Features

November 8, 2009

Catastrophic film is Cusack’s good fortune

AMY LONGSDORF For The Times Leader

John Cusack has made a career out of stretching himself as an actor. Now with “2012,” he’s doing a different kind of stretching altogether.

“I had to stay (loose) or I definitely would have pulled a hamstring,” Cusack teases about his stint as an action hero. “There was a lot of running, jumping and tumbling.”

The 43-year-old star of “Say Anything,” “Being John Malkovich” and “The Ice Harvest” didn’t hesitate a second when he was approached to topline “2012,” the brainchild of Roland Emmerich, the disaster-movie maven who decimated Washington, D.C., in “Independence Day” and wreaked havoc on Manhattan in “Godzilla” and “The Day After Tomorrow.”

“It was nice to be wanted,” Cusack says. “You get the call for Roland Emmerich’s next movie, that he wants you to do it, and you go, ‘Great, let’s do it! Thanks for calling me.’

“Then I read the script, and I thought it was a real page-turner. I also thought it was very surprising. By the end of the film, it actually got quite emotional and very tense.

“I remember reading it, and all these interesting things keep happening like Rome burns and Paris falls. How do you shoot that? California falls into the ocean. I had no idea how (Roland) would even begin to shoot that.”

But shoot it he did. In “2012,” half the world goes boom. Los Angeles is destroyed in a 10.5 earthquake. Yellowstone National Park goes up in a 30-mile-wide explosion of lava. And the Vatican is turned to dust.

“I think (Roland) liked to destroy every Western icon in the film,” Cusack says with a laugh. “And be careful if you’re standing outside of a church. It may fall on your head.”

In the movie, opening Friday, Cusack stars as Jackson Curtis, a sci-fi writer who sets out to make sure his ex-wife (Amanda Peet) and kids have an escape route from the destruction. Meanwhile back in Washington, the President (Danny Glover) and his associates (Oliver Platt, Chiwetel Ejifor) are figuring out the best way to deal with global apocalypse.

The idea for the movie originated with scripter Harald Kloser, who previously collaborated with Emmerich on “10, 000 B.C.” Looking for a story to hang a disaster movie on, he began noticing an influx of end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it reports pegged to 2012. The prophecy dates back to the Mayans, whose calendar is set to reach the end of its 13th cycle on December 21, 2012.

“You will find millions of people, from all walks of life, who believe that in 2012 there will be some kind of shift in society, or a shift in spirit,” Kloser says.

As for his own thoughts about 2012, Cusack says that, after reading the book “Return to Quetzalcoatl,” he expects “a shift in consciousness” rather than an actual End of Days.

“But I think the movie taps into a paranoia and how out of control the world feels, with global warming and all of those things in the zeitgeist. This movie smartly doesn’t get into the politics of it; it just gets into the fact of what’s important to you, what matters to you.”

Cusack’s skepticism about 2012 didn’t mute his enthusiasm for the film. As far as he’s concerned, the film was a welcome departure from most epics of mass destruction.

“What I liked about the script is that as the catastrophes get bigger, the movie actually gets more intimate,” he notes. “I hadn’t seen that in most action films. Usually once the explosions start, the characters stop. But this was reverse engineering in some ways.”

To bring “2012” to the screen, Emmerich used a combination of special effects and computer-generated imagery. “The objective is that the viewer can’t tell what we actually built and what’s a visual effect, made in the computer,” production designer Barry Chusid says. “Hopefully, in the end, you watch the movie and ask, ‘Where did they find the mountain to build these things in?’ ”

The production designers concocted several outdoor “shaky-floor” stages, or giant sets built on hydraulic lifts that Emmerich could maneuver as his actors ran through them.

“I walked through an entire city block with fences, facades of houses, lawns, trees, cars -- and the whole block was on these hydraulics, so it was just shaking and pulsating,” Cusack notes.

What couldn’t be built by production designers was achieved through computer animation. But Cusack insists that acting in front of “oceans of blue screens” wasn’t as challenging as he imagined it would be.

“This was a pretty action-packed show, but it wasn’t really any different from a lot of other films because we had such an amazing production design,” he says.

“At the end, when we’re on a mountain, there would be a huge glacier and then blue screens in the background. So we were always acting on regular sets, but the backgrounds would be digitally enhanced (in post-production). Roland’s got a whole army working so effortlessly that you could come in and just kind of do your acting job.”

At other times, Cusack was forced to simply imagine the end of the world, with an assist from an over-eager assistant director. “The A.D. would be going, ‘(Buildings are) collapsing! And sewage is everywhere!’ He’s screaming, the most fantastic guy in the world.”

Cusack’s wordless reaction to the devastation made a big impression on his co-stars Tom McCarthy and Amanda Peet. “John came in and, literally, started doing silent-movie acting,” Peet says. “He was just really still. Tom and I looked at each other, and we were, like, ‘Yeah, that’s why John gets paid the big bucks.’”

Stretching back to “San Francisco” and continuing on through “The Towering Inferno” and “Independence Day,” Hollywood has made heaps of cash from disaster movies. Cusack has a theory about why so many filmgoers seem to enjoy watching the world being blown to kingdom come.

“I think movies like this give you a sense (of tragedy) without actually (having to experience) real tragedy,” he says. “I think that’s maybe their function and why people like them so much. … Also, there’s something to the fact that, at the end of the movie, there is no more division between Russia, United States and China. Everybody is on the same playing field.”

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