John Cusack Talks War, Inc.
This entry was posted on 4/29/2008 4:10 PM and is filed under Politics,Interviews,Musings.
In advance support for
War, Inc., releasing May 23 from First Look after its not very well received Tribeca presentation, writer-actor
John Cusack sits for
an interview of decent length with the English language Al Jazeera channel, which can be found in two parts on YouTube (
part one here, running six-and-a-half minutes;
part two here, running 13-plus minutes, the first five-and-a-half of which can be skipped since they focus on celebrities more broadly). A political satire about the privatization of war — co-written by Cusack, with Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser (who did good things with
Bulworth), and starring he,
Marisa Tomei, Ben Kingsley,
Hilary Duff and Dan Aykroyd —
the movie finds the dryly sardonic Fan of Black slipping back into a pro forma version of his conflicted Grosse Pointe Blank hit man, here sent to bump off a Middle Eastern oil minister and consolidate power for an American company run by a former vice president.
Mainly because the questions seem to come from Billy Bush, the chat is fairly reserved and full of expected stuff — Cusack deriding the "conveyor belt" mentality pervasive in society today, and talking about keeping his sense of outrage and independence — though one wonders how it plays overseas. The most interesting portion comes late in the interview, when Cusack says that
there's a "vision of the world that corporate ethics are our national interests. And I just don't think as a citizen, or a spiritual creature, or even as a thinking creature that we should accept that. I don't want to be a shareholder in a great, ecumenical college of corporations. That's not my thing. I don't want to join that party."
