Which bits of the film reflect Cusack’s own experience? “Almost everything,” he says.
“I got another 15, 20 years before they say I’m old. For women it’s brutal. Bruce’s thing about if you’re 26, you’re menopausal? It’s only absurd because it’s a little bit further than the truth.”
“I have actress friends who are being put out to pasture at 29. They just want to open up another can of hot 22. It’s becoming almost like kiddie porn. It’s fucking weird.”
“People would look after you when I was a kid,” he says. “There were good people in the business. When I came to LA Rob Reiner said: ‘Come stay at my house.’ He taught me. I worked with Pacino [in 1996 crime drama City Hall]. Pacino would talk to you and mentor you. Now it’s different. The culture just eats young actors up and spits them out. It’s a hard thing to survive without finding safe harbour.”
“I think it’s very wise – and speaks highly of Robert [Pattinson] that he’s formed a thing with David. He can try to be good and have a space where he’s not just this product that’s going to be followed around by TMZ. That speaks to the healthier instincts of the guy. I don’t know if there’s that space for other people.”
“We could argue now that we don’t have a functioning democracy,” he says. “I would. That’s why I picked that thing to fight. I know that this [he grimaces at my iPhone] can be turned into a microphone and they can be taping our conversations right now. It’s not that I’m paranoid. I know it.”
“There’s a slicing and dicing of what people should think about,” he says. “Why can’t you make larger connections? I made a couple of films – Max [Cusack plays a fictional Munich art dealer conflicted over exhibiting work by the young Adolf Hitler] and War Inc [a satire about US economic expansionism] that were radical, political films. War Inc was interesting because it was a reaction to the opening up of new markets at the point of a gun in Iraq.
“We’re seeing that happen now. War Inc was savaged by regular movie critics. But then there was a whole realm of people who don’t write about entertainment who were writing about it totally differently.”
“Why wouldn’t you have contempt for the movie business?” he says. “It sucks most of the time.”
“My friend Joe Roth ran Disney [until 2000],” he says. “He made things like The Rock and Con Air to make shareholders happy, but then he also gave six or seven slots to people he liked. I got to make High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blank. Spike Lee got to make Summer of Sam. Wes Anderson got to make Rushmore. I had that memory of film and that’s gone.”
The whole “one for you, one for them” system has broken down, he says: “Now it’s six for them – with a committee cutting the film who weren’t part of making it – and maybe one for you. If I could do something like sell watches in China, then I would do that and just make movies like Maps.”