WEISZ: I try to stay a little bit in the accent. It just helps. I can slide in and out, but I try to stay a little bit in it.
You knew where the script was going. How did you measure how many clues to drop without tipping off the audience?
CUSACK: Well, I think in the theater - I sounded like an a**hole right there - there's a saying, “Don't burn your steps,” which is you don't want to play where you're going to get to. So you know, that's a fun thing about doing something that's kind of a con movie or has a confidence game. You're gaining people's trust and there are some very slight misdirections. When you know that an audience is trying to figure out where a character is going or what their agenda is, there are some nuances, very subtle things, and you can sort of misdirect them so that they go, “Oh, I know it's going down this way.” And then it actually ends up going somewhere else. It's kind of fun that way.
Gary [Fleder] is a very precise kind of storyteller. He had methodical visions to the thing. We, of course, knew where it was going, but you sort of have hang back a little bit, and maybe do less sometimes than the audience imagines. That's the idea anyway.
The director said he didn’t think of your character as a ‘John Cusack type of role.’ Does it bother you when people can or can’t picture you in a role?
CUSACK: I don't know what those roles are, really. I know sometimes what the studios want to pay me money to do, generally romantic comedies and stuff, which I don't like doing. So, I don't know what those roles are. This is a totally different role than stuff that I did in, say, “High Fidelity.” I don't know what that means, but I'm glad that Gary felt like I was stretching outside of my box, whatever that box is [laughing].
Recently you’ve played characters who are playing characters. Was that the draw of playing this character?
WEISZ: I don't know why one would be drawn to that. I think that it's fun to play a role where you have a secret and you have masks and you can take those masks off and have sort of a reveal. It just gives you something interesting to play. I think that made things more challenging and interesting.
Is it a conscious strategy to mix up the types of films you do?
WEISZ: I wish that I had a strategy. I'm just a storyteller. I read a story and if I want to tell that story, I'll tell it. It doesn't really matter to me how much it costs. That's really a question for a producer. So, it's different kinds of stories. I have different tastes.
Did you draw on any other performances for this role?
CUSACK: For the stuff that Rachel and I were doing, I definitely remembered the people that I'd met and studied for “The Grifters” because that was a con movie too. The first half of that movie is an elaborate con that these two people are doing. I definitely thought about that, but I'd never really seen a movie about jury tampering. The closest thing to that was “12 Angry Men” and that was just about jury deliberation. That was more of the aspects of being on a jury and what that means.
There are scenes where you're in the jury box, just watching the action. Is it difficult to act without dialogue?
CUSACK: No, it's actually fun to do. It's fun to see what you can bring to that. That's also an element, when you're playing two movies about a confidence game, it's what you can express and what you can show. Rachel has a great, to me, transparency about her face and I think that a lot of movie stars, you can really see inside, [see] what's going on. You can see it right there, all of her emotion. She has that aspect to her, but then, she can cover it up, mask it and only let you see what she wants to let you see, and what the character wants to let you see. That's a great combination.
Page 3: Changing from the Tobacco Industry to Guns and Filming in New Orleans
