All right, everybody, welcome back to anti-war radio chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, introducing actor, writer, producer John Cusack on the phone from England today.
He's the star of Say Anything, The Grifters, The Thin Red Line, Being John Malkovich, High Fidelity, Gross Point Blank, Identity, 1408, and dozens of other movies, including his brand new War, Inc., which he also co-wrote.
It also stars his sister, Joan Cusack, Marissa Tomei, Dan Aykroyd, Hilary Duff, Ben Kingsley, Montel Williams, and John McLaughlin.
It starts tonight in New York and L.A. and then hopefully soon after nationwide.
Welcome to the show, John.
Hi, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks very much for joining us on the show today.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
My first question for you really, I think, is you know Marissa Tomei, huh?
I do.
That must be pretty nice.
Yeah, that's pretty nice, especially if, you know, you get to know her too in 3D.
It's even better.
All right, so this movie is great.
I've already watched it about three times and shared it with a couple of friends of mine.
It's a pretty ruthless satire of empire and the so-called war on terrorism.
I'm gonna see if I can go ahead and start us off with a couple of clips of Dan Aykroyd here.
Sure.
Hope you like the smell of fresh liberation.
Tarakistan, what's the gig?
Omar Sharif, CEO of Ujigas, the Ujigastani conglomerate.
Son of a bitch is trying to build a pipeline through his own sheep fucking country.
We didn't liberate Tarakistan to get hustled by some cocksucking fez headhouser.
Terminate.
You'll be working directly under the viceroy just appointed by the president.
Tamerlane is sponsoring a trade expo, Brand USA.
It's our big launch bringing democracy to this part of the world.
Plus, now that we bombed the shit out of them, now there's a lot of rebuilding to do.
Shows a lot of spirit.
Somebody has to help these poor people.
This moment presents a great opportunity for Tamerlane and the United States for that matter.
Not to mention the people of Tarakistan.
This is a historic moment, Hauser.
The first war ever to be 100% outsourced to private enterprise.
Tamerlane jets, Tamerlane tanks, Tamerlane soldiers, and to top it all off, a Brand USA expo.
All right, so that's you, you're Hauser, the man having some personal problems, and you're the fixer for this company Tamerlane running the very first all outsourced war.
Yeah, I mean, I guess Halliburton and, you know, Bechtel and a lot of the Green Zone gang now, they got about half of it done.
But there's still the problem of they have to use the United States military, but they're trying their best to make it a totally outsourced war.
They've outsourced, there's 180,000 troops, I think, and 140,000 contractors, or it might be the other way around.
But we got about a half privatized war now.
You know, so this just takes that logical, this is a logical extension of that trend.
So it could be two weeks into the future, or two years, unless we can, you know, what they represent, which is that strain in the Republican Party, hold them accountable for their crimes, you know.
Yeah, you know, I just interviewed a guy named Bruce Falconer from Mother Jones magazine, and he had written this article all about Blackwater.
And he talked about how they really are now building their own Navy, their own Air Force, and their own ability to actually do an entire war.
Yeah, that's the future that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, if they're going to be complicit in this, are offering us.
So if you want a world where corporations can hire their own armies, and they can run around with weapons and kill people without any accountability to international law, and do it on our tax dollar, you know, then that's what you can get with this ideology.
Now, have you always been this opposed to Empire?
I don't remember you really being lumped in with, well, the members of the Film Actors Guild from Team America or anything earlier in the war?
Yeah, I guess I didn't make the cut there.
But I think that's just because my agent is the agent of Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
So I think he said, you know, you ain't using Johnny.
So I think it was basically the threat of my agent to Trey and Matt, probably, that they didn't want me in there.
But I always thought that was a completely jive argument anyway.
You know, I mean, I think it's fun to make fun of celebrities, but to kind of equate, you know, actors or artists who are, you know, may or may not be self-righteous with, you know, dictators and corporate war profiteers is a bit of an uneven, uneven, you know, comparison.
I always thought that was a, to put it mildly, I mean, I always thought, you know, making fun of actors is kind of like a paper tiger thing.
I don't know.
I don't get it.
You know, at least those people, self-righteous or otherwise, were trying to stop this war that pretty much everybody seems to agree was a bad idea now.
Yeah, I think the biggest thing to fight now, and the whole reason we sort of just made War, Inc. was really just to fight kind of apathy.
And I think the first thing, you know, that people need to reclaim is their sense of outrage and their sense of defiance and kind of their spirit, you know, right?
It's like, you know, it may take a while to kind of hold people accountable for this.
But, you know, we don't have to just roll over.
You know, it should feel good to be subversive.
It should feel good to tell the right people to go to hell.
It should be empowering.
I can't really tell many people to go to hell, because otherwise I'd be living in a glass house, and I don't really want to tell that many people to go to hell.
