Quint's politically charged interview with John Cusack about WAR, INC. has finally arrived!

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. This interview is a long time coming. For those fans of REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER, like me, this interview happened the week before his appearance on that show. With that on the horizon and the political charge of the film we’re discussing, WAR, INC, we get an interview with a lot of political opinions going back and forth. Needless to say, we’re both pretty liberal people, so we didn’t disagree about much, but I thought it’d be best to kind of stand back and let him take the floor. Anyway, I still haven’t seen the movie. Can’t wait to. In the meantime, here’s the chat I had with John Cusack. Enjoy!

Quint: Hey, how’s it going?

John Cusack: Pretty good man. How are you?

Quint: I’m doing well. I’m doing a lot of catch up; I have been pretty much nonstop since Sundance, so I’m finally getting a chance to relax a little bit.

John Cusack: Good.

Quint: Well thanks for talking with me. I really appreciate it. I’m really curious about the project, because the other films that you have a co-writer credit on are some of my favorites that you have made, like HIGH FIDELITY and GROSSE POINTE BLANK.

John Cusack: Well, thanks.

Quint: What do you pick to be that involved in? Your writing credits… are these collaborations from the beginning or do you come in and get a script and then do a polish or something?

John Cusack: No, I’m there at the beginning of all of them.

Quint: What do you pick to get that involved with? Does it always start with an idea like you go out and find the book, like for HIGH FIDELITY, or did you find the idea for WAR INC?

John Cusack: Yes. GROSSE POINTE BLANK was an original idea and the three of us, two are my writing partners, worked on that and then we did it over at Disney when Joe Roth was running Disney. He was a friend and a great benefactor to my career, so we had done that and then Disney had the rights and so Kathy Nelson who did the music with us was sitting with Joe in one of her meetings and she said. “Well we have this property and we have already got the three guys to write it.” Literally I got it just sent to my desk. We just got sent this great book and they said “Do you want to write this?” Before they had even finished the sentence we said yes. That was just pure luck and the good fortune of Joe and Kathy and that’s how that came to be.

Quint: Nice and that was for FIDELITY, right?

John Cusack: Yeah, that was like the last year Joe Roth was head of Disney.

Quint: Cool and then how did you come to WAR, INC then?

John Cusack: With WAR, INC I had wanted to make something when the Bush administration invaded Iraq and you saw the shock and awe of the thing. It was like a biblical, Jehovah like air to it and I thought it was so ill conceived that they would be doing that and predicating the whole thing on lies and putting troops and their families at risk and Iraqi people and all of the stuff that the soldiers would have to endure. I then thought that I would want to do a kind of a real time sort of response to it in the tradition of mockery of the rich and the powerful and institutions and all of that stuff.

Quint: Definitely and doing it, at least judging from the trailer, it looks like it is a very satire rich film. I saw Jason Reitman talk and he was saying that with comedy and satire, he can say so much more than he could with a drama, because when you do a drama, unless you do it just right, people will feel preached to, but with comedy you can slide it in there.

John Cusack: I think of even the great tradition of political cartoons…

Quint: Yeah, definitely.

John Cusack: You can get to a harder truth than you can when you don’t put it that way, but I think the tradition of taking on the power elites and aristocracy which this administration is clearly part of, kind of a corporate aristocracy, but I think it’s healthy and great in the tradition of insurrection and change. You know, tell alternate versions of history that aren’t kind of a corporate history… so that’s the tradition we have, so we decided we would go and do this and go make a punk rock song about war profiteering.

Quint: Are you excited this year? Everybody I know is caught up in the excitement and I don’t… I have some friends that voted for Bush in 2000 elections and they are campaigning aggressively for Barack Obama and I think the combination of having a couple of really interesting candidates for the nomination and seeing the Bush administration leave office is making this a really exciting time.

John Cusack: I think it is an exciting time, but I also think it’s a dangerous time, because it’s almost like people who have a sense of what is happening or what has happened to this country are almost exhausted and numb and the people who have done this to this country are kind of rabid in its self defense in its agenda, so I’m very, very hopeful that there is so much energy going on to kind of reverse this, but I don’t take it for granted that the Democrats are going to win. I think we need to broaden the debate and I think one of the things about the movie that I think is pretty cool is that it’s challenging the fundamental concepts and nature of what the war is, which is an extension of this ultra-ultra right wing kind of fundamentalist ideology where everything is about corporate interest in the free markets and expanding the markets. These companies should just set up shop right inside the state department and just use the government as an ATM and ultimately the thing that is crazy about it is that it’s not even a free market. It’s like a protectionist’s bracket and they have got it totally rigged, so that’s even a lie, but the whole idea that what’s good for Bechtel and Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, and all of these companies… what’s good for them is what is good for American foreign policies is just a hideous obscene lie.

