John Cusack: Why We Write

Blog written by: Jeremy Pikser, Mark Leyner & John Cusack

Back in early 2003 the three of us got together to see if we could figure out something to write that would express some of the outrage and feelings of going crazy we had about what was going on around Iraq.

Here we were living in the most powerful country on earth, which had bombed the shit out of a relatively poor and weak country, Iraq, devastating its roads, electricity, drinking water; then proceeded to impose sanctions that resulted in half a million civilian deaths from starvation and lack of medical supplies and facilities, then, using the pretext that because some Arabs from several other completely different countries killed 3000 Americans (that’s 1/150 of the Iraqis we had killed in the previous ten years), we bombed the shit out of Iraq AGAIN, and everyone… virtually every journalist attached to anything even remotely mainstream, every politician, every movie star, every everyone was talking about how great and heroic it all was, and we just said, you know, “Fuck This!”

So we wrote this thing that said, this is all lies. None of this is about freedom or democracy. It’s about money and power. We thought the lies these bastards had blanketed the world in were so blatant and outrageous that it would be inappropriate to respond to them with anything that wasn’t derisively absurd. Because the idea that we were expected to swallow all that shit was absurd and insultingly derisive to our intelligences and those of everyone on the planet.

So we wrote it. And the people with money didn’t see a way to make a profit on it so we got someone to make it in Bulgaria for a fraction of what we really needed. But we made it anyway. And we got great, talented people to work on it and be in it for practically nothing, and now it’s done. And we love it. And lots of other folks love it. And we hope you love it.