What scares 1408 stars John Cusack and Mary McCormack? McCormack claims she’s a classic girl when it comes to scary. “I can’t do bugs,” admitted McCormack. “No bugs for me!” Leaving no room for argument Cusack said rats are definitely not high on his list of must-have pets. “I hate them,” said the critically acclaimed actor.
But in 1408, directed by Mikael Hafstom and based on a Stephen King short story, it’s a haunted room in the Dolphin Hotel that scares Cusack almost to death. Cusack plays Michael Enslin, a writer hard at work on his latest project - Ten Nights in Haunted Hotel Rooms - who books a night in the Dolphin Hotel’s Suite 1408. Enslin goes into the room not believing in ghosts and other things that go bump in the night, but quickly discovers he’ll be lucky if he survives the night.
The Challenges of Starring in 1408: “It was a relief to do scenes with [Mary McCormack and Samuel L Jackson], but after a while when you’re in the third act and you’re trying to keep trying to top or keep the tension or keep the stakes raising, it required a lot of wattage, I guess, cause you had to keep putting out. So Lorenzo [di Bonaventura] and Mikael [Hafstrom, the director] and I would really try and figure out the logic of the inside of the room. Once you figured it out, you actually do it with no one to cut away to. That was a challenge. And then doing the end, it really kind of let it, going along with the dare, the room setting… You’re going to find what you’re bringing with you. You’re going to go through nine circles of hell, but each one of them is going to have a piece of your life and your past, and you’re going to have to confront your demons in it.”
On Acting Alone: Much of Cusack’s work in 1408 was done with just the actor reacting to his hotel room environment, which meant he didn’t have anyone to interact with. Describing the experience, Cusack said, “Well, I think Mikael and I, we 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 and Sam [Jackson] and stuff, it was kind of strange. You went to the lobby and there were all these extras. Then you'd go out to [the] beach and there were these surfers and things. We just thought, ‘We gotta get back in the room. We gotta get back to the room where it's safe.’ That’s horrible. And it’s me staring at the walls - and I get tortured. That made more sense than dealing with people after a while.
But 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. 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.”
John Cusack’s Spooky Hotel Experience: Cusack said that like most travelers he often wakes up in hotel rooms and doesn’t remember what city he’s in. But that’s not the scariest hotel story Cusack had to share. “I did a movie in upstate New York and there was this very, very scary old hotel, and I later found out that’s what Stephen King based The Shining on. It was this big hotel and it was supposed to be haunted. We were staying out there and walking back at night after one too many cocktails, and it was a little frightening there.”
Being a Mom and Imagining a Dying Child: Mary McCormack would go home and hug her own daughter a lot after working on 1408. It was difficult for McCormack to play the mother of a dying child but she got through it and thought having a child might even have helped. “Yeah it's hard but helps, I think,” explained McCormack. “I mean I think every actor uses their life and their relationships to sort of act as their emotional life.”
John Cusack’s a Long-Time Fan of Stephen King: “My parents took us to Boston — Nantucket, right? It was 1978...to visit some cousins. That was about 1979 or ‘80, and The Shining had come out, and it was already sort of a classic. It was in all the revival houses, and I snuck into the theater around six o'clock because it was an R movie, and I had to walk back to this cottage where we were staying. And when I got out it was night, and it was a pretty winding road with lamps. That was the scariest walk home I've ever taken after a movie. I saw The Shining when I was about 12 years old and that freaked me out.
I snuck in alone and I had to walk home about 20 minutes by myself, and I saw Jack Nicholson around the corner in every bush. That was my first entry into Stephen King. Then I saw Carrie. As I got older, I read The Stand in about one sitting for a whole night. I couldn't put it down. I think he's very underrated as writer.
There is something about his stories that are so rich that I think he gets really undervalued as a writer, like I said, because 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. So we kept going back to this 30-page short story just to see what [he wrote]. 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.”
Choosing to Take Part in Darker Projects: In 1408 Cusack’s character mourns the death of his daughter. He’s also got a film coming up in which he loses his wife. Is he choosing the darker theme for a reason? “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.”
