John Cusack: "What is Absurdity But the Logical Extension of Current Trends?"

With a few exceptions, John Cusack never really made a go for the blockbuster movie career. Sure, he made Con Air and The Runaway Jury, but he's better known for smaller projects like Say Anything and Bullets Over Broadway and offbeat pieces like Being John Malkovich and The Ice Harvest, not to mention Grosse Point Blank and High Fidelity, which he helped develop, write and produce. War Inc. [official site], his third starring production as co-writer/co-producer, is a savage satire of the modern war industry as a veritable government in its own right driving and defining national policy in the name of disaster economics: every war is an opportunity for profit.

I confess that I didn't really like the film - I didn't find the broad humor funny or the direction particularly deft - but I appreciate the politics and the perspective and I admire Cusack's nerve to go for the jugular. Behind the laughs, his portrait of corporate politics behind the war in Iraq (or rather, the not-so-thinly disguised stand-in, Turqistan) is dire and depressing. The low-budget production was released to a handful of theaters in New York and Los Angeles in May but is rolling out to other cities, including Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin and Boston, on June 13. I spoke with Cusack by phone on Sunday, June 1. He was in London, where he is currently shooting the film Shanghai, directed by Mikael Håfström (who previously directed Cusack in 1408), but took the time to talk about the production and the politics behind it.

Your character is called Hauser in the film but listed as "Brand Hauser" on the IMDb. Where did that name come from? I ask because it almost sounds like a name brand itself, and this is a film all about corporate branding and franchising American business to other countries.

Actually his name was never mentioned to be Brand Hauser, but there was a time when we were going to call the movie "Brand Hauser," kind of like the corporate branding, and then this Hauser: corporate mercenary. So everyone who has written about it has used it and it's sort of stuck, so that everyone calls him Brand Hauser, but his name was not actually Brand, it was Gaylord Hauser.

War, IncDo they use the name Gaylord in the film?

No, he's just known as Hauser. The Gaylord reference got cut out. Joannie, my sister, called me Gaylord a few times. Did you get a chance to see the film? Did you like it?

I just saw it last night. Pretty damning stuff, but done with a very sarcastic sense of humor. You've got an occupied Mideast country called Turqistan, you've got a former American vice-president more beholden to the war industry than to the government, and you've got a war that is 100% outsourced. That sounds like what the military industrial complex at least aspires to.

I'd say they're 50 to 60% there already.

How much would you say War, Inc. exaggerates what corporate America is really up to in Iraq and how much would you say is simply a reflection through the lens of satire?

Well, it's interesting, because the basis for a lot of the criticism and praise for the movie is what the perspective is. If you go on MySpace - we have a big space on MySpace, check it out - we have some of the heaviest people I know who have written about Iraq, from chief foreign news correspondents for 60 Minutes to Naomi Klein, who spent a lot of time there, to Jeremy Scahill, who's been there a bunch, to artists and writers like Damian Hirst and Gore Vidal, comedian Sarah Silverman, we have a bunch of people who all think the movie is prescient and they all get what the movie's about.

Then you have some people who say the tone of it is way over the top or it's five years too late or it's five years too early or you can't mix all these tones and styles together and it's a failure. So you have this chasm between movie critics and people who write about the world from a different perspective and the chasm is pretty extraordinary. So we have plenty of supporters out there for it, but we've also had people who have said the movie goes soft and it's a happy ending. And I think, "Are you even watching the same film?" If that's a happy ending...

[SPOILER ALERT: John Cusack's next two sentences appear on Page 3; don't read them 'til you've seen the film]

It's very experimental. My point, I guess, is just to talk about how some people view it as absolutely two minutes around the corner and some people say it's way over the top, but the people who say it's way over the top aren't usually the people who have written or know extensively about the subject. So it’s been interesting.

Grace Is GonePrevious films about the Iraq war and the American presence in Iraq have been dramas. You yourself were in Grace Is Gone.

That's right.

Why did you choose to use comedy, to use satire, to approach the issue?

Well, what is absurdity or absurdism but the logical extension of current trends? So if you have a war that is almost half privatized - there are 630 private companies making a gold mine in Iraq and you these companies, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, describing it as a gold rush, which is like creating the frontier; you have all these things - I don't know another way of processing the information except through absurdism or satire. I think maybe it helps, if you look at it through an absurdist lens, it kind of puts it in focus in a way that if you did a very straight piece, like I did with Grace Is Gone, it's just almost too depressing to watch. Because it's so dark and it's so depressing and there's this sense of inevitability about the whole thing, that the bastards are just going to win and greed is too powerful to combat and it's too structural and there's nothing you can do.

