press. Jackson plays the hotel manager at the Dolphin, where room 1408 is haunted. Cusack plays an author who debunks haunting stories, but since this is Stephen King, of course he finds the real deal. Mary McCormack and director Mikael Hafstrom chimed in occasionally but it was really the John and Sam show.
CraveOnline: Sam, we can’t imagine anything would scare a badass like you. Are you fearless?
Samuel L. Jackson: Fearless? No. No. I'm quite the opposite of fearless. Well, yeah, I'm the guy that sits in the horror movie and says, “Don't go in the dark room. You're safe in this particular place right here, stay there until it gets light and call somebody or do something, but don't go in the dark room. Don't go down the stairs. Don't go see what the noise is.” Even in my house, if I'm at home by myself in my house here in Beverly Hills, my house is big enough that if I hear something down the hall, I'll just stay in my room and go, “Well...I'll go turn the alarm on and if something happens then the alarm will go off but I'm not going to go down the hall to see if something's not right. I'm not that interested.”
CraveOnline: You’re not the hero in real life.
Samuel L. Jackson: I got a gun, too. I will take the gun out and I'll put the gun on the bed and I'll sit there and if somebody comes in the room that's not supposed to be in the house, I'll just start shooting.
John Cusack: I shouldn't drop by your house late at night.
Samuel L. Jackson: Not unannounced. No.
John Cusack: Sam? [Knocks on the table]
Samuel L. Jackson: You could. As long as you're doing that, you're okay. But don't just pop in the room, “The door was open.” It was not.
CraveOnline: John, would you go after the noise in the house?
Samuel L. Jackson: He takes fight lessons. He wants to test his skills.
John Cusack: I wouldn't. The cool thing about this movie is the thing where you say, “Don't go in the room,” that happens at about minute 16. And then we go for another hour and then we see if we can top it or see if we can sustain that kind of thing.
Samuel L. Jackson: I'm always afraid that once you go in there you end up doing what you did, the key gets sucked in the lock, doorknob breaks off, and you can't get out. And then it's like, “Damn, I'm in here with it. Why? I never had to go in here in the beginning.”
Mary McCormack: There's still a lot of “Don't go in the room in that room.” Like don't go in that vent. Don't lift the shower curtain.
John Cusack: Don't go in the bathroom.
Samuel L. Jackson: Don't go out the window.
John Cusack: I'm pretty lucky. The only times I've had kind of weird paranormal events, the only times I've had them, I had a couple of times where I thought things had moved and whatever it was, it wasn't a bad spirit because I've never really been in the presence of I don't think anything truly evil that I couldn't explain.
Samuel L. Jackson: It's not necessarily evil either. I remember doing a movie and just being freaked out because I was in New Mexico and we shot in Alamogordo and when we finished we had to go back to Santa Fe and for some strange reason I drove myself from Santa Fe to Alamogordo and when we were going back I was in my car alone because nobody wanted to ride back with me. So I'm on a lonely New Mexico highway that's just straight just saying to myself, “Please let nothing show up in the sky and beam me up.” Because the hope that, it's New Mexico and you're always seeing sh** that's in the sky, like zzz, zzz, zzz, stop! And zzz, zzz and boom you're gone. What was that? All I could say was please let nothing pull in front of my car and just hover. Let me get back to Santa Fe, please!
CraveOnline: Sam, you do a lot of Sci-Fi movies too, like Jumper that’s coming out. Do you make movies to explore these kinds of phenomena?
Samuel L. Jackson: It's always a movie that interests me or a story I want to tell or something that I saw when I was growing up that made me excited and all of a sudden I can do it. I don't have to go home and describe it for my friends and I'm actually in something where people teleport and it's kind of like great. Okay. And I get to chase them. Yeah. Okay. I can't do it but I can chase them. And then when I catch them I get to beat them up and kill them. Kind of cool.
CraveOnline: Do you get to box in Resurrecting the Champ?
Samuel L. Jackson: This boxer is in his 60's. He's old, but he still fights because kids come to the alley and these kind of bad kids pick on him and they want to make him fight and so he kind of, they kind of bum fight him, beat him up.
CraveOnline: Was Olin really trying to spare John’s character, or was he just enticing him into the room?
John Cusack: The guy's think Olin's evil and the girls think he's not, which is interesting. All the girls I've talked to said, “No, he's a good guy. He's trying to help you out.” And the guys are like, “No, he isn't. He's the crypt keeper. He's the one who set you up for all this.”
Samuel L. Jackson: Hopefully, I can be the cryptkeeper for the next three incarnations of this film. 1408 Returns.
Mary McCormack: 1409. 1410.
Samuel L. Jackson: 1408 Junior. Junior suite.
CraveOnline: How do you think the scares of 1408 compare to the sort of torture porn horror that’s out now?
Samuel L. Jackson: Torture porn? Really? I want to see it now! Is that like Asian cinema or something? What is it? Asian extreme, gonzo? What is it? Who’s making that? Is The Eye torture porn? No? What’s torture porn, Hostel? This new one, Captivity?
CraveOnline: Takashi Miike type stuff.
