Emmanuel Itier: You met husbands who have lost wives?

John Cusack: Very sad. I met somebody who was in the exact position Stanley was in, except he had three daughters, not two. He had gotten that knock and his life was changed forever, from the [Knock, knock, knock].

EI: Did you base your character on him?

JC: Yeah, mostly–just for getting the music of it and the tone of it, and asking him physical questions, which are consistent with what you know about grief, which is you don’t have any equilibrium. There is something happening to you and it has its own time clock. It doesn’t really matter what you do. It’s going to have its own life, and you are just the last person on earth who is in control of it.

EI: Did you character get younger during the film?

JC: No, but I think when you release all that tension, maybe. I had that emotion. You are letting go of some of that taught-ness and tightness. That’s the only thing I can think of.

EI: I didn’t even recognize you at first.

JC: Thanks, he was wound pretty tight.

EI: Did you stay in character the whole time?

JC: By the end of the day, I would take my makeup off and I’d need a little bit of a chiropractor because I was so hunched over, but besides that I’m okay.

EI: This is a movie about grief…

JC: Well, the climate in the United States seems to me to be about denying pain or putting pain off on a macro and micro level. I would never suggest, for a moment, that the military families are part of that equation, but in Hollywood or Chicago or New York, or wherever you are, people are getting on with their lives and the war is this distraction that they see on television. A lot of pundits are doing their usual partisan bickering where they are putting each other in boxes and calling each other names, and talking down to each other, but I think the whole thing has been fought on a credit card and they even–when I wanted to do the movie–they banned photos of the dead coming home, flag-draped coffins of the dead. They said, “We control that too. So in case we haven’t controlled it enough, you don’t even get to see the soldiers who are paying the ultimate price for this.” And they had all their reasons and they are all bullshit, but it’s just a cowardly political act. So in that climate, making this movie…nobody wants to see grief. They use it in their photo ops when they can wax poetic behind it, and like all people, I’m sure they have very different motivations and a lot of them feel like what they are doing is true and all of that, but on another level, there is a great denial of any sense of reality about this.

EI: Which world problems worry you the most?

JC: Personally, probably the privatization of war. I think what Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex, we’ve gone far beyond that. It’s far more dangerous than that now, to the very essence of security and disaster relief and prisons, war is now a for-profit business, and I think that has kind of apocalyptic ramifications. So…you asked.

EI: Might movies with children be the next phase in your career?

JC: No, I don’t think like that way. You get offered stuff from studios that you do to stay in successful movies that are good, and you try to do the best you can in the projects that you love. I just happened to play fathers, but I didn’t go out thinking, “I’ve got to play a father now.” I wouldn’t be against it, but I don’t have any plan.

EI: Was it hard to capture this character, since you are a lefty?

JC: I love that about it, because then I had to put my money where my mouth is in a sense where I really had to not judge or look down on that character but really get inside his shoes, and really try to understand his point of view and live it. It was great because I had much more compassion towards people who, ideologically, I disagree with.

EI: Did it change any of your opinions?

JC: I don’t think it changed it, but I approached the whole thing with much more compassion, I think.

EI: Is that what attracted you in the first place?

JC: Just because I have compassion for the Stanleys of the world doesn’t mean I would support an ultra-authoritarian administration that wants to open up new markets using the US Military and Blackwater. That ain’t gonna happen ever, but you can be pro-military and anti-war, and war profiteering. I hope, in 2007, one doesn’t have to say that, but, given the state we are in, I guess you do.

EI: What do you think you’d be doing if you wouldn’t have been an actor?

JC: I don’t know. I don’t think I could hold a real job.

EI: What attracted you to this project?

JC: A lot of this stuff, yeah. Something captured my imagination. I had a sense of the character. I thought it was in a gray zone where he was cowardly and heroic, and I thought it felt like this would be a great thing to do right now, just to do the first three days of grief. And as I said, the impetus to do it came out of outrage, but I hoped we would transcend outrage and my own personal opinions and get to something more transcendent. I thought if we could do that, it’s going to be really interesting.

EI: They’ll market it in Europe as an anti-war movie?

JC: Proudly, I hope.

EI: How about in America?

JC: They’ll probably try to hedge their bet, but the movie is what it is. But I think what’s different about it, as I said, is it doesn’t get lost in the usual. In America, everything gets lost in that polemic and that partisan stuff, and they just want to put you in a box, and it’s like a gang war. Now you are with us, and they send hits on the other guys and everybody has attack dogs, and there is no intellectual honesty to it anyway. But art is supposed to do something else, isn’t it? It’s supposed to transcend. That’s what we tried to do. Whether we did it or not, I don’t know, but that’s what we tried to do. But I don’t know how you could be pro-human and not anti-war. That’s the only dialect, that seems to me.

EI: Was this more challenging than 1408?

JC: They are both different, but those are both demanding ones.

EI: Have you started working on Stopping Power yet?

JC: No, that one fell apart. I’m not doing that one.

EI: Why so many movies with Joan?

JC: I figure, sooner or later, someone will tell us we can’t, but…I love her. She’s fantastic. Some of the studios just offer them to us and we go, “Okay,” if they are going to let us. And as a producer, I always offer her something because I know how great she is. I figure, sooner or late,r people would get tired of it, but as long as we can get away with it, it’s fun. I get to see her for 12 hours a day. I love it.

