy. I also thought with this, why not at least be subversive with it? You know, fuck with the stuff. It feels good to be subversive, you know?
RS: Do people in your circle ever advise you to take it easy on the political films, to keep yourself accessible to the soccer moms and such?
JC: I don't care. I liked doing it. I had a great time doing it with my friends and we've had a great reaction from people who loved the movie that are totally outside the corporate media, traditional movie people. They're all political writers or culture writers or Internet writers or they write about foreign affairs and all that stuff. Those are the all people who've driven the publicity for this movie. For me, it's great fun. I've had that sort of cultural snobbish thing where people try to build you up and I've had it where they try to take you down. I've been on both sides of that kind of taste-making stuff, where people are kind of snobs about you one way or the other, saying you're great or you suck. So, you can't really take it seriously either way. You just do what you want and keep doing what you want.
RS: Is this movie as far out there as you can really go? I mean, what kind of political film could you make after this?
JC: I don't know. Who knows? I think what happened was the statue had fallen and it was so fucking depressing that this was what we were doing. These guys take the 9/11 tragedy and use it to ram through their crazy, messianic privatization-fantasy-hypocrisy-clusterfuck agenda. Then they tell people, "You better watch what you say." They're standing behind podiums and warning people to watch how they talk. And I was like, 'Oh, right. Fuck you!' It was like, 'Let's just do something' and we didn't really have any money, so we finished the script and then we said "Let's just go make it." We didn't really have any money or time or anything like that, but we had great actors who wanted to come do it, so we said "Let's just go make it." I had remembered their spokesman saying "Everybody should watch what they say" so I said, "Let's try to be as disgusting as they are immoral." So that was the spirit of it. How much we succeeded or whether we did, who knows, but I think the movie's got a spirit to it and it's definitely a little punk rock movie in that way. Do it yourself, do it now and make the rough edges a virtue.
RS: Think the upcoming election will change anything?
JC: I hope so. I really do. I'll be working for Obama, big-time.
War, Inc. opens in theaters today, May 23. For more information, check out the official site here.
VIEW 17 of 17 COMMENTS
Still... I've GOT to see this movie... i forgot it even existed!