1408 is the classical high concept Stephen King story. An author specializing in debunking the supernatural gets stuck in a room that really is haunted. It’s really John Cusack reacting to increasingly weird effects for most of the movie. At least he had director Mikael Hafstrom there to talk to between takes.
John Cusack Talks 1408
“I think Mikael and I sort of had a Stockholm syndrome where the room was keeping us captive, but as soon as we got out of the room and got to work with Mary [McCormack] and Sam [Jackson] and stuff, it was kind of strange,” said Cusack. “You went to the lobby and there were all these extras, and then you'd go out to Venice Beach and there were these surfers and things. We just thought, ‘We gotta get back in the room, get back to the room where it's safe and horrible.’ And it's me staring at the walls and I get tortured. That made more sense than dealing with people after a while.”
Despite the adverse affects, Cusack rose to the challenge. “It was pretty fun actually. I thought the piece was very ambitious that way because you didn't know if you could pull it off. You knew it would be interesting when these guys came back into the film were in and out of the film. But how do you pull off that kind of dance just in a room with the dp, the director, the actor and anything you can think of? It's kind of ambitious to try and pull it off. It was kind of catch and go in the morning because you couldn't rely on these guys.”
The room’s secret weapon against the cynical author is the apparition of his tragically departed daughter. Cusack is making some other movies about lost children too. “Well, one of them is about the Iraq War so I think that's a perfectly reasonable response to the war we're in here. And this one was, this is just a nice one because a lot of times when things have worked out for me in my career it’s because there were really smart people who came by and said you should do this. And then there were people like Lorenzo [di Bonaventura] and Mikael around here who said, ‘Oh yeah, we're going to do this and you're going to do this and then we're going to get Sam Jackson and Mary and then all of sudden it's there for you.’ So this was just kind of blind luck to be able to get invited into this crew. To do this film. But the one about Iraq is about this country and people going through shattering grief so it seemed appropriate to make a movie about the times you live in once and a while.”
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Plus, it’s a Stephen King story and Cusack is a fan. “There is something about his stories that are so rich that I think he gets really undervalued as a writer. We were going through the script and we'd get in a room and there'd be a certain kind of logic that you have to play out and you have to kind of keep going. And so we kept going back to this 30-page short story just to see what did he write? And there was always stuff we could pull from, just little details or lines or turns of phrases or descriptions. It was amazing. It was like this 30-page piece that was like a bottomless well of stuff.”
1408 opens to theaters on June
22nd.
For the trailer, poster, more interviews and more movie info, go to the 1408
Movie Page.
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