Good Boy, Bad Boy

John Cusack has set his own pattern in Hollywood, alternately playing the game and fighting it.
Richard Rayner finds out why he's in for the long haul.

Spend a couple of hours with John Cusack and you get the sense of a highly intelligent, ambitious, sensitive, watchful, likable guy who might also be a little arrogant, is struggling with that tendency and doesn’t care much for being famous and giving interviews. This isn’t his idea of fun or even psychological theater. But, then, he’s in the bind of every performer who wants to be both a serious artist and taken seriously as a player in Hollywood: There comes a point when it’s simply necessary to play the game.
Cusack, 32, has been a movie star since he was in his late teens, but it’s really only since the success in 1997 of Grosse Pointe Blank that the potential upside of playing Hollywood politics seems to have been very much on his mind. Grosse Pointe Blank was the first movie produced by New Crime, the company he started with his high school buddies Steve Pink and D.V. DeVincentis. Cusack cowrote the script and starred as a hit man with a cat and a therapist who goes to his high school reunion. In a darkly comic, violent and romantic way, the movie expressed various ambivalencies that Cusack has about both corporate America and the fact of being a man for hire. It felt very much like a declaration of identity, and now Cusack, through New Crime, wants to produce more movies - which means a trade-off. “Ideally I’d like to alternate: do one of mine and then do one of theirs,” he says.
Cusack is tall, rangy, athletic looking (he plays basketball and kick-boxes) with a thin nose, a sharp mouth, expressive black eyebrows and a high forehead. His is an unassertive sort of handsomeness, well suited to playing characters who can seem pained and put-upon as well as cool. We meet in the freezing basement of the Shark Pit, a groovy bar in Calgary, Canada, the city where he’s shooting a New Crime picture called The Jack Bull. Cusack smokes, sips black coffee and is dressed like the slacker punk he never quite was, in a black coat, mottled green combat pants, sneakers and a ski cap that reads PUSHING TIN, a movie coming from 20th Century Fox this spring, whose plot, about two macho, dominant, messianic air-traffic controllers who become involved in a contest of wits and wills, is based on a New York Times magazine article . Directed by Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco, Four Weddings and a Funeral) and costarring Billy Bob Thornton, it’s a frat-house comedy set within the framework of two men’s midlife crises. The Jack Bull, meanwhile, which is being shot for HBO on a budget of $9.4 million, is a downbeat Western based on a story by Heinrich van Kleist and with a script by Cusack’s father, Dick. The Jack Bull, in other words, is very much one of Cusack’s own, and Pushing Tin is one of theirs. The fourth of five siblings (his elder sister Joan, Oscar nominated for Working Girl and In & Out, took a role in Grosse Pointe Blank), Cusack grew up in an Irish-Catholic family in Evanston, IL, a middle-class suburb of Chicago. “We lived halfway down the street, right across from a park, right next to the lake,” he says, “so it was a beautiful place to grow up. But it wasn’t all wealth. There were poor areas, a mixed demographic. My high school was 60 percent black.” His mother is a former math teacher, and his father is a writer who makes documentary films. Both were politically active, and Cusack grew up with a left-leaning skepticism about authority and the System. As a child he acted in Chicago’s Piven Theater Workshop, run by the parents of his friend and fellow actor Jeremy Piven (other graduates ihclude Aidan Quinn and Rosanna Arquette). He hated school, did radio voice-overs for McDonald’s and Heinz commercials, was in his first film at 16 (a small part in Class with Rob Lowe and Jacqueline Bisset), dropped out of N.Y.U. after one semester and then landed the starring role in Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing.
Despite his relative youth, Cusack has been around for so long that we feel we’ve grown up with him. In the early phase of his career - think not only of The Sure Thing but of Savage Steve Holland’s Better Off Dead and Cameron Crowe's epochal Say Anything (in which Cusack wooed the class brain, lone Skye, by holding a boom box over his head playing Peter Gabriel, a goofy scene that worked because Cusack made evident his pain at having to do it) - he was the antislick teen underdog who always wound up with the girl, even if she wasn’t the girl his character originally intended. The first big change of direction came when he was cast opposite Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening as the con man Roy Dillon in Stephen Frears’ The Grifters. To research his character, he hung out with professional liars, gamblers and grifters. “I learned to cheat professionally,” he says with a wry smile.
Has that been useful?
He backs off a little, weighing the benefits of taking this riff any further, perhaps wondering whether to do so might run the chance of being misinterpreted, or come off as unsmart or unfunny, a prospect that I suspect alarms Cusack more than somewhat. And yet this is the same man who once, years ago, gave a Good Morning America interview so obnoxious that the segment never ran. He’s a cool cat these days, but a wary one, and he takes a sip of coffee before resuming: “The usual basis for the grift is that you have information the other person doesn’t. Don’t we all like to be in that situation? Certainly people who decide to lie do. Lawyers, movie producers, any kind of lobbyist.”
