John Cusack Interview about "Must Love Dogs"

John Cusack Returns to Romantic Comedies with "Must Love Dogs"

Cusack on "Must Love Dogs," Choosing Roles, and Working with Diane Lane

John Cusack and "Must Love Dogs:" John Cusack has plenty of dramatic roles on his resume, including recent starring turns in "Runaway Jury" and the indie film, "Max." But to me he'll forever be known as the guy who gave us the best teen angst romantic comedies of the 1980s. "Better Off Dead," "The Sure Thing," "One Crazy Summer" and the best of the bunch - "Say Anything" - helped make John Cusack into one of the most recognizable actors of his generation.
Cusack adds another romantic comedy notch on his belt with "Must Love Dogs," an adult relationship comedy about Internet dating and finding the perfect partner.

John Cusack on His Decision to Do Another Romantic Comedy: “I was going to go off and do a film in Europe, and the way things happen in the film business so many times, it fell apart at the last minute.

I thought, ‘I’m going to be sitting home right now not working.’ I hadn’t had any of my own projects ready, and I then I had a call saying, ‘You’ve got to meet this guy Gary Goldberg. He really wants to talk to you.’
So I went and met him for lunch and he seemed like a great guy, and I read the script. So it just sort of came out of the blue, and they asked me to do it. But I thought the combination of Gary and Diane [Lane] and Chris Plummer – that’s a pretty great pedigree, so I was kind of happy to be asked to join such a great group.”

On Typecasting as the Go-To Romantic Comedy Guy: “I don’t think of it that way, as type casting. I think if I get offered to do a movie about relationships I’m going to download as much of what I think about them into a part, or what seems funny to me about it, or what’s on my mind about it. So, if I get offered those parts and think they can be good…

It seems to me that one thing people do over and over again is try to figure out how to get married, stay married, fall in love, how to rekindle all this stuff. It seems to me to be a pretty eternal theme so I don’t know if you can get typecast from making movies about men relating to women. It seems to be what is going on on the planet a lot.”

John Cusack on the Internet: “I’m not really that much of an Internet person. I use it for final drafts for screenplays, and then e-mail. Then I call my assistant all the time and say, ‘My computer’s down. Can you have someone come fix it?’ And then she comes by and they turn it on, and that was the problem with the computer. So I’m not really that good with it. But I do the Google thing where you can Google your name and then find out what the press is saying about you. I’ve done that a few times just to see if they’re saying anything. What I did, I did check out some of those online dating things and some of those chat rooms, and I was amazed at how intense that is.“

It is pretty bizarre, but the whole instant messaging – text thing, it can replace the phone, but you can keep things going it seems like. You can stay in touch with people, even if they are all over the world, so in a sense it’s great because you can just write anybody a note any time and it seems fantastic. But there are more and more of those ads for these things, ‘We’re going to find your perfect mate. You put all your information with us.’ There’s more and more of those things on TV, isn’t there? Late at night when we’re sitting there not trying to sleep. They’re all over.”

If He Was Forced to Go Online to Get a Date… “I don’t want to get a date online. I’m trying to think of what I would put online. I’d probably put something just really funny and absurd, and then if somebody approached me with something that was equally funny, then I would know I would like them. I would try to be funny, and then if someone was funny back I would think, ‘Oh, there must be something interesting there.’ What would I put? ‘Nice person, sometimes brooding, sometimes nice.’”

John Cusack on How to Make a Good Romantic Comedy: “What I think was so great about what Gary was, and I really didn’t know Gary, I just knew that he was this kind of this impresario of television - he’s like James L. Brooks or one of those guys who made those great comedies and character-based comedies that will work forever in television. He really loves character and I think from working in television, the process keeps evolving with Gary. He’s always writing it, and re-writing it, and re-tweaking it, and throwing something out. He just loves characters.

I think he found the book and loved the idea of doing this story with Diane, but then he just kinds of falls in love with the characters and then just keeps trying to make their world more interesting, and more interesting, and he’s not precious at all. He’s really a terrific. I heard great things about him, but he really exceeded all my expectations that way. He just stands there and he goes, ‘I love this guy. I love this girl,’ and ‘How do we make this better?’ and ‘What do we do here?’"

"I think if you just approach it from being interested in the characters and not just interested in the devices or the plot twists… Obviously in a romantic comedy you know that these people are going to meet, then they’re going to get separated, and then they are going to come back together. So it’s really just fleshing out the lives in-between. Any genre can be done well or bad I guess.”

