Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist - John Cusack

Episode Date: September 27, 2020

John Cusack has been on our screens for the better part of four decades, first in movies like Better Off Dead and Say Anything and later starring in classics like Grosse Pointe Blank and Being John Malkovich. In this week’s “Sunday Sitdown,” Willie Geist gets together with the actor over Zoom to talk about that long career of memorable roles and his latest shift into television with the new Amazon Prime series Utopia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another brand new episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. My thanks as always for clicking and listening along. Excited about this one for you today. Some of my favorite interviews are the ones we do with people who don't do a lot of interviews. Al Pacino jumps to mind earlier this year. John Cusack is my guest this week. He doesn't do a ton of press. He's sort of like an elusive star, even though he's this movie icon and so connected to the great movies of the 1980s.

but then also moving forward. He's sort of always been there doing good stuff, whether it's gross point blank or high fidelity or being John Malkovich. He just keeps pushing forward. He's done like 70 some 80 movies over the course of his career, which he started. You'll hear him talk about as a teenager growing up in Evanston, Illinois,

just outside Chicago. He said all of a sudden they started making movies about teenagers in Chicago, and I was there. I was a teenager in Chicago. which led to movies like 16 candles. And then, of course, better off dead and a little bit later say anything with that famous boombox scene. He said such an interesting career.

And his latest project is on TV. Hasn't done a lot of that over his career for all he's done. It's called Utopia. It's on Amazon Prime. And the premise is basically it comes out of a cult favorite British series about a group of young people obsessing over a comic book that's about biologues. warfare. It's about a pandemic. It's about people getting caught up in conspiracy theories. I mean, obviously they conceived of and shot this long before the coronavirus pandemic, but it's amazing when you sit and watch it. It touches on all the things that we're seeing

play out. So John and I get into all of that. He's also, as many of you know, very active on social media talking about politics, supporter of Bernie Sanders for many years. So we talk about the state of the country a little bit, the state of what he thinks needs to have. happen if Democrats win the election in the fall, what they need to do to sort of adopt many of the progressive policies that he's been talking about for a long time. So we got a lot to get into. He's home, just to paint the visual for you. I'm home. He's home. He's sitting in his living room, I think it is. Just got a laptop open like you all are doing these days on Zoom. The two of us talking about his long career. Yes, we talk about the boombox scene. Yes, we talk about working with

his amazing sister Joan Kusack. And then we talk about this incredible show, Utopia and all the eerie similarities with what's going on right now. So I think you're going to enjoy this conversation right now on the Sunday Sit Down podcast with John Kusack. Hey John, thanks for doing this man. I appreciate it. Thanks for asking me. So we were going to talk about the show in a second, but curious what you've been up to for the last six months. You like the rest of us kind of hunkered down at home, watching movies and baseball games? Well, finally baseball games came back and both Chicago teams are doing great.

So it looks like they're going to both be in the playoffs. So that's pretty exciting. But it's very strange, you know, to sort of not be able to go to the games and all that. But yeah, I've been sort of hunkered down and reading and writing a bit and catching up on a lot of old movies. It's definitely a time to sit and watch movies and watch series

and people are going to be going crazy for Utopia. I mean, we were just talking a minute ago about, my gosh, how it touches on themes that we see today, shot obviously before this pandemic, but touching on all the things that we've seen around it. So how do you describe this show to people? I went in cold, which I think is a good way to watch a show. That's the best way to go. And just bam, and it hits you right out of the gate. Yeah. Gillian sort of pitched it as sort of, you know, Marathon Man Meets the Goonies, which I thought was very, very good.

That's good. The goonies. They are the goonies. It also has elements of like, you know, Willie Wonka and a, you know, and a cult. And it's got so much stuff in it. It's so dense with ideas and kind of madness.

That I think it should be quite a rollercoaster for people. So for people who don't know, maybe didn't see the British series, Utopia is a comic book and we won't give too much away. But it basically, predicts things that are coming in society and culture and dark things that are coming? Well, the British series, which Gillian Flynn has updated and included a big biotech angle, which I'm kind of a part of, with another part of the story. But the original show

was that there was a comic called Dystopia that had in it these Nostradamus-like predictions about future events and calamities and kind of all the conspiracy theories that are sort of known to man, but that are under the banner of what governments and corporations are doing to people without their knowledge, right? So it's half rooted in reality. Like if they say there's the JFK assassination and then there's a lot of people who go crazy about it, but it's rooted in at least half of a truth that JFK got assassinated. So this comic book has all these truths in it, and then it emerges that there's a sequel called Utopia, and that's when the story begins.