I think a lot of those films about Iraq are fantastic, but it's very depressing. If you look at it through comedy, it also ignites a sense of your outrage or your defiance or your spirit: "Well, the first thing I'm going to do is reclaim my sense of subversion or my sense of defiance. At least I can shame or mock this ideology, even if I can't beat it." So I think that's what comedy or absurdity offers you.

Do you think you can reach more people through this lens?

Well, apparently it's working this way. It seems to be working.

You're a writer and producer on the project. Was it hard to get it made in this climate?

It was tricky because people were buying all the lies that came out of the Bush administration. It would be like, "What time is it?," and they would just start to lie and everybody just let them get away with it for so long. They were even saying things like, "Everybody better watch what they say, you guys better watch what you say." And it was really at the height, you know, when the statue had fallen, and so we figured that it better be time to not watch what you say. So getting a movie made is hard but getting a movie made that takes on the military corporate complex and how it's mutated into this kind of privatized war machine - it was not an easy sell.

You said that there were people telling you that the film was too early or too late. In fact, it's coming out before the presidential elections, which seems to me the perfect time to get a political message out. Was that part of the plan, or is that a lucky break on your part?

A little bit of both. I think the climate has changed for the movie. At first people were saying things like, "We won't even show it," you know? And then they were saying things like, "It's anti-American," and then they started to say things like, "Well, there are some good ideas in it," and then they started saying it was funny and then people started to say, "It's great." All that happened in about six months, so I think the climate has changed in the country really drastically in the last year. The movie hasn't changed much but I think people's reaction to it has changed drastically. It's actually doing very well in the theaters at the moment. Crazy.
War, Inc



It's expanding out to more cities on June 13.

It's interesting. In the movie we have disaster capitalists, these corporations that want to make money off of actually planning and then milking disasters, like owning every part of the disaster of war. But in the movie business we just have straight capitalists, and the company that released it feels like they can make some money because its per-screen average was, I think, just under Sex and the City and Indiana Jones in LA and New York. The theaters have been packed so far and there's been a real viral groundswell to see the movie.

Some critics have not liked it and there are some critics who have, but the LA Times and Time magazine liked it and a lot of other people have hated it, but the critics we've had on MySpace, like the guys I told you about, that's gone viral. There's been about 30,000 visitors on MySpace now and a lot of these political organizations who have been supporting the film, like The Nation magazine and Raw Story and independent journalists and investigative journalists, are saying, "This is the way it really is right now." We've actually sold out the theaters so we've got the capitalists interested in this crazy movie, which is kind of crazy because it's just a punk rock movie which we just made for a couple of bucks in Bulgaria. The idea was, let's just do something that tries to puncture a hole as loudly and as broadly as we can in the whole neo-conservative movement, let's just call things what they are, shame it, mock it, light it on fire and throw rubber bricks at it. Or real bricks.

I saw you talking about the film and the issues on Real Time With Maher a month ago or so.

Bill Maher actually gave us a terrific endorsement for the movie. He's one of our guys who gave us a quote.

You said you made this as a guerrilla operation, very little money...

Yeah, about a third of the money we had for Grosse Point Blank and that was 10 or 15 years ago.

How did you get stars like Hilary Duff and Marisa Tomei and Ben Kingsley in major roles?

They all loved the script, they all loved the idea of how radical it was and how fearless it was and they all said "Yes" right away. Hilary read it, wanted to do it. Sir Ben Kingsley read it, wanted to do it. Marisa read it, wanted to do it. I think they liked the idea that it was so crazy. One of the things that's so weird about this movie that some people like and don't like is that it's so, as you said, strange, but a lot of people love that about the movie, because it shifts from surreality to a soap opera to black comedy to regular sincerity and it doesn't make any excuses about that or explain it. I think some of the actors like being in something that isn't just another romantic comedy or isn't just another cop film. It's nice to be able to do something different.

You brought up Grosse Point Blank in terms of budget, but there are other connections to the film. I see Hauser, the corporate assassin, as the logical evolution of Grosse Point Blank hit man Martin Q. Blank, in an alternate universe. He still sees a therapist and he has stress issues, he just turns to shots of hot sauce.

He doesn't even really have a therapist, he just uses the OnStar guide, and even that is a little antiquated. He is kind of a samurai; he is kind of an old school guy, but he uses the OnStar valet as the only human connection he can. But yeah, we saw it as kind of a spoof on samurai characters, but it's certainly in the tradition of the other movie.

He even has the same dry, deadpan sense of humor.

It's definitely cut from the same cloth as that movie, but it's a lot more experimental.

Here's what John Cusack was about to say when we set off the SPOILER ALERT:

You might not like it or it might be too broad, but we're satirizing the nuclear family and they get blown out the air in the last frame of the movie while a viral, authoritarian, Orwellian machine continues rolling on into the next country. If that's soft, I don't know what hard is.