John Cusack - biography

“Art is spiritual.”

“Death is a billion-dollar business.  They can’t even pass a law where it takes seven days to get a gun.  Why don’t you have to go through the same kind of screening you do to get a driver’s license?  It’s totally insane.”

“Hitler was so modern, in that he was obsessed with being famous.  He was caught up with this rush to be have achieved greatness before turning 30.”

“I think the more you expose yourself as a celebrity, the less interesting you are to watch in your work, because if you’re putting yourself out there all the time, you’re not holding anything back.”

“The more you expose yourself as a celebrity, the less interesting you are to watch in your work, because if you’re putting yourself out there all the time, you’re not holding anything back.”

“Any time you stop looking at evil as a black and white thing, it’s helpful.  So the fact that there won’t be any obligatory Islamic terrorist stereotypes in movies any more, that’d be helpful.”

“The reason bin Laden staggered the planes going into the towers was so every camera would be focused on the second tower when the plane hit.  It was not only the murder, but the perpetual image of the horror that permeated into people’s consciousness.”

“If you’re going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can’t be politically correct when you do that.”

“Being on a movie set is like one long financial crisis.”

“I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted.”

“I love these movies where it’s just about the film.  You don’t have my face on the poster.  It’s all about the movie.  I like that.”

“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.”

“New York’s like a boxing match.  In Hollywood, it’s like a Fellini movie or something.”

“The film is not a success until it makes money.  It’s only good when there’s a dollar figure attached to the box office.”

“The British keep employing me, and that makes me like them.  It also makes me think they’re very intelligent.”

“I think when you get to the point where you don’t need to be in love, then you could be in love.  You have to just be OK with yourself-and that’s a long process.”

“I’ve seen the people who talk about their love lives in print invariably have doomed relationships with the person they’re talking about.”

“Do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?”

“I have a bit of a rebellious nature.”

“When applied to politics and taken to its extreme, kitsch is the mask of death.  Fascism was all aesthetics.  There was no core principle to it.  There was no truth to it.”

“Good actors can sort of see into people and immediately you have a chemistry with them or not.  It’s like an affair with no mess.”

“I think good actors can sort of see into people and immediately you have a chemistry with them or not.  It’s like an affair with no mess.  You don’t actually consummate it, but you get to pretend, imagine what it would be like.”

“Sometimes you meet people and you feel like you’ve known them for a long time.”

“A lot of people are not meant to be together.”

“I feel like I’m a filmmaker; I don’t feel I need to yell action and cut.”

“I guess maybe I’m idealistic.”

“I was a teen star.  That’s disgusting enough.”

“I was never interested in being an overly public person.”

“I was raised Catholic until I was old enough to say no.”

“I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don’t consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.”

“Kitsch is more dangerous than it looks when taken to the extreme.”

“Nope, no sex scandals yet.  But I am open to offers!”

“People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past.  Every Springsteen song talks about that.”

“There are some good people.  But a good chunk of them will lie for no reason at all - it’ll be ten o’clock and they’ll tell you it’s nine.  You’re looking at the clock and you can’t even fathom why they’re lying.  They just lie because that’s what they do.”

“Usually I play people who just keep babbling on and on and on.”

John Cusack has appeared in the following films:
Class (1983)
Sixteen Candles (1984)
Grandview, U.S.A. (1984)
The Sure Thing (1985)
Better Off Dead... (1985)
The Journey of Natty Gann (1985)
One Crazy Summer (1986)
Stand by Me (1986)
Hot Pursuit (1987)
Tapeheads (1988)
Eight Men Out (1988)
Fat Man and Little Boy (1989)
Say Anything... (1989)
The Grifters (1990)
Shadows and Fog (1991)
True Colors (1991)
Map of the Human Heart (1993)
Money for Nothing (1993)
Bullets Over Broadway (1994)
The Road to Wellville (1994)
Floundering (1994)
City Hall (1996)
Con Air (1997)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)
Anastasia (1997)
Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
The Thin Red Line (1998)
Being John Malkovich (1999)
Pushing Tin (1999)
Cradle Will Rock (1999)
High Fidelity (2000)
America’s Sweethearts (2001)
Serendipity (2001)
Adaptation. (2002)
Runaway Jury (2003)
Identity (2003)
Must Love Dogs (2005)
The Ice Harvest (2005)
The Contract (2006)
1408 (2007)
Grace Is Gone (2007)
Martian Child (2007)
Igor (2008)
War, Inc. (2008)
2012 (2009)
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
Shanghai (2010)
The Factory (2011)
The Raven (2012)


John Cusack contributed to the screenplay for the following films:
Floundering (1994)
Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
War, Inc. (2008)