Melora Koepke

Like all good movies about the evils of Hollywood, Maps is an inside job. The A-list cast, which includes Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, and Robert Pattinson, participates with an ill-disguised glee. You get the sense that their performances come from their experience in the industry, a fleeting intuition that Cusack confirmed.

“Every awful thing that happens to our characters are the things that happen to us on all our other movies,” he explained. “Most of my time as a filmmaker and someone who produces, writes, acts, directs—my job is keeping those people away from the actors and the set.” Most of the movies you see in Hollywood, he continued, “got butchered and focus-tested for a committee of senior vice-presidents who didn’t read the script.

“Now it’s just a corporate group idea of ‘Let’s put together an animated version of a face.’ There’s no sensitivity towards letting anything interesting happen. The culture has gotten so debased,” he said.

“For us, that’s what we live in and fight all the time. So to do this film, which was just us and David, that’s real filmmaking. No one fucked up this movie,” Cusack concluded. “Maybe it’s fucked-up. But if it is, it’s us that did it.”

Read article.