But war profiteers who then come back and give, and then deny the GI Bill of Rights to the real soldiers, I can wake up in the morning every day, look in the mirror, and tell those people to go to hell.
Well, part of the joy for the movie for me was just seeing you get away with it, because it really is very ruthless in its delivery of the satire, gag after gag, for the first 40 minutes.
You know, it's pretty shocking.
And that was part of the joy for me was that, wow, you know, John Cusack and these guys got this movie even made.
Was that difficult?
Yeah.
And, you know, the thing is, is we haven't really gotten away with it yet.
And that's maybe where, you know, people who listen to your show and some other people can come in, because we got it made.
But, you know, we don't have a lot of support out there for it, obviously.
If any of your listeners want to go to MySpace, you know, and go to John Cusack at MySpace, you can look at the MySpace page, and there's reviews from, you know, some people who I think a lot of anti-war folks would respect, you know, from Naomi Klein to Jeremy Scahill to Gore Vidal to, you know, Tim Robbins, just a whole bunch of people who have come out in support of the film.
But we really don't have support of a lot of the corporate media, obviously, because they say, well, they say the movie is not funny enough or it's too close to home or, you know, like it was supposed to be Wedding Crashers or something.
And I like Wedding Crashers, but it's just a different vibe.
Or a lot of people say, well, you should make fun of something, you know, we're already, you know, so close to having a privatized war that it shouldn't be the time to be making fun of this.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know exactly when the right time would be, you know, or should we wait till everything is a corporate profit industry, like every function of the state is at the time to make fun of it, like when there is no more public sphere.
I don't know.
So if people go see the movie, you know, tomorrow and it's playing at the Landmark Theater in L.A. and it's playing at the Angelica Theater in New York.
And if we sort of sell out the weekend, then they're going to put it in more theaters and we'll bring it to all the different cities.
But if it doesn't make money right now without a lot of without any corporate backing, then, you know, it'll go it'll have its life on DVD and it'll play and, you know, all over the world and in Europe and the other countries.
But if we want to keep it in theaters, if we really want to piss off the right people, we have to get people to see it now.
Well, it really is funny.
It seems like you probably have the best shot of any of the anti-war movies that have come out lately of really breaking through to the public here because it's a hilarious movie and, you know, the other ones aren't and they haven't done that well.
So I think you stand a really good chance.
Well, people want to, you know, if people want to like, I mean, I was hoping that people would, you know, they would use it as a springboard to get people riled up and to, you know, reclaim their kind of spirit about this, because, you know, if you think about the war, it's really depressing, too.
And I think at some point when you know all this stuff, as every one of all of your listeners already know, you know, there's sort of a you get a little bit down about it and you get a little doomstruck about it.
You think, well, it's just inevitable that these bastards are going to keep doing this.
And so I think the first thing you want to do is just reclaim that sense of outrage and, you know, name it and shame it and tell them to go to hell.
And then so people use the movie as a springboard to take action, to kind of take the country back in some way, in some small way.
That'd be great.
So if they really, you know, if they want to go see it, go see it this weekend.
Don't don't wait.
And if and then if we can keep in the theaters, maybe we can have some real fun with this.
And I'd love to keep it in the theaters all the way to the Republican Convention.
Well, you know, your character in the movie kind of goes through that.
He's sort of a tin man character with no heart.
He's got to reclaim his outrage.
Right.
Yeah, I guess.
I mean, I think that the character in it is, you know, I don't I don't know if he's he's quite so redemptive, but but I think certainly the movie and the politics of the movie are things that people who are interested in ending the war and ending some of the abuses of empire would would really, really like.
You said something very interesting in an interview with I forget the guy's name, the Scottish guy that does the TV talk show at night.
Craig Ferguson, Craig Ferguson.
That's right.
You said something interesting in the interview with him that this disaster capitalism is not the free market.
It's actually a big protection racket, welfare for billionaires.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, see the thing.
Let's just say, for example, I mean, these are some of the arguments that the that the movie makes.
And this is also, you know, any of your a lot of your listeners would know, like if you would read, you know, Jeremy Scahill's book, Blackwater or Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine or Anthony Arnaud's book or, you know, the blogs of, you know, Raw Story or, you know, a lot of these journalists who are doing unbelievable work is, you know, we all know we hear about this privatization thing and and, you know, it's kind of an abstract thing.
It's like globalization.
Like, what does it really mean?
I don't really know.
But when you really get down to it, if if you want to believe that it's OK for Exxon to, say, hire a private army to protect their oil field, well, then, OK, let's say you could make that argument that it's OK for a corporation to have a private army that's totally outside international law and not accountable to anybody.
Well, then you could say, all right, well, you know, they got to make producing the oil and they got to protect their pipeline or whatever they got to do.
So I guess, you know, yeah, let them pay for it.
But that's an insane argument to say that it's OK for a corporation to have its own private killing army.