Samuel L. Jackson: Oh, yeah! Yeah, Ichi the Killer? Oh yeah. Audition, is Auditiion torture porn? I love Audition. That’s an awesome movie. It’s a good date movie! It’s a movie who hasn’t had a date in years and makes a bad choice.
John Cusack: What’s is the Danish director who did the movie about the two guys, Funny Games, right? [Michael] Haneke. But Haneke is gory, but it wasn’t gory until the very end, so what made that movie so terrifying was the tension that it kept up and created the whole time. I think if you do a movie like this and you do it with the guy you’re talking about, I don’t know if it becomes as interesting because where do you go after the first 25 minutes of blood, guts and gore? I don’t know how you sustain tension that way.
Samuel L. Jackson: Audition is like that. Nothing happens really until the end, and then it’s kind of like, “damn.”
John Cusack: And this has its share, we’ve seen this with an audience and they go, they jump too. So it’s really two different deals.
Samuel L. Jackson: Every generation jumps for different reasons. People used to jump for Vincent Price, now they’re jumping for different sh*t.
CraveOnline: They used to do The Tingler.
Samuel L. Jackson: I remember that under your seat, trying to make you think something was there. Or like the ghosts on haunted hill when they ran them on wires in the theater, you were like, “Awwwww, common!” But then, it was innovative and awesome. Kids are so movie savvy now. The thought that 15 years ago, people were making snuff films, people were like, “Oooh, ahhhh” and now we’re watching them. You go to the movies and watch them. Kids are special effects savvy; they’re making their own slasher films in what, sixth grade on Photofinish, or whatever.
CraveOnline: John you’re the guy in the room for most of this movie. How hard was that?
John Cusack: It was a relief to do scenes with these two [Mary and Sam] 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 Mikael and I would really try and figure out the logic of the inside of the room, and 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. So by the end of the movie, you sort of knew they were going to bring Katie back, the daughter back, and it was, “Are we going to go here? Are we going to go this dark?” And we sort of had to, but that was kind of dark, that was a dark place to go. When you saw that little girl walking on the broken glass, that wasn’t a fun day on set. It’s all pretend and we’re just making a movie, but still, that was challenging.
CraveOnline: Both John and Sam are well liked by both women and men. Why do you think that is?
Samuel L. Jackson: I guess that means we’re ok with the human race.
John Cusack: They got the demographic.
Samuel L. Jackson: I just assumed people like me because they come see your movies or they don’t or they won’t come and see them. I don’t know how you classify that. I just think when you approach the work honestly, and people appreciate what you do and the sincerity and the effort that you put into giving them something that’s real and not acting down. I try not to act down to people, I just try and act as normal as I can. When audiences have an opportunity to see the things you’re doing that makes sense to them, or they see things that make sense to who the human beings are or people that they know who act that way. And they appreciate it in another kind of way and I appreciate you as an actor for being honest with them. I know what I want to see if I’m an audience member, so I read scripts as an audience member, number one. I always see a script and say, “Do I want to see this?” Or number one, “Would I pay my money to go see this?” Then, “Would I pay my money to see it with me in it?” And if the answer is yes, then I do it.
CraveOnline: What wouldn’t we want to see you in?
Samuel L. Jackson: A dress.
John Cusack: Kind of echoing what Sam said is they respond to something personal about you. So I don’t know if there’s another actor who reminds me of Sam or another actress who reminds me of Mary, so you don’t have to play the same character all the time, but if you access something about yourself that you think is true, you’re not trying to be someone else and you’re not trying to be some cookie cutter version of someone else and people respond to it. That’s probably it, or maybe it’s women and men like you if…
Samuel L. Jackson: You’re not too cute and you’re not too ugly
John Cusack: Not too cute and not too ugly.
Samuel L. Jackson: Not too threatening
John Cusack: If you’re really too good looking, guys won’t like you
Samuel L. Jackson: Wow, he’s like an ordinary guy.
John Cusack: Yeah, you have to be perfectly average.
Samuel L. Jackson: Interestingly enough, yeah.
CraveOnline: Of course the big news, what are your thoughts on the Paris Hilton situation?
Samuel L. Jackson: What?
John Cusack: Yeah, I’ll talk about it. I think all heiresses should be put in prison on general principle.
Samuel L. Jackson: Not my daughter, no. My daughter’s an accidental heiress, it’s only because of what I’ve done.
John Cusack: No, no, no. I’m talking about old money.
Samuel L. Jackson: Oh, old money, alright.
John Cusack: I’m Irish-American, so I’m anti-royalist. I intrinsically don’t trust the monarchy, so any heiress should have to do prison time, mandatory prison time.
Samuel L. Jackson: This story is way bigger than it needs to be, really, for real. That’s just the truth; just way bigger than it needs to be.
John Cusack: To me, I’ll tell you, f*c** It’s sad to me because it’s taking up air time when habeas corpus is suspended and no one else is doing anything about it.
Mary McCormack: And Scooter Libby was just sent to jail.
John Cusack: Habeas corpus, it’s the foundation of our legal structure, right. You have to face your accuser on all your rights and all your rights stem from that, right? The Bush administration is taking away habeas corpus and people are talking about Paris Hilton. That’s America.