On Choosing Roles – Is it a “One for Them, One for Me” Type of Decision?: “Yeah, but this one, as I said, came out of the blue and I really didn’t know what to expect. But I knew doing something with Christopher Plummer and Diane Lane and Stockard Channing, that’s not really a ‘one for them’ kind of a movie.
I didn’t know what the experience was going to be because it came very fast, out of the blue, but it was really one of the most lovely times I’ve had making a film. The group of people they got together were so nice, and Gary set such an amazing tone. He made it all seem sort of effortless, but he really just loved the characters so it was kind of a joy to come in.
It was very light. It’s a very fun movie, and it’s supposed to be a really fun movie. It didn’t feel like I was going off to do some Diet Pepsi action movie and make some corporate mark. It really just felt like a movie about these characters, and everybody approached it with a lot of love, so it was really a wonderful time to go work on a film. I was just very, very lucky to be wanted. Sometimes they just come to you, but this was just, I think, luck. I was just very lucky to get asked to work with these people.

Then sometimes you take it because you think, ‘If I do this kind of movie maybe it will help me get the movies that I want to get made, made, or help my profile out.’ It’s kind of a dance you do with the business. This had the combination of being a really fun movie and one I think that will be really commercial, so that’s just dumb luck to get ask to be in this.”

Relating to His Character and First Dates: “Some of them you know that stuff, where you actually start talking over dinner and then you realize that you’ve been talking a long time and the person is looking at you with the face of utter incomprehension, and not laughing at your jokes. Then you realize that you still haven’t ordered yet. That’s not so pleasant. But it’s kind of awkward. It’s hard to fathom someone and everybody’s coming at it with – it’s all ripe with possibilities. Is this going to be something great or not? And sometimes the pressure of that is kind of insanely comic.”

John Cusack on the Script and Inserting His Own Style Into the Character: “When I talked to Gary, when I met him I said… Because it was a little bit of a small part, he goes, ‘Well, if we’re going to have you do it, we’ve got to make something of it.’ And then that’s his thing. His process is to just get an actor and then write and re-write and work on the set. He’s always bringing new pages on the set so I came with some ideas and then he wanted to go with them. That was kind of how he wanted to do it, and I like to work that way too. And I have ideas.”

On Working With Diane Lane: “I’d always sort of wanted to work with her so, as I said, I was very lucky to get asked to do this because I’d been following her. I probably had a crush on her since ‘A Little Romance’ when she was 13 and I was about the same age probably.”

On Improvisation in “Must Love Dogs:” “I think Gary would have it on paper and he’d be rewriting it a lot, and you come up with an idea. I would do it that way and then I’d say, ‘Well, let’s just do one where I say anything that comes out of my mouth,’ and we’d do that. Sometimes Gary would laugh and sometimes he would sort of look at me like I was insane and I don’t know how much of that he used.

We improvised a bit but there was a lot on the page and the actors kind of just went with it and went with their impulses. It’s kind of nice to do that in comedy because it’s really all about the character. It’s not like it’s a heist movie where they have to be at this moment and do this and crack the safe and get the number. Character drives plot so it’s all about these characters and what’s going on with them and what they’re feeling, so there is room for improvisation in a film like that. Gary likes to work that way. I think he’s worked with actors before who like to riff.”


John Cusack on His Upcoming Projects: “I’m shooting this film called ‘The Martian Child’ with myself and my sister Joan. Amanda Peet’s in it and Oliver Platt and Sophie Okonedo. I’m making it with the director who I made ‘Max’ with. It’s about a guy who adopts a kid with kind of special needs. It’s a really nice story.”


Cusack’s also shooting a film in Bulgaria. “I’m making a film with Morgan Freeman called ‘The Contract’ with Bruce Beresford. Kind of a hostage drama kind of thing. It sort of switches back and forth but Morgan plays a bad guy, which is pretty interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that so I said, ‘Alright, I’m going to Bulgaria.’ He’s one of those actors, kind of like Christopher Plummer or Stockard Channing or Diane [Lane] or any of those people where if somebody said, ‘Come on in and they’re going to read the phone book from L to M,’ I would just listen because they are so interesting to watch - those actors.”

On His Edgar Casey Project and His Interest in the Paranormal: “I have an interest in that sort of thing. I’m very interested in that and then my father and I started working on a screenplay before he passed away, so I have a connection with my father, too. I just think the world is fascinating. I’m interested in what you can learn from it.“

John Cusack’s Take on the Paranormal: “…I’ve had experiences where I’m pretty sure there’s more going on than [what’s on the surface]. Instincts and intuition things and things where people have known stuff they’re not supposed to know. You wake up and go, ‘Something’s up with somebody,’ and it’s happened. Just little connections to people where you’re hardwired in ways you don’t really know about or aren’t conscious of.

I’ve just studied that stuff for a while and I think he’s a fascinating creature. Houdini and all these people tried to debunk him and nobody could, so he definitely had a connection to this other world, whatever that is, that is kind of irrefutable. He was studied and there’s 40 books written about him and there’s a whole institute in Virginia Beach. He’s a fascinating figure. Spencer Tracy wanted to do a movie about him for a long time. They’ve been trying to do a movie about him for a while so I’m going to do that one.”

From movies.about.com