John Cusack for The Ice Harvest (2006) Interview

Exclusive John Cusack interview
5th May 2006
Posted by: Ryan Izay

Question: Another day another press junket. I hear it’s your favorite thing.

John Cusack: Yeah, if you like the movie. Did you like the movie? Be honest.

Q: I liked it a lot. I feel like it could have been a longer movie. Was there more of it before?

J.C.: No, everything we shot is pretty much in there.

Q: So what attracted you to the project?

J.C.: Well, Harold, and then I read a couple of pages and it was Benton and Russo, the guy who wrote Bonnie and Clyde, Bob Benton. These are great writers, and I think their take on this… I don’t know how you box a movie in, you call it a noir with comedy, but clearly a crime film and a film about characters whose illusions are exhausted and at the end of their rope, so I guess you come to that tradition, but I thought it would be interesting what all these guys would do with this. Some very well developed characters, sad kind of characters. I thought it was very interesting.

Q: So you are a fan of film noir?

J.C.: Yeah.

Q: Which is your favorite film noir?

J.C.: Oh, you know, I made a couple earlier in my career, and I loved the ones in the fifties. You know, The Killers, Kubrick movie, I think. That was pretty good. Asphalt jungle, John Huston. I’m just thinking of them off the top of my head. I’m sure you could name four others that are better. I can’t remember, you know.

Q: The film explores American male masculinity. Is that a theme that appealed to you?

J.C.: Yeah, I thought it was a particularly brutal take on it, but it made me laugh. There’s another version of the movie, that actually I think some people are seeing, where it would be so grim that it would actually be unbearable to watch. Just as a straight drama it would be so depressing, on Christmas Eve in a strip club in Wichita, your family has left you, you’re drunk, and you’re a mob lawyer. You’re sitting here with these dancers who are dancing for money, but it’s for you. There’s a promise of sex, but there’s no sex, and it’s a business transaction, night after night. It’s pretty grim. This one actually seemed very human and funny. I don’t know why. I mean, I kind of do know why.

Q: What do you think people in Kansas will say about this movie?

J.C.: I don’t know, it could be Wichita, it could be any heartland city.

Q: But there’s a certain comment made about Kansas, particularly towards the end of the film.

J.C.: They’ll be alright.

Q: You’re a Midwestern guy in general. Did this resonate with a certain version of the Midwest that you recognized yourself?

J.C.: the thing about Wichita is that it’s kind of symbolic of the heartland, some version of the American dream. I know that there’s more strip clubs and churches per capita than anywhere in the world. So that makes it a pretty interesting place.

Q: Six years after Pushing Tin, what was it like working with Billy Bob again?

J.C.: Great fun. Great fun. I love working with him. He’s such a talented man.

Q: Had the dynamic changed?

J.C.: No, it’s just like we picked it up where we left off. But we got to do sleazier, more interesting things.

Q: Is it more fun doing sleazier things like that?

J.C.: Yeah, I mean I think its fun because when the script is well written, you can understand why characters are doing what they’re doing, and you can start to fill in the blanks. You kind of accept their humanity. You’re not really judging them or accepting them, or saying this is morally acceptable behavior. You’re saying, I can understand how they got there and I can see my share in the humanity of the character, and then it starts to become sort of grim and funny.

Q: What is it about you that draws you to darker shades of comedy?

J.C.: I think the complexity of the characters. They’re just more interesting to do rather than just doing a stock archetype, or someone who’s just serving plot. If the motivation comes out of character, that’s pretty good. Characters in crisis make for the best comedy and drama, because a guy who’s really enlightened would sit in the same place and there wouldn’t be anything… there wouldn’t be as many interesting things to do. I just thought it was so interesting. He’d done his best to get what he thought American men are supposed to get, which was status, money, even get the trophy wife, get the women on the side, get all the alcohol you want, but none of it is making him happy. None of it’s filling him. Him and Pete, they’re looking at the picture of the table, they look at the chair, and there’s this great piece, he looks at the chair and says, “I couldn’t fill it,” and Charlie goes, “Neither could I, if it makes you feel any better.” That just sort of says it all. They couldn’t do it, so they’re leaving that version of the dream and their clinging to another one, which is the outlaw having one last big score and hitting the open road. That’s even dumber. These are some desperate cats.

