Big Mad John: An Interview With John Cusack on War, Inc.
"Their
game has been to privatize the entire essence of what it means to
be a state--from military to disaster relief. They want these unaccountable
elements. They want to turn everything that it means to be a state
into a for-profit enterprise, including outsourcing the advanced
interrogation techniques, which is torture."
Interview by Rob Capriccioso
Posted: June 9, 2008
John Cusack was an out-and-out nerd in the 1980s,
a freaky puppeteer in the 1990s, and a mixed up romantic in the
early 2000s.
Then, Bush took the country to war. And something snapped.
Like many of Hollywood’s elite stars, John started blogging
about politics for The Huffington Post. He soon defined
the Bush administration as “depressing, corrupt, unlawful
and tragically absurd.” He became friends with anti-globalization
journalist Naomi Klein, and he raged about the Blackwater military
corruption scandal.
The change is reflected in John’s work. Last year, he starred
in the largely unseen drama Grace Is Gone, about a father
struggling to explain to his daughters that their mother has been
killed while serving in Iraq. Now he offers up War, Inc.,
in which he acts as a hit man who suppresses his emotions by gulping
down hot sauce.
Despite the sauce, it’s not laugh-out-loud funny.
John co-wrote and produced the dark political satire, which is
partly inspired by Klein’s 2004 article “Baghdad Year
Zero.” It will probably not do well at the box office. But,
as John said during our phone interview, he just doesn’t care.
Have you seen a picture of him lately? Look at his eyes. They look
different. They look colder. John’s affected. And, for better
or for worse, he wants you to be, too:
Rob Capriccioso: What do you think about people
who criticize actors who speak out on their political views?
John Cusack: Well, I think you have to consider
the source. You know, usually the source is not very credible. I
mean, I’m a filmmaker and an actor and a producer and a writer,
and whatever else I am, I’m a citizen. So the people who criticize—they
spend their time reading, writing, and hopefully talking to interesting
people…they work in front of the camera sometimes, sometimes
other people write their lines, and they wear make-up, and sometimes
they go on television. So, what is the difference between their
opinion and mine—between what they do and what I do? It’s
kind of a joke. They communicate, and I communicate. They deal in
ideas, and I deal in ideas. I don’t even understand the question.
RC: Well, so many people make a point of bashing
actors—
JC: —I haven’t heard anybody make
that sort of criticism about me in a long time, actually. You do
have the right-wing guys who will say bad things about George Clooney
or Barbara Streisand...I can understand what they’re doing
because they’re trying to put people in their little boxes
and diminish people who have opinions. But I’m not cowed by
those sorts of fools.
RC: Do you tune in to the chatter of how pundits
have handicapped the election so far?
JC: Yeah, I do. I mean, I’m always grateful
for the journalists who are keeping real issues on the table. These
horse race issues, I sort of find to be much less interesting. I
found it interesting that on the day when the President of the United
States admitted to meeting about what he called ‘expanding
interrogation techniques’—that’s the sort of feel-good
symbiotic of torture, right—he said that he had these meetings
in the White House. I saw no follow-up questions from the national
press, and we went right back into the latest recapping of Hillary
Clinton and putting Barack Obama in his box as a gun-hating elitist—right
back to the horse race questions. These are disturbing trends, so
I just look for the journalists who keep these issues on the table…
RC: What political issues are on your mind most?
JC: I would love for someone to say, ‘Hey,
what are we going to do with the troops?’ There’s 140,000
troops and 180,000 contractors [in Iraq], and I believe Sen. Obama
and maybe Clinton said that we can’t take out the contractors
because the troops are too dependent on them. That’s sort
of a backdoor draft, right? Or it’s part of a pattern. And
I think it’s the duty of the people—the Internet and the
press—to make the Democratic candidates talk about this because,
obviously, the Republicans are not going to talk about it. This
has been their game. Their game has been to privatize the entire
essence of what it means to be a state—from military to disaster
relief. They want these unaccountable elements. They want to turn
everything that it means to be a state into a for-profit enterprise,
including outsourcing the advanced interrogation techniques, which
is torture.
RC: So, you don’t like Republicans?
JC: If you want torture to be a for-profit enterprise,
which it is right now, then we should continue on with the Republicans’
agenda. Or force the Democrats to bring these issues up. I mean,
that’s what I think—that’s what the movie’s about.
What I’m happy about, given what’s going on on the Internet,
is that people have been so interested in the movie. I think they’re
interested in the ideas, and I think they’re interested in
using it as a springboard to talk about the ideas. That’s
really gratifying.
RC: War, Inc. is a pretty dark project,
John.
JC: You’re talking about compared to sketch-comedy
satire… Yeah, it’s not Wedding Crashers...
In a sense, it has darkly comic imperatives. That’s what we
aspire to, but it will be up to you and anyone else to decide how
well we succeeded…if there’s a progenitor, or the film’s
descendant, it might be of the sort of the aesthetic of radicalism
of the '60s, which spoke to the inhumanity and problems of entire
systems, rather than kind of regretfully weeping over the supposed
bad policy choices that dominate political discussion. This [film]
is talking about the entire new economy of what, I guess, Naomi
Klein called the ‘disaster capitalism complex.’ And
attacking a whole economy and trying to look at the whole ideology
behind this, which has been a maybe 25-year-old campaign—not
a conspiracy in any sense, but a real campaign to destroy the New
Deal and to turn government into basically an ATM card for the corporations,
so they can get right to our tax dollars...
RC: Would you describe yourself as bitter?
JC: Um, no, I mean, I think that given the controversy
over [Obama’s] bitter remark, I can see how that would be
something that you could sort of run with, but I think the essence
here is that I’m certainly not running for office. So, we’re
going to try to express our feeling and process this into symbols
to put it up on the screen. The movie has a core of outrage in it,
but I think it also has a spirit of rebellion and a spirit of defiance
and a spirit of subversion. I think all of those things are also
fun.
RC: Darkly fun.
JC: Yeah, I mean, it’s fun to sort of tell
the truth and it’s fun to not be cowed by an administration
that tells people to watch what they say...
RC: Do you worry that conservatives are either
not going to like the movie or not like you as a result of the topic
the movie covers?
JC: Actually, no, because the Republican Party
that I’m talking about is a radical, radical version of this,
and I think there are well-meaning Republicans, Libertarians and
Democrats who are all outraged about this. I’m not interested
in making a partisan, pro-Democrat movie... Anybody who wants a
version of the country where these corporations can have private
mercenary armies doing their bidding, when they invade a country
to try to strip mine it and sell off all the rights of the country
while it’s still burning, and they think that it’s okay
to use war and basically murder as an extension of economic policy...if
that’s okay, then I don’t care who is offended by that...
This is not a movie for the Democrat Party, and this is not a movie
designed to change the GOP...
RC: Do you think President Bush would like the
film?
JC: I don’t think he would like it because
it’s basically a condemnation of the very core essence of
his administration and the worldview of his advisers and the people
who have taken the country down this ruinous path. I think it hopefully
exposes it as a wanton, protectionist, criminal enterprise...I think
saying they’re an ideologue gives them too much credit. These
guys talk about wanting to reduce the size of government, keep government
off your backs, protect your Libertarian instincts—but then, at
any moment, when they have a chance to make a profit, violating
any of their principles, they do it...
RC: Will we see more politically-motivated pictures
from you, John?
JC: I’ve always thought, as an artist, that
you do what you think is right, you do what inspires you. And you
just let the chips fall where they may.
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