Cusack says that a large part of his motivation in being an actor has always been the idea that if he perseveres and takes the right sorts of chances, he might be involved in things that end up being regarded as great. With The Grifters, which had the feel of a classic on the first day of its release, he succeeded, and the kudos he gained brought him to the attention of Woody Allen, who cast him first in Shadows and Fog and then as the pretentious bespectacled playwright in the splendid Bullets Over Broadway. “Believe it or not, Woody Allen is not a very fearful man,” says Cusack. “He’s extremely confident in his talents, so he encourages you to improvise. He wants to hear the natural rhythms of speech and interaction, and he’s not interested in having his text be read and studied like Shakespeare. He’s interested in the moment.”
Which very much corresponds to Cusack’s own vision of how acting should be: "React, act, riff, put some Cassavetes in there - not in place of the text but to embellish the stuff,” he says. It’s an approach that is often at odds with the high-pressure, big-budget ethos of Hollywood pictures. Movies he’s turned down include box office hits like Sleeping With the Enemy, Indecent Proposal, White Men Can’t Jump (he’d have been lovely in that) and Apollo 13. "I don’t have to worry so much about money,” Cusack says. “Not that I’m so wealthy either, but I do have the luxury of choice. It’s just too much work if you know going in that the best a thing can be is only okay. It has to have the chance of being something special, otherwise it’s so tedious dealing with the politics and aggro.”
Eventually he realized that he’d better get himself in a popcorn movie and, after years of resisting such offers, starred alongside Nicolas Cage and John Malkovich in 1997’s Con Air, a veritable blueprint for a brainless summer flick. It was a $100 million-plus hit and, as Cusack acknowledges, a necessary stepping-stone that, together with Grosse Pointe Blank, has added to his clout. But as if in revenge, or as if to reassert the nature of his yin and yang contribution to contemporary American cinema, another release this year will see him teamed with Malkovich again, in the absurdist comedy Being John Malkovich, directed by Spike Jonze, in which he plays a lowly puppeteer who discovers a vaginalike portal that literally allows him to be reborn as John Malkovich.
Cusack’s voice, in talking about the movie, comes to life with a sly humor. His eyes do more than that - they light up with a delightful wicked glee. “John Malkovich is an intellectual, he’s a bon vivant, he’s a great thespian of the 20th century. If you were a lowly puppeteer living in a hovel, wouldn’t you like to be him? Think of the perks,” he says. “Until now I’d always thought that How to Get Ahead in Advertising was the darkest movie ever made. And this movie may just be that dark, that fucking sick.”
And he likes that?
“Man, I couldn’t believe we were making it. I would have paid them to let me do it. Let’s just say that my character gets to do some very creative things with a whole array of puppets.”
By the mid-'90s Cusack was able to define the qualities that make a movie work and to attempt to replicate the better side of things in his own productions. “It’s all about having the script ready, surrounding yourself with the best technicians, creating an atmosphere for the actors, especially treating people with respect and yet being demanding of them,” he says. ‘“Years ago, on The Sure Thing, Rob Reiner made me feel that I could do no wrong so long as I gave it everything I had, and that’s a wonderful place for an actor to be. I thought that was how it was gonna be all the time. I only learned later, ‘Oh, no, no.’ A lot of times the process of getting a film made is so hectic that the acting just happens. It’s the last thing that people deal with. When, of course, it should be the first thing.”
New Crime has its offices in a Venice loft, where Cusack keeps a huge jukebox as well as punching bags, judo mats and various workstations: he also has homes in Malibu and his beloved Chicago. After wrapping The Jack Bull, Cusack will head back to Los Angeles to view the finished versions of Pushing Tin and Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, in which he plays an officer who wins the Congressional Medal of Honor for his role in the assault on Guadalcanal. Then it’s on to England to work with director Stephen Frears on the script Cusack has been writing with his New Crime partners for Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, due to begin shootiig this summer. “I love the male idiocy of the piece, its male confessional aspect,” he says. ‘“There are all these guys out there who want to hold onto what was working for them in their 20s. They’re not ready to move on yet, and while they vacillate, women just cut them up. It’s a brutal window, before they move into fully fledged adult-hood and let go of that running-with-the-pack mentality.”
I wondered whether he could relate in particular to this aspect of the Hornby novel. After all, in recent years, Cusack has been linked with actresses Alison Eastwood (Clint’s daughter and Cusack’s costar in Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil), Minnie Driver (his costar in Grosse Pointe Blank) and Claire Forlani, but as yet there’s no sign of permanent attachment, no hint of little Cusacks on the way, no shrugging aside of the mantle of the guy who likes to hang with the guys.
“Oh sure, I can relate to it. Maybe I’m right in the midst of it, but I hope that I’m a little ahead of that state of mind, although it might take a lifetime to totally remove it,” he says, “A smart, sensitive 25.year-old woman is always more mature than a 35-year-old man. They’re just mere evolved than us. They have their own psychodramas, but the good ones, they age quicker, they get to the other side better and sooner.”
Cusack says he wants his career to last 50 years, and you can believe that it might. Of his teen-movie peers, the likes of Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald and Charlie Sheen have fallen by the wayside, and Tom Cruise has metamorphosed into something beyond the A-list. Nicolas Cage is right up there, but Cusack is obviously more cerebral, and not such a big star in the old mythic sense, more of a true dramatic performer. He has the determination and integrity to keep himself on track, both with his own projects and those that the studios send his way. He’s had his own psychodramas, no doubt, but he’s coming through to the other side.