Q: There were scenes where you were falling in the ice in this movie. Did you enjoy the weather in this film?

J.C.: I don’t like the wet part at all. The wet, cold part I don’t like, which I’ve been in a lot, but I don’t know why. I think writers and directors seem to want me wet and cold. I don’t know why. I love doing physical stuff. I love it.

Q: Do you find yourself being more selective in your work? You do a lot of edgy work. Is it important to you not to do just what Hollywood mainstream is?

J.C.: There’s so many reason to do stuff, and sometimes you do stuff because you want to work and that’s the best thing that’s offered to you, and sometimes you do stuff because you think it could be commercial and leverage movies to help you get movies like this made or Max, Grosse Point Blank, stuff that you like. But I think it’s always your response to a character or an idea, something that ignites your imagination, you think, “Yeah, I’ll go do that for four months, then wait for the editing process, and then go to press and talk about it. I like that enough to go do all that.” What that is and why you respond to that in life, I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be something different in a couple of years.

Q: Are you developing something on your own now?

J.C.: Yeah, I have a film I want to do next year called Pipe Dream, and I have another one which is more of a political satire in the vein of Grosse Point, with Jeremy Pikser, who wrote Bulworth and Reds with Warren Beatty. I’m developing a lot of my stuff and trying to have it reach critical mass where somebody actually puts money into it and you get to make them. When that happens it’s kind of mystical, so you just keep pushing. Someone says, “Okay, you get to make it,” and I go, “Really? I get to right now?” I don’t know when that happens. You just keep talking and meeting people until something happens and it becomes real.

Q: Are you interested in directing?

J.C.: Not yet. Someday, but I wanna just get them made, more like a writer and a producer than a director. I don’t wanna go to all those meetings. I like being in front of the camera if I developed it or wrote it. You get to work with people. I loved working with Harold and it’s not like I don’t feel like a filmmaker. You hire the director a lot of the time.

Q: In this movie, a lot of people comment that Charlie is not being himself that night. Does it pose a particular challenge to an actor to play a character who’s not being himself?

J.C.: Yeah, but in a way it’s interesting because what’s fun to do is figure out what’s going on in a character and then figure out what he would show, what he reveals to each character around him and himself. It’s kind of like in the beginning of the movie he’s had the best night of his life and he’s going to go on the adrenaline rush, I think because he’s been so inert for so long and he finally makes a break, he’s just on a kind of high from that and so he starts to act a little differently before things start to unravel. One of the great things about it is putting on the mask. The masks we put on to each other and to different people are different. So, that’s kind of a fun thing to play.

Q: So do you need to know as an actor what he would have been like a week before with all of these actors?

J.C.: I think you can imagine it, but that’s not what the drama is written about. The drama is usually written about people leading up to and after peak moments in their life. That’s usually where the action in a piece happens, but I definitely think you need to have a sense that him and Vic have been sitting on those bar stools talking about doing something different with their lives for a long time. I think you can hopefully feel that.

Q: How do you think he ended up there, sitting on those stools and working for the mob? He seems like a bright guy who could have been a lawyer in a different city.

J.C.: Yeah, I don’t know because the world is full of regret. You start to make some compromises, cut some corners, lie to yourself one too many times, take some short cuts, cheat on your wife, steal a little, and all of the sudden you wake up ten years later and you’re a different guy. It hasn’t happened to me, but we all know people.

Q: It’s also interesting that your character at the beginning of the film is not violent. He is just witnessing it.

J.C.: I don’t think Charlie has ever done violence. As a character I don’t think he’s been in two bar fights in his whole life.

Q: But then he is forced to.

J.C.: Yeah, he’s forced to, but he’s not a violent guy at all.

Q: What is The Martian Child about?

J.C.: It’s about a guy who is a science fiction writer and he’s a recent widower, and he and his wife were going to adopt a kid, but she dies and he gets a call from the adoption agency saying they have a kid for him. The kid thinks he’s from another planet, like a little David Bowie, The Man Who Fell to Earth. So it’s bout them trying to reach each other. He’s kind of a kid with special needs.

Q: Studio film?

J.C.: Yeah. New Line.

Q: What kind of dynamic do you and Oliver Platt have in that film?

J.C.: He’s play an agent, so he plays another funny character, but he’s not drunk. And he’s kind of a happier person than Pete is, but he’s very funny in it.

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