But let's say you went with that.
But even that's not true because we pay for it.
We're paying Blackwater, the U.S. taxpayers.
So it's not even it's not even like a free market.
It's not even these people kind of just taking care of themselves in the lawless international land.
I mean, all these myths are are are bullshit, you know.
Right.
They like to call it free market fundamentalism when what it really is, is it's fascism.
It's it's mercantilism at war.
What else do you call it?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I don't know another name for it.
And nor do I think you should be polite with it anymore.
I think we're just we have to be past that point.
So, you know, if you if you think it's OK for these corporations to help create the conditions for war, right, drive us into war and then make money bombing the place, make money rebuilding it, all the while barring other people from the competition.
Right.
And then come back on television to preach about the free markets when they're orchestrating a vast protectionist racket where they're securing their market and profiting off of people's death and destruction.
I mean, that's what's happening.
I mean, they've we're at a place right now where it's OK for people to not only do the United States torture, but we have turned torture into a for profit business that is paid for by the U.S. taxpayers.
We have outsourced interrogation, right, which is, you know, a gentle semiotics for torture.
Yeah.
International.
Great.
So that's that's the reality.
So I don't know when I don't know if you don't if this isn't enough for if this isn't enough for revolt.
I don't know what it is.
And the Democrats have got a lot to answer to as well.
I mean, when if Nancy Pelosi says impeachment is off the table, what does that mean?
That means that you can commit crimes as long as the Democrats are within striking distance of capturing power.
Yeah, that's exactly what I mean.
Yeah.
Hey, John, let me take this opportunity to compliment your sister, Joan.
I think she is so funny and I think she ought to win best supporting actress or something for her portrayal in this movie of the pure banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt called it.
I want to play this short clip.
Progress update, people.
Bank Swiss didn't even wait for the opening ceremony, closing a 1.3 billion dollar deal with Root Branch and Blossom to restore essential water services to the people of Duretkistan.
Oh, come on.
I'm sure they'd like to give a shout out to the Tamerlane third bomber wing for for those humane precision strikes that have created this wonderful opportunity for everyone.
All right, that ought to give you a little bit of a taste of what this is.
You know, you should probably do is, you know, that really long winded speech that I just gave before this.
You should just play that clip and I should shut up.
Oh, no way.
No, I love it.
I love it because that was that was that was a lot better example of what I was talking about.
Well, it's the perfect example.
What you said was the setup.
There you go.
All right.
We'll go with that.
No.
Listen, you mentioned the media and in this movie, you really kind of he preys on the bravest reporters in the form of Marissa Tomei's character and you absolutely skewer.
Well, the same people who have panned the movie, I guess.
Right.
No, because the people who panned the movie are people who are mostly go to junkets and watch movies all the time.
The people who have any people who have sort of studied this stuff, you know, from, you know, as I said, even people in the media like Bill Maher, who liked the film and gave us a quote.
And Laura Logan, who is the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News and 60 Minutes, Rachel Maddow, who's, you know, studies this stuff and does a lot of stuff.
People on the Internet like Howie Klein and crooks and liars, people who are keeping an eye on this stuff.
They all love the film or, you know, really like it.
The people who have not liked it are the people at the trade papers in Los Angeles who said it was a little too close to home and, you know, made him uncomfortable.
And some criticism.
Well, it's interesting.
I think you should feel uncomfortable about all this.
Yeah.
I mean, what kind of phrase is that role of satire is just to make you feel good.
It's maybe meant to provoke you to.
But, you know, so we'll see what happens tomorrow and with, I guess, these reviewers.
But I'm not expecting much from kind of the corporate media, to be honest.
I've been the beneficiary of snobbery from that class, so I don't mind so much that they don't understand or like this movie because I never really expected them to.
Yeah.
Tell me about Hilary Duff's character, Yannicka, baby.
Yeah.
Yes.
She plays a pan-Eurasian sex symbol who wants to be like an American pop star.
And, you know, her goal is to come to America and write soulful music and be sad and rich.
That's her ultimate goal.
Yeah.
And she's great in the movie, too.
Even I think even people, even the people who haven't liked the movie and haven't been that many, but there's certainly been some blowback on the movie.
They all love Hillary.
And she's pretty great.
Very funny.
Yeah.
I'm not even familiar with her.
Is she a pop star or an actress?
She's both.
Oh, OK.
Well, I guess she is now.
But she was a pop star originally.
Is that it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
She's like she had a TV show and but she's kind of like she tours and does music.
And yeah, she does it all.
So she was sort of she was happy to skewer that world, I guess.
Yeah.
Well, and her character is the the centerpiece of the big brand USA synergy, marketing, corporate culture at war kind of thing that you have going on there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She says she says she's the perfect branded synergy between the modern young woman getting her own and getting it on with all the strength and tradition of, you know, of a kept mistress for a warlord.
