Cusack Talks

“There’s a revolving door in and out of the State Department and big business,” John Cusack is telling me, as we discuss the media’s pathetic performance in the run-up to the Iraq War. “You’ve got guys who work for Lockheed-Martin or Bechtel. They go on television and make the case for war on television, and they’re labeled ‘Statesman’ on CNN, because they may have held a position under Reagan or Bush 1.

“But do they sit on the board of defense companies? Shouldn’t they either make defense policy or profit from it? If they write op-ed pieces and say we have to go to war and we have to act now, shouldn’t you report that they were just awarded 2.3 billion in contracts? Don’t basic intellectual honesty and journalistic integrity ask you to point out the conflict of interest?”

It might seem as though Cusack – in town to promote his new War, Inc. – is referring to the recently exposed, probably illegal Pentagon propaganda operation, in which former military officers were sent out to news organizations as “analysts,” in order to “carry water for us” (as one internal document put it), and were rewarded with greater access or through their corporate positions – except that my interview with Cusack is taking place four days before that story came out.

It’s a sign, not of extrasensory precognition, but rather of how in touch Cusack is with the horror show of current American politics.

Now just a little shy of his 42nd birthday, Cusack has been starring in movies since his late teens. Like many actors, he took to developing and producing his own projects; like far fewer, he actually cowrote some of them. Like very, very few others, the films he’s cowritten – Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), High Fidelity (2000), and now War, Inc. – are among his best.

The title of War, Inc. (which was directed by Joshua Seftel) manages to convey, in six letters and two punctuation marks, the focus of this wildly free-ranging satire – the unholy convergence of government and huge corporate interests, as manifested in the grotesque foreign policy misadventures that have characterized the last seven years. This may sound heavy-handed and didactic, but War, Inc. runs riot through a fistful of genre conventions, starting like a modern spaghetti western, skidding toward the black comic tone of Grosse Pointe Blank, and reviving some of the outrageous energy of late-’60s/early-’70s cinema, particularly films like The President’s Analyst, The Candidate, and Network.

Cusack plays Brand Hauser, who is either a contract hit man or a government agent or a lethal corporate enforcer. It’s not that his job title is ambiguous; it’s that the distinctions have become vague to meaningless – one of the film’s central notions.

Hauser is dispatched by an ex-Vice President (Dan Aykroyd) to Turaqistan to assassinate Omar Sharif (Lyubomir Neikov) – not the actor, but a Turaqi oil minister, who may provide trouble for the Tamerlane Corporation, a multinational whose financial well-being trumps mere national security interests.

Hauser is a burnt-out case, who has to swig increasingly fiery shots of hot sauce to make it through his assignments. He is haunted by a Tragedy in His Past and would quit if quitting weren’t a presumed death sentence.

His cover is as a functionary for Tamerlane, in charge of staging a huge trade show – part of “the first totally outsourced war and USA expo!” Performing at the festivities is the Middle Eastern pop sensation Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff), essentially Britney Spears with an accent. Meanwhile, leftie reporter Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei) is trying to find out what’s actually going on and just who the hell Hauser really is; simultaneously he’s falling for her.

Cusack, who frequently blogs at the Huffington Post, is clearly well-informed and thus (inevitably) passionate about the Iraq War and the Bush administration.

CityBeat: How long ago did you start on this project?

John Cusack: I would say since Bush won reelection. I’d been working with Mark Leyner, one of the writers, and we’d been looking to write another project. We wanted to write something about American imperialism and the neoconservative movement, and put it through a different lens – an artistic, satiric lens.

We were thinking about people like Joseph Heller and Terry Southern, the people we admire in this area, the great ones, even Kafka. We decided to call Jeremy Pikser, another writer I admire, who did Bulworth and Reds with Warren Beatty. I think we just came together with the idea of “Let’s do something stylistically, and maybe spiritually, irreverent and as absurd as the ideology of these guys making policy that, in its application, is obscene and criminal.”

That was the impetus of the movie. It captures some of the insurrectionary spirit of dissent and satire, versus this obscene corporate narrative we’re fed. If you don’t put it through a different lens, you can’t get out of bed. And this is what we do. We tell stories; we’re filmmakers. So we decided to put our money where our mouth is.

