The one movie John Cusack hated with a passion: “I will never trust you as a director ever again”
It’s been more than 40 years since John Cusack made his feature film debut, but his recent trajectory is beginning to make it look as though he’ll struggle to come close to recapturing the heights he enjoyed at the peak of his career.
Breaking out in a big way when his second-ever feature film appearance saw him cast in John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles, Cusack became one of the faces of the teen drama genre through subsequent outings in Stand by Me and Say Anything…, before the 1990s saw him evolve into one of independent cinema’s leading lights.
The odd blockbuster role here and there to ensure the bills were paid didn’t go amiss, but the actor certainly knew how to choose them after lending support in Con Air, while the likes of Grosse Point Blank, Being John Malkovich, and High Fidelity superbly played to his strengths as the sardonic slacker with a heart of gold.
Times have proven to be fairly tough over the last few years, though, with Cusack taking the same route as his Con Air co-star Nicolas Cage by popping up in an array of action thrillers that get sent nowhere else but straight to video, but at least it’s been keeping him busy. It’s a far cry from where he once was, but so far, he hasn’t actively rebelled against any of his directors, which means that one of his earliest leading man gigs endures as one of his biggest regrets.
Cusack only had four films under his belt when he top-lined writer and director Savage Steve Holland’s Better Off Dead, a very odd coming-of-age black comedy. The star’s Lane Meyer gets dumped by his girlfriend, has a younger brother who can’t speak but builds lasers, and has regular run-ins with a pair of Japanese drag racers.
It was supposed to be a showcase for his talents, but in Cusack’s mind, Holland had completely dropped the ball. So much so, in fact, that he had no issues telling the filmmaker directly to his face that he actively hated Better Off Dead with a passion and would never again collaborate with him on any other project. The downside, at least based on his outburst, was that he’d already shot another movie with the same director.
“The night before we started shooting One Crazy Summer, we screened Better Off Dead for everyone that was up there because it was mostly the same crew, and a lot of the same cast,” Holland shared with The Sneeze. “And John walked out of the movie. About 20 minutes into it, he walked out, and he never came back.”
When they returned to set of their second film the next day, Cusack hadn’t cooled down, telling Holland that “Better Off Dead was the worst thing I have ever seen.” Not only that, but he informed him that “I will never trust you as a director ever again, so don’t speak to me.” That must have created a very awkward environment, and funnily enough, One Crazy Summer was their second and final flick together.