EI: Any project before the strike stops things?

JC: Yeah, actually, I have two. One is called Factory and the other is called Shanghai. It’s in China. I’m not sure if I’m going to do them, but hopefully they will work out.

EI: Have you supported the writers?

JC: I won’t cross the picket line. As a writer myself, I know I haven’t gotten paid for any of my stuff on the Internet either.

EI: Have you been called to march yet?

JC: Yeah, but I don’t want to do that.

EI: How long do you think it will go on for?

JC: I think for a while. I think the studios would love to just bust the union anyway. It gives them a chance to clean house and they can cry force majure, right? They can say it’s an act of God and they can just cancel contracts and do all that stuff. But I don’t know enough about it really.

EI: Will it go until the actors and directors join in too?

JC: Yeah, but I don’t know because I’m not really up on it, as far as the negotiations, but I think they mismanaged it and sort of got blindsided by the Internet. And then they made all their money on DVDs and they have like an 85% profit margin on every DVD, so the movies in the theaters are now just basically promotional platforms for the DVD release. But now that DVDs are being traded online, and soon it will happen that it will be easier to do that, the whole thing is crumbling and the TV guys–they don’t know how to make money anymore because they can’t get the advertisers. And you can just go buy a TV show. It’s all changing and I think it’s in that chaos that nobody knows how to monetize it, and they don’t want to promise to share profits, but they’ve already said they make billions of dollars off the Internet and they aren’t sharing it with us.

EI: Did one performance change your life more than others?

JC: No, not that I can think of.

EI: How do you feel about Oscar buzz for this?

JC: It’s alright. I’ll take it, right? It’s nice. That stuff [Sundance]–I don’t know how that stuff really works. It’s really political and faddy, and I don’t know how it will work. I know Harvey’s got me going to lots of parties. You’ve got to go here and you’ve got to go to Q & As and stuff, but I really don’t know.

EI: How was working with a first-time director?

JC: It was good. It was such a contained story, and we had a great DP and were surrounded with great people, and he knew the script. Stylistically, it’s a pretty contained film. It’s just more about the performances, so he was a good collaborator.

EI: Why cast these two kids?

JC: They were the two faces and spirits that you’d least want to lie to on the face of the earth. You try to imagine that final scene and you just imagine the most painful moments. And you met those two girls and you thought, that’s the last thing I’d ever want to do, to take away their mother, take away their innocence. And they are very, very soulful and talented, very different. They are very soulful and great, terrific, talented people. So they were just the answers.

EI: How did you bond with them?

JC: That’s just casting. Either you have the feel for somebody or you don’t. And then we went and did some training and stuff together and did stuff. But you either have that chemistry with people or you don’t. It’s hard to put your finger on why, and it’s not even worth trying to figure out why. But I’m smart enough now to recognize that’s one of the most important things about making a movie. So I was like, “Those two.”

EI: What keeps you grounded?

JC: I don’t know, probably nothing. I’m probably not grounded.

EI: How do you stay out of the gossip mags?

JC: That’s because I don’t go to all these parties that Harvey is taking me to. It’s living in Chicago, but it’s also that I don’t stay on the scene that much, which has got its pluses and drawbacks. Politically, it would probably be better to be on the scene a little more, but…

EI: What do you do in your spare time?

JC: Just normal stuff. I see friends and have dinner and watch movies and see music, travel…

EI: Do you have any holiday traditions?

JC: The same old ones will do. We usually have a Christmas Eve dinner. It seems to be like, for some reason, it’s like sushi or Japanese food.

EI: Because Catholics have fish?

JC: That’s it! I knew there was a reason I could trace that back.

EI: What was the best Christmas gift you ever got?

JC: No, I’ve never been a big gift person. I never care too much about gifts.

EI: Would you like to direct?

JC: Sure, but it takes so long. Being one of the filmmakers if you are an actor/producer and writing in front of it, if you are one of the filmmakers, it takes two to three years to get them made, so it’s okay to have collaboration.

EI: What is it like watching your old movies?

JC: I don’t know. Sometimes I just don’t watch them.

EI: Is there a movie you saw that changed your life?

JC: I remember Apocalypse Now being pretty outrageous. My parents were out of town and we had some friends staying with us on a school night, and I think it was 8th grade. It was playing at the Revival movie house. It came out in ‘75, right? So this is probably ‘78 or ‘79 or something, and I remember being a sophomore in high school or something. You walk in one way and you kind of had the back of your head blown off, and you just kind of stumble out. I couldn’t talk afterwards. I wanted to stay up and make coffee and talk about it. I’ve always thought film had a great power.

EI: Then you decided to act?

JC: I was always sort of in love with the movies.

EI: Who were your idols?

JC: Strangely, a lot of the people I’ve had a chance to work with. I’ve had a very interesting career that way. Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Woody Allen–I’ve gotten to work with a lot of people that I grew up watching and inspired me to want to make films, so I was really lucky.

EI: What would you do if you died today?

JC: I’d ask Jesus when he is coming back and checking this shit out.