By Cole Smithey 
It’s easy to take John Cusack for granted. The 41-year-old actor with more than 50 movies to his credit readily admits that he’s made 10 good films. The self-deprecating statistic is a clue to Cusack’s unpretentious value system that has informed his portrayal of unforgettable characters in movies like "The Grifters," "Grosse Point Blank," "High Fidelity," and "Runaway Jury." His one-man showcase performance in this summer’s breakout thriller "1408" showed Cusack’s ability to effortlessly modulate a complex character arc in a finite narrative space. John Cusack is a Hollywood star in the same vein as a Jimmy Stewart or a Warren Beatty; he has a wide-ranging appeal that he leverages into a variety of big studio and independent projects.
At the moment, Cusack has two films hitting cinemas ("Grace is Gone" and "Martian Child") in which he plays a widowed father struggling to communicate with children. I had the honor of sitting down with Mr. Cusack at Manhattan’s Regency hotel to discuss his recent roles, future projects, and his first job.
CS: How was it working with the child actor Bobby Coleman on "Martian Child"? Did he remember his lines?
JC: It’s amazing but he was a stone-cold professional. He came in ready to go in each scene—had thought about the character and about what he would or wouldn’t do. It was as if he’d been doing it for twenty years. It was a little bit freaky. It was definitely eerie how good he was, because I thought how does anybody know how to do anything? You know–you’ve only been alive eight or nine years. How have you managed to figure this out?
CS: You must spend time with your sister’s (Joan Cusack) children. What kind of uncle are you?
JC: I’m not a disciplinarian. I rev them up and work them into a frenzy, and then I leave. So after the apartment’s destroyed, they have to try to calm them down. It’s their own fault. They were born bad. I help them achieve their inner demon.
CS: You have two movies out with you as a father figure. Does it get you thinking about having children of your own?
JC: Everything usually happens the opposite with me, like I’ll practice something in a film, and then I can do it. Whereas usually it’s the other way around. People have to have the experience first—everything works opposite with me. Like if I work out, I get smaller.
CS: You have a movie coming out related to the war in Iraq.
JC: It’s called "Grace is Gone," I’m one of the producers of it, and writer/first-time director James C. Strouse did it. It’s about a military family and I play a believer in the war and the cause. Then he gets a knock on the door, and he has to take his girls on a road trip because he can’t tell them that their mother has been killed in the war. He wants to buy some time, and stave off a nervous breakdown. It’s a pretty gut-wrenching movie about grief and loss, and the Iraq war, but in an interesting non-partisan, non-soap-boxy way. People [who have seen it] are feeling that it has a universal appeal. I play a conservative right-winger who’s absolutely gung-ho with supporting the war, so it’s about the ultimate sacrifice that these military families have to pay and what they’re going through.
There have to be some issues that are above the left/right bickering, and the common rubble of the talk show box that everybody puts everybody in. The war is abstract to a lot of us. It’s over there, you can go shopping. It’s lasted longer than World War II; it’s unbelievable the carnage and insanity. The difference here is that then there was a draft. Now they’re outsourcing it out to private mercenaries.
CS: Marisa Tomei said that she’s playing a journalist in the film "War, inc." that you produced. Is it a black comedy set in the Middle East?
JC: Yeah, that’s about as unrestrained as "Grace is Gone" is restrained. That’s about war profiteers; the absolute opposite of family sacrifice. Sometimes I think farce and absurdist stuff is the way to play around with some of the darker truths. I love black comedy.
CS: Have you given any thought to the current trend of magical realism movies like "Martian Child," "Lars and the Real Girl," or "Pan’s Labyrinth"?
JC: I think maybe people are looking towards a different way, because we all have the facts but none of them make sense. None of the logic is logical anymore. It’s a kind of a dark time. So I think it would make sense that people are looking for something else.
CS: Is producing more rewarding than acting?
JC: The projects are harder to get going, and it gets harder and harder in this climate because, literally, everybody is just afraid to take risks. The movie business is shrinking and they’re just making less movies or more big movies so it’s very hard to get movies made.
CS: Did you get some satisfaction from knowing how well "1408" did as a summer movie?
JC: Yeah, that’s nice. That was really fun.
CS: Do you remember the first job you got paid for?
JC: Shoveling snow. I shoveled snow for the Robert Crown family. The rumor was that it was the RC Cola estate. So we went there and told them we’d shovel their snow, and we did. We thought we were going to get like a million dollars, and they underpaid us so we just pushed all of the snow back.
CS: What music are you listening to right now?
JC: I was listening to the new Bruce Springsteen album ["Magic"].
