Rachel Weisz and John Cusack got together with a group of journalists recently to promote “Runaway Jury,” a riveting thriller based on the novel by John Grisham. But once the tape recorders were rolling, the duo devoted little time to discussing their new courtroom drama, and instead argued their case for a return to a brand of filmmaking influenced primarily by creative visionaries as opposed to marketing executives and focus groups.
Cusack’s been around a long time and has starred in such films as “The Grifters,” “Eight Men Out,” “Say Anything” and “High Fidelity.” Weisz is a newcomer who burst onto the scene in the 1999 blockbuster “The Mummy,” and has since appeared in “About A Boy” and “Confidence.”
QUESTION: Rachel, I bet a lot of moviegoers would be surprised to learn that you’re from London because you’ve played Americans in a majority of your films. And convincingly so. Do you ever feel cut off from your British roots?
RACHEL WEISZ: I’m still very English. I have a home there. My family’s there. I have an agent there. I’m reading British scripts, and I’m going to do a British film next year. I don’t feel cut off from my roots at all.
Q: How does one research the role of con artist?
RW: Unfortunately, criminals are very hard to come by. They tend not to be forthcoming about their skills. If you’re playing a doctor, doctors come out of the woodwork to show you how to be a doctor, but unfortunately, criminals aren’t nearly as helpful.
JOHN CUSACK: But you can always meet with record executives, film executives, publicists — the whole deal.
Q: You worked with Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman on “Runaway Jury,” two legends who rose to prominence during Hollywood’s so-called “Golden Age” in the 1970s. How would you compare that era to today?
JC: You look at Dustin’s career, for example. He makes “Midnight Cowboy” in the ‘70s, and that’s an X-rated movie, a big studio release that won Best Picture before the Oscars were bought and paid for by Dreamworks and Miramax and all the rest. That’s inconceivable today. I think those movies still get made, but they have to fight and claw and scratch for screens, and if they don’t get a tidal wave of press right off the bat, they can’t hold screens. But I guess, on another level, they have a second and third life on the DVD and foreign territories, so they can get discovered later.
RW: This film (“Runaway Jury”) is actually about something. It does have substance, so in that way it kind of reminds me of some of the movies from the ‘70s.
Q: What, in your opinion, has contributed most to the homogenization of current studio films?
JC: It has to do with the testing of movies. If you test (screen) movies, then everybody in the test audience becomes a critic, and gets to give input as to what should be changed. Then (the studios) start to kind of dumb the movies down to the greatest common denominator of understanding.
RW: And you lose the director’s point of view.
JC: That’s right. Instead of one person’s point of view, you’re trying to appeal to every demographic, and that’s a problem.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 17, 2003. Read the original PDF.