2012 preview: Action figure

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John Cusack’s role in disaster thriller 2012 more than just special effects. (COLUMBIA PICTURES)

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(COLUMBIA PICTURES)

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — The most iconic image of actor John Cusack remains a scene from the 1989 movie Say Anything. Cusack is (and for some, will always be) the skinny young man with a boombox over his head, playing a romantically loaded Peter Gabriel song in an effort to reclaim the love of a young woman.

To get the gist of Cusack's role in the disaster thriller 2012, digitally erase the boombox and replace it with two kids, which Cusack struggles to hold aloft while the floodwaters rise and threaten to swamp the entire planet.

On the soundtrack, substitute In Your Eyes for maybe... The Tide Is High? 

The Illinois-born Cusack is 43 and perhaps too old to bring off the big romantic gestures, but he's still plenty young enough to do the requisite amount of running, jumping and swimming required for the apocalyptic genre offering from director Roland Emmerich, the German-born director responsible for the similarly cataclysmic offerings Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow.

Cusack plays Jackson Curtis, a failed novelist and divorced parent who takes his two children for a vacation in Yellowstone Park and begins to realize (with the help of a manic "prophet" played by Woody Harrelson) that A) the world is in imminent peril and B) the government has a plan to rescue a select few from the coming cataclysm.

Cusack tends to waver in his acting choices between films of serious intent and big crowd-pleasers. In 2007, for example, he starred in the horror movie 1408, but he also produced and starred in the antiwar film Grace Is Gone as a man who becomes a single father when his wife is killed in the war in Iraq. In 2008, he provided the voice of a hunchback lab assistant in the animated feature Igor, but he also wrote, produced and starred in the vitriolic (and underrated) Bush-era satire War Inc.

But it would be impolitic to assume Cusack is slumming in 2012 (especially since the movie's budget is reportedly in the vicinity of $250 million). He is, first and foremost, an actor and responded accordingly when he was sent the 2012 script.

"It was nice to be wanted," Cusack says. "I got the call, and they told me: 'Roland Emmerich's movie, they want you to do it, and we'll send you the script.' I said, 'Great!'

"I read the script and it was a real page-turner," Cusack says, adding that while cities may get levelled, the roles aren't swept away by the film's massive special effects.

"As you read it, interesting things would happen, because they have this scene where Rome burned and Paris fell. How do you shoot that? Then the story got bigger and bigger and the catastrophes got bigger (while) the geography of the characters and the places where they were safe, got smaller and smaller.

"The movie actually got more intimate as it went along," Cusack says. "I thought it was very surprising. By the end of the film, I actually got quite emotional and very tense.

"I haven't seen that with most action films," Cusack says. "Usually once the explosions start, the characters stop. These were reverse-engineered so it got more intimate. I thought that was really clever."

That said, a movie so dominated by visual effects tends to be a challenge for actors, obliged to act in front of green screens or while being buffeted by wind machines and giant-gimballed sets that roll around like a storm-tossed ship.

"This was pretty action packed for sure," he says. "A lot of running, jumping, and tumbling. You got to stay stretched out or you could pull a hamstring, for sure.

"Roland has done this so many times before," Cusack says. "What would be a crushing technical process for other directors, he seems to do very effortlessly, so he just focuses on the characters."

Even so, the film presented serious acting challenges, such as reacting to outrageous events occurring offscreen. But for a California earthquake scene, Emmerich placed his cast on a set that shifted perilously in the real world.

"There is an entire city block with white picket fences and houses and the whole thing was on hydraulics," Cusack says. "A whole city block with cars on it was pulsating, so it was like walking onto a pretty wild set.

"It wasn't all green screen and imagination," Cusack says.

2012 opens in theatres tomorrow.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 12, 2009 F13