What was the stylistic intent?

We were trying to make a subversive, commercial movie, playing around with the language of romantic comedies, but with other things going on it. Mark really loved samurai movies, like Lone Wolf and Cub. I hadn’t known about that one, but I loved the archetype, which is so connected to the western archetype the neocons exploit. We thought the samurai mythology was really fun; the Grosse Pointe character was like that too – the wayward mercenary, wandering around the wasteland with their code, looking for a cause. But they’re corrupt, and there’s corruption all around them.

So we thought we’d go with that samurai thing ... and just put a Telemundo soap opera in there ... and then put that into a blender with the Apocalypse. And whatever else you could think of – big George Foreman ... the Berrigan Brothers ... and Pee-Wee Herman. We thought it would sure be fun to not explain when we were going to shift from soap opera to the surreal to black humor and back to sincerity. Can it hold all those things? We didn’t know, but we thought it would be interesting to find out.

How directly were you looking at specific real-world events?

We just took trends and bits of what’s happening now and pushed it to a logical conclusion. Is it happening now? Well, yes: There are 180,000 contractors there, and there’s only 140,000 troops. We’re well on our way. Almost everything in this movie – even the most grotesque stuff – is rooted in facts. There is a trade show there; there are companies that make limbs for prosthetic legs and have direct ties to weapons manufacturers. This is all real; they’re not particularly subtle facts.

If you take the trends and follow them, it’s sort of reality plus. I like movies where you don’t know when you’re supposed to laugh, and you don’t know what kind of movie it is, and you don’t know exactly where you are. Is it okay to laugh? Am I supposed to laugh? It’s nice to be unsettled in a film once in a while, where it’s not, “Okay, here’s what this is. Here’s when I laugh. Here’s when I feel this. I can go along for the ride, and it fulfills the genre, maybe expertly or maybe poorly.” What about something that’s not that?

The character of Omar is as guilty as the people trying to kill him, but he also has this charm. He seemed to be in the mold of Ahmed Chalabi [the Iraqi exile who was crucial in pushing us to war].

A lot of the speech that I have Omar saying, I just took from Chalabi. Arianna [Huffington] is this amazingly connected person, so she’s always meeting really interesting people. She called me up in New York and said [he briefly imitates Huffington’s accent], “I’m going to see Chalabi speak on the Council of Foreign Relations, come with me.” So I went with her, and we went to meet Chalabi afterwards. You knew this guy was neck deep in the muck, as dirty as they come. And he thought he was using Arianna, and Arianna – just being the diplomat – was sitting there, being the wily Arianna and being a beautiful woman and letting this guy think he’s seducing her. It was the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen.

We said to him, “What did you think the plan was?” And he said, “The Americans didn’t have any plan. They went in guns blazing like John Wayne. They did what they always do – make it up as they go along. They’ll either make me president ... or maybe they’ll try to kill me. I don’t know.” I put that meeting right in the movie.

When you read about Chalabi specifically, it’s like he somehow took the entire establish-ment for a ride. To all these people high in the government he was The Guy Who Would Be Welcomed Back, which is patently insane. But I guess that’s what they wanted to hear.

Yeah. They were looking for people who would agree with what they wanted to do and would help make their argument. So there’s mutually assured destruction.

There’s the scene in War, Inc. where the allegedly “embedded” journalists are just sitting inside the Green Zone, with goggles and headsets, being fed this videogame/Disneyland version of what’s going on outside. I assume – I hope – that was an exaggeration.

Yeah, but that’s another case of following the trends to a logical conclusion. I’ve never been to Iraq, but I learned about the war from courageous journalists. But there are all these people in corporate media who just repeat White House talking points and all go to the same parties and just keep feeding the machine. They might as well have chips in the back of the head, because they’re not reporting the stuff that the brave, real journalists are finding out.

Finally, are you endorsing anyone?

I’ll endorse anybody who exposes this new economy. I think either one of them would be a vast improvement.

And “either one of them” doesn’t mean John McCain, right? One of the other two people?

I’m sure that McCain would be –

– more of the same?

– a disaster.