John Cusack.

• Author: Swanson, Jim
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

John Cusack is an intense actor. He has starred in such films as The Grifters, True Colors, Being John Malkovich, High Fidelity, Cradle Will Rock, and Grace Is Gone .

Now he's the prime mover behind War, Inc. , which opened in May. He helped write, produce, and star in the picture, along with Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Marisa Tomei, Joan Cusack, and Hilary Duff. It's a satire on a fictional country where an entire war is outsourced to corporations. Sound familiar?

Not afraid to enter the political ring, Cusack also recently narrated a MoveOn ad that criticizes John McCain.

I interviewed him on May 23 for Progressive News Radio, and I found him eager to talk about not only the film but the politics behind it.

Q: How did the writing process get started?

John Cusack: We wanted to do something about the situation the country's been forced into by this neoconservative movement that's taken over this country. It's been plotting to do these types of things and working at them openly for thirty or thirty-five years: the evisceration of the government and the promotion of the corporatist worldview where everything is privatized. It wants to drown the government and then say it doesn't work. And then in the meantime just create a feeding frenzy for these corporations.

It's kind of reached its apotheosis in Iraq. I studied what the Bush Administration was up to, and realized it was worse than most of your fears, so I thought that probably putting an absurdist lens on the situation was maybe the only way to get the information out there.

The Republicans and the Democrats have enabled this kind of fiasco. We're deeply and savagely down the rabbit hole. As writers, we wanted to express that, call things what they are, and then do a story. We sort of conceived it at the peak of Bush's popularity, right after the statue had fallen and "Mission Accomplished" was proclaimed. We figured it would be a good idea not to be cowed. So we decided to make a film where we didn't pull any punches. And we didn't. We hope it can be part of a larger conversation.

Q: How excited was the rest of the cast to come on board with you?

Cusack: Oh, they were thrilled. A lot of people know that something very drastic has happened to the very idea of America. People know that the Bush Administration has tried to gut the country, to really destroy it. People are angry, they're pissed off. They really feel it doesn't represent them, or their interests, or their ideology, or their...