"It's absolutely true," he says. "No one cares. The movies have got more corporate, they're making fewer movies in general and those they are making are all US$200 million $300 million tent-pole releases that eat up all the oxygen."
This may seem rich coming from a man who profited from exactly that species of movie when he appeared as an FBI agent in the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced blockbuster Con Air. Yes, his character wore sandals and quoted Dostoevsky, but he still ended the film wrestling the bad guy atop a speeding fire engine. At the time, Cusack claimed he did Con Air because it had come time for him to be a businessman. "You know: get my name above the title, my face on a billboard," he told me in 1997. "I use those kinds of films to get leverage," he says now. "You wouldn't think Con Air had anything to do with Max, but in my career it does. It's doing Con Air, or doing romantic comedies, that makes Max possible. The bad stuff you just try to make as good as you can."
It may be pragmatic, but isn't it also depressing? "Sure, it's depressing." Another long, wide-eyed pause. "But you aren't gonna talk about that in the press. 'Poor John, he's depressed because he can't have it all his way' - you know, with everything going on in the world that's going to sound ridiculous." He hoots at the thought. "I get to do the stuff I want. I have a good voice, I think, and it comes through in my work."
To illustrate this, he cites two upcoming films concerned in varying degrees with war: Grace Is Gone, in which he plays a man whose wife is killed in Iraq, and War, Inc, a "spiritual cousin to Grosse Pointe Blank," and partly inspired by Naomi Klein's article Baghdad Year Zero.
You can see the strategy in juggling such disparate projects, but from the outside it resembles a kind of personality crisis. When the same actor who throws himself into writing, producing and starring in War, Inc or Grosse Pointe Blank turns up in featherweight romantic daydreams such as Serendipity or Must Love Dogs, it's as though there are two John Cusacks walking the earth.
To his credit, he retains a palpable sense of mystery on screen and off; the most diligent showbiz reporter would be hard-pressed to fill a paragraph about him. "The thing about John," says Mikael Hafstrom, the director of 1408, "is that he is full of secrets. You never read anything about him in the gossip papers, he doesn't talk about his private life, so you never feel you've had enough of him." Cusack calls it his survival instinct. "It seems like common sense to me. When I was growing up, I never wanted to know what my favorite musicians or artists ate for breakfast, or who they were dating. I found out what they felt about the world from their work."
On the downside, there is the real possibility that he will get taken for granted - that he'll always be there, being wry and enigmatic, and is destined never to receive proper approbation. He was daring in The Grifters and Being John Malkovich, and droll in Bullets Over Broadway, and yet on all those occasions he had to stand by as virtually everyone associated with those films, from the caterer upwards, was nominated for Academy Awards while he - the leading man, no less, in all three cases - was overlooked. Doesn't he want an award? "Do you have one?" he shoots back, mock-excitedly. "If you wanna give me an award, I'll take it. Just don't make me go to the party afterwards."
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