John Cusack

Have you seen that kind of like, did you see it kind of happening in real time for you? Because like, it does feel like the last decade, 15 years, 20 years, I mean, and I like superhero films, don't get me wrong, we're talking about a graphic novel that's comic, you know, there's the comic world, the good ones are great, but I don't know, is it depressing for you as someone that kind of came of age in a time where you were allowed a little bit of artistic freedom?

Well, like getting back to the, when I was doing Say Anything, right, so...

The producer of it was Polly Platt.

Polly Platt was married and worked with Peter Bogdanovich.

So she had made Paper Moon, Last Picture Show.

I mean, great films, right? Really cool, seminal, amazing films.

So she was like, that was her mindset.

Her mindset wasn't, how are we going to make the most money and who am I going to connect with here? It was like different values.

The cinematographer was Laszlo Kovacs.

guy was carrying, you know, during the revolution, he was, you know, going across fields with canisters of film, right? You know, he's a real artist.

And the first AD was Jerry Ziesmer, who was Francis Ford Coppola's first AD on Apocalypse Now, who is in the scene when he says, you know, terminate with extreme prejudice.

That's Jerry.

And so there was, you know, there's that feel of you're here to try to make something cool and artistic.

And I think over the years it became more and more corporate and the people who were running the studios, it used to be that the studios were just studios and then you know, people forget, but there was a time when Paramount and Warner Brothers weren't held by some huge international, right? Now the movie things are a tiny, tiny part of a media empire.

And that's all about vertical integration strategies and all that.

So, They're selling

telephones.

They're not selling movies.

Yeah.

So

the the environment, the corporate environment around it has to do with like kind of uniformity and surety.

And but movies should,

you know,

the one thing that movies lack is ambiguity, right? Like you can't feel conflicted ways about a character,

right?