So she's got she's a perfect crossover star.
Yeah.
I'm curious about the portrayal of the Emerald City there, the green zone.
It's well, it has that wizard of all sense, as I was saying before.
But I wonder, did you actually go to Iraq and see what the green zone was like for yourself?
No, I didn't.
But I have read from a million accounts of it and talked to a million journalists who have been there, including, as I said, Naomi Klein and Laura Logan and a bunch of them.
So.
Yeah, I mean, you have the atmosphere of that situation.
Just it's pretty insane the way people really I think people people have sort of read these books and this accounting and this journalism, this heroic journalism that's gone on from over there.
They don't think the movie goes far enough.
But people who, you know, I guess haven't studied it so much think maybe we're, you know, sniffing glue and taking blotter acid.
But that's OK.
Have you considered offering a free screening to Congress?
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
I don't think many would show, though, do you?
I don't know.
You might get a couple of the braver ones.
I bet Jan Schakowsky would.
Yeah, I actually bet a bunch of them would.
But I don't know.
I don't think a lot of them knew when the Blackwater hearings were happening.
I didn't have a real sense that any of them even knew that they were taking state money.
I didn't think people knew that the 600 million or so they take is from us, our taxpayer, our budget.
That the Congress people didn't even realize it?
I don't think a lot of them did.
I swear to you, I don't.
I mean, when I was watching those hearings, I had a sense that they were learning for the first time what was going on during the hearings.
That's funny.
Yeah, I don't doubt it.
I think most of them are pretty uninterested in their actual job and more just when you think about, you know, if you think about what the Republicans have done, which is their version of government is to create a feeding frenzy for corporations and to let these corporations come in and basically use the State Department as like an ATM, like they can just put their card in and just take money out for whatever project they think they want to do at a cost-plus basis.
So that's the gig.
I mean, it's a great gig if you can have it.
I mean, it's basically, I think, completely deranged and evil to do that, especially when you think that the soldiers weren't getting all of the equipment that they needed or they weren't getting everything that they needed or they had to go on these extended tours or that they aren't being guaranteed the GI Bill of Rights.
Yeah, or even decent health care.
Much higher salaries at a cost-plus basis for private mercenaries.
I don't know.
If that doesn't get people outraged, I don't know.
I don't know what would.
I really don't.
I mean, I think we're so far down the rabbit hole here, but I don't know what it'll take.
So, I mean, that's maybe probably why we wanted to be so over the top with ORINC.
Yeah.
It's just to get people talking about it or thinking about it.
Are you familiar with the writer Nick Turse?
No, sir.
Well, he's a progressive writer and he's got a new book out called The Complex.
It's the military industrial everything complex.
It's grown so much since the days of Ike Eisenhower, and it's so pervasive.
And one of the things that he talks about a lot, actually, is the Pentagon's role in Hollywood and how if anybody wants to have good military equipment and special effects and high-tech gear, that the military is always there, ready and willing to cooperate, that kind of thing.
I don't guess you got any help from them on this.
From the Pentagon?
No, no, no.
I mean, there's some pretty big stunts and things.
No contact with the Pentagon.
No, I haven't heard from them.
That's something that is pretty pervasive in Hollywood, though, isn't it?
I don't understand the question.
You're saying that the Pentagon is kind of infiltrating Hollywood to give pro...
I don't understand what you mean.
Sure.
Yeah, exactly like that.
Like Transformers and Iron Man.
It's all F-22 Raptors and the latest technology because the military helps them make the movie, basically.
I think they probably do some stuff like product placement deals.
Certainly.
No, I know they're going to try to keep their brand vital and alive.
There's no doubt about that.
But so I don't know a lot about that, but I'm absolutely sure that you're right, just based on principle.
All right.
Well, this has been a great interview and the movie was absolutely excellent.
Everybody, please go out and watch it.
It's War, Inc.
It comes out Friday night in New York and L.A.
A few people are selling it out there.
It's at the Angelica and the Landmark.
If you want to keep it in theaters and if you want to have fun, you can do whatever you want with it.
You can throw stuff at the screen.
Who cares?
Just have fun with it.
But if you guys go, we'll keep in the theaters and we'll keep the conversation going and we can use it to I think the anti-war movement can use it.
And I'd be thrilled if they did to get more attention.
All right.
Well, yeah, I wish you the best of luck with it.
And I congratulate you on it.
It really is good.
The hot sauce helps, too.
Thanks, man.
All right.
Thanks a lot, everybody.
John Cusack.
But to use one of your own homespun colloquialisms, let's cut the shit, shall we?
War is the improvement of investment climates by other means.
Clausewitz for dummies.
The USA is a subdivision of Tamerlane.
Democracy, the war on terror, the war on drugs.
These are all focus group slogans for Tamerlane.
