John Cusack wastes no time getting down to business. "I've made 10 good films," says the 41-year-old actor shortly after striding into the Berlin hotel room in a backwards baseball cap and sprawling in an armchair. "I'm sure you know which ones they are. The ones that suck I tend to blank out. It's like I never even made them." I'm slightly taken aback at his honesty, though his tally is in the right ballpark. Here's my list: The Sure Thing, Eight Men Out, Say Anything, The Grifters, Bullets Over Broadway, Grosse Pointe Blank, The Thin Red Line, Being John Malkovich, High Fidelity, Max - that pretty much covers it. But has he really made 40 movies that suck? He mulls it over. "Well, there aren't 40 that are great, put it that way." He pauses for an eternity, eyes widening. "But that's fine. Ten is a good batting average, don't you think?"
To that hallowed 10 he now adds his latest picture, a claustrophobic chiller called 1408. What a happy coincidence, you might think: the movie he happens to be promoting this week is one about which he is cock-a-hoop. But it doesn't take long in Cusack's company to realize he's a straight-shooter. Isn't that why audiences respond to him? Whether he's playing chirpy and idealistic (Say Anything) or amoral (The Grifters, Grosse Pointe Blank), he cuts through the celebrity fog that surrounds so many performers of his stature and generation; you feel you're getting something real, even if another of his selling-points is paradoxically that you can never be sure of its precise nature. "This John Cusack guy: I always see something going on in there, and I don't know what it is," remarked the late Robert Altman. And if Altman couldn't define it, what hope have the rest of us?
Not only has Cusack learned a lot about the way the industry works in his 20-plus years as an actor, but he is eager to share his findings; and to shatter any illusions I might have about how an actor such as him comes to make the films he does - only 20 percent of which, don't forget, are actually any good. So it's unlikely he would beat around the bush if he had reservations about 1408. It is adapted from a Stephen King story (Cusack's second: he was the hero's idealized older brother in Stand by Me) about a hack who checks into a malevolent hotel room as research for a book on haunted hostelries. What he encounters there is a radio clock that only plays the Carpenters, eerie paintings that spill free of their frames and a hammer-wielding assailant with a scary receding hairline.
He falters somewhat talking about the finished film. "If I'm in something that I think is kinda good, it stays with me like a fever dream for a long time afterwards. I don't recall the finished product so much as the feeling of making it." Working largely on his own altered the typical film-making dynamic: if being on a movie set is like living in a bubble, then Cusack was in a bubble within that bubble.
"It was all so intimate," he enthuses. "The director, the cinematographer and I created our own little world, with its rules and internal logic that only we understood. I loved it because it was a high-wire act. I knew that if it worked, it would be great, and if it didn't, I'd fall on my ass real hard. It's insane doing something where you don't know whether it's going to work on any level, but it's so exciting." His long face crinkles into a grin.
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