Quint: And when they have so many direct ties with those in power making those decisions…

John Cusack: You have people going on TV saying “We must act now” and they are sitting on a board for a company that when war happens, their stock is going to quadruple and so in a sense they are being honest, “We must act now, because it’s the corporation’s duty to make profit for it’s share holders.” That doesn’t mean that they should be making foreign policy decisions with unlimited access to the budget of the country or that they should be able to invade sovereign nations, because their ideology says that “this is the way we are going to reach a utopia on Earth” through corporate free market, which by the way aren’t even free. It’s just hypocrisy and the extent of lies are so intense that you can’t even turn the television on without your eyes watering.

Quint: Now in your film…

John Cusack: It’s out of that outrage that we thought, me and Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser and the director and some of the actors, we thought “Well, were are going to do this and put it out there and then we won’t have to stand in the darkest period of America in our lifetime that we just didn’t do anything.” Besides being in the political system, certainly we can make art and hopefully piss off some people, the right kind of people…

Quint: And in the film, the corporation that is pretty much taking over is headed by the ex president, right?

John Cusack: Yeah, well there is a company that is sort of set loosely in the future, but it’s saying that the next place that they invade besides Iraq for their “free markets” is headed by a guy who was a former vice president and you can guess who that is.

[Both Laugh]

John Cusack: But in this war, it’s the first one hundred percent outsourced war, so right now we have more contractors there than troops, so maybe in the future congress won’t even have to declare war, because it can just get private contractors and mercenaries and we can just exempt them from international law, right? That’s what is really happening right now in the country and they even outsource interrogation, which means they made interrogations a cost plus for profit business, so that means the torture is for profit. That is what is happening right now in our country, so I mean these people are insane and that’s the truth of it. They are insane and I would love to hear one or any of the Democratic candidates talk about that and talk about this new economy and what that means. They are outsourcing what it means to be a state and what it means to be a government. That’s not just destroying the new deal, that’s destroying the country and I would like to see any well meaning Libertarian or Republican that could argue for that or Democrats. All parties should expose and disgrace this kind of ideology.

Quint: Yeah, it seems that Washington is just so entrenched in that kind of business that it… everybody seems to be like “Well that’s the game and we have to play it.”

John Cusack: There’s that sense of “We have to accept this narrative about the way the world is” and this sort of sense of inevitability about the corporations and what they do. “They are the government and we can’t touch that,” but you know we don’t have to believe that. It isn’t inevitable.

Quint: I saw that you are going on Bill Maher this Friday?

John Cusack: Yeah.

Quint: Is this the kind of stuff you are going to try to bring up there? It’s a very succinct argument and I think a lot of people have been trying to talk about this kind of thing but haven’t been able to really nail it within the confines of the corporate structure. h2>

[The representative says to wrap it up.]

John Cusack: I believe in it and part of the thing is no matter how successful the movie is or isn’t, we just went to go do it and it was just such an emotional thing to do and we tried our best and worked hard on such a small budget. What we really hope is that people say “Hey wait a minute, we don’t have to just lay back. At the very least we can tell these people to fuck off.”

Quint: Yeah, the discussion has to start and I think that we have… I don’t know what your feelings are on Obama, but I think why he is so popular right now is because he does kind of represent that person that isn’t willing to take lobbyist money, that isn’t willing to do all of this stuff and a lot of people say that they want change, but I think that his popularity is actual proof that when you actually see it effectively it can actually work for you, you know?

John Cusack: Yeah, and also I would love to have this film be a part of the jumping off conversation that would make the Democrats answer this question too, because the Democrats are complicent in this, too. They can speak out about this, because this is happening under their watch, too. You can make an argument like “Yeah they didn’t have 60 votes and it was a pure political reason,” but they can shut down congress every day just to let it be known that American companies aren’t allowed to just torture people. So I would love to be part of a larger discussion.

Quint: Alright cool. Thanks, good luck with the film, and good luck on Bill Maher.

John Cusack: You, too. See you down the road.

Quint: Alright, bye.


And that’s it. Thanks for reading our political rantings. Hope you enjoyed it! -Quint quint@aintitcool.com