How important was John Cusacks involvement, both creatively and in terms of getting the film made?
I think creatively he was far more important than… Johnny absolutely helped us by being involved, but it took us two years to get the film mounted so I can’t say that people suddenly said, “Oh you’ve got John Cusack!” It’s not like you’ve got Tom Cruise, you know, where you say, “That’s it then, when do we start?” They would say, “Great, so you’ve got John Cusack, so what? Why don’t you go and make another movie with John Cusack and we’ll be happy to pay for that.” But creatively he was much, much, much more important. My [producer] partner and I, we knew we were just going to stick with it until we got this finance. That was it. We were just going to get this done. Much more importantly was Cusack’s contribution creatively. He’s a brilliant actor. How method-y did Noah Taylor get as Hitler? He didn’t get all that method-y. He was still Noah and everything, between takes, but he didn’t hang out with us. We were all there in Budapest and on Saturday night we’d all go out to dinner tog