And as soon as this new comic with all these secrets in it emerges, the fan boys and girls and all these sorts of forces come in to try to get hold of it, because I guess the information is quite valuable to many different factions. And again, I don't want to reveal too much about the show that people are going to love digging through it, but we're talking about a pandemic, which obviously we're going to going through now. You couldn't have predicted that when you were shooting the show, they were conceiving of the show. But do you see all the resonant themes throughout the show of what we're going through today, not just the fact that we're in a pandemic, but all that follows

from that disinformation, confusion, all of those things? Yes. And a lot of those paranoid thrillers of the, you know, 70s that were so great, like a marathon man, you know, those kinds of things. So yeah, all that's in it. And since the theme is that the world is sort of hurtling towards, you know, kind of extinction, mass extinction, if left unchecked with climate change and nuclear wars and viruses, all those very dark things that would keep people up at night all the time, there's no way to sort of avoid the fact that that is the theme of the piece, And that was in the original British piece as well. But it's, I guess surreal would be the only word you could use to describe the fact that

what happens in the show, you know, you look out, you look out your window and look at the television and read the papers. And it seems like it seems a little bit too eerily similar, especially with the West being on fire and climate change and floods, all this terrible, terrible, these terrible tragedies. Hurricanes in the Gulf. It's coming from every direction. You touched on conspiracy theories, which I thought was so resonant as I watched the show specifically to what's going on right now. You talk about a half-truth being part of a conspiracy theory, and what's happening today is there tends not to be a truth around it. It just tends to be something that's floating out there for people who are looking for something to grab onto.

So what do you think is at the heart of a conspiracy theory, not just in your show, but what we're seeing right now, is it fear? Is it uncertainty? Is it a lack of solid information? What makes a conspiracy theory take off? Well, I think there's, you have to sort of separate, you know, there's the classic conspiracy theories and thrillers that you can see in novels and films that have to do with people's relationship to power. So, you know, Daniel Ellsberg releases the Pentagon Papers and all this, you know, if he would have said what he had said, at the time, they'd say, oh, you're crazy. No one would believe that. Then he releases the documents, right? So there's people who want to know what the government is doing in their name,

or people who want to know what giant corporations are doing in their name, right? And so there's that element to it that is kind of straight up. It's about the imbalance of power and the abuse of power. But what we have now with sort of surveillance capitalism is the algorithm that just keep to reinforcing people's fears and prejudices and hates. And you actually have, you actually have, propaganda and artificial reality coming that is based in no truth. It's not exploiting a truth or anything like that. So this is, the utopia is firmly in the other camp. You know, it's trying to figure out what corporations, governments are doing and little

people trying to figure it out and figure out the story and figure out the truth. But it inhabits a world that has all that other things in it as well. well. I was a truly, truly terrible, terrible and a terrible reality we're all living through. The, you know, the social media companies are really data mining companies masquerading as social media companies, and they're selling off our information. And it's very unnatural for a company to know more about you and I than we know about ourselves. That's very interesting, dark.

dystopic reality. And so you're the first, fourth, and seventh, all of those are really compromised at the point of contact with a lot of these platforms. So hopefully there'll be some accountability and some of them will be broken up and regulated. So as I looked at your character, Dr. Christie, I wondered about what inspired him.

What did you go to in our real life culture, if you did, to find a sort of a puppet master type character, somebody who has the ability to control what's happening in the culture in our society. Yeah, I mean, sometimes you can go back to like just myths. And I don't know if you ever remember that great, the power of myth, the Joseph Campbell series. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah. But when you read through mythologies, you know, there's a story when you go, when you go meet the dragon or you go meet the troll under the bridge or you go meet the devil, right? They know all your secrets and they're going to put you through an initiation of sorts.

And they seem to have an omnipresent kind of understanding of knowing exactly what your secrets are and how you, what makes you tick. And so I think it's, it was along those sort of that mythological level that I sort of took some of it from. That's how I've interpreted. And then there's plenty of people up in kind of, you know, like you have had a fortunate life where you've, you know, I grew up in Evanston near, I think, where you grew up. Yeah. But yet we've, you know, gotten to travel the world and meet all sorts of people, you know, from people in positions of power to everyday people on the street. And so, you know, I've met a lot of those people over my travels who ended up being big tech,

you know, movers and shakers. And I've spoken to some people who are pretty powerful over the years. And so you catalog those conversations and try to remember, you know, the human being within the power and the power structure. And then, you know, what that power does to their personality, maybe over time. And so there are a couple ones, especially some of the biggest moguls of today are very conscious of having a public. branded face to whatever they're doing, where it's before, I think, you know, Rockefeller and, you know, in the old days, they didn't, you know, we didn't talk to anybody unless they had to.

Right. And they didn't have to. Unless Teddy Roosevelt was calling him into Congress, right? Right. These guys were way out front and they really want to make sure that they have a brand that is multi-racial, pluralistic, democratic, empathetic. But of course, what they're doing underneath it might be another story. So what do you think drives Dr. Christie or perhaps those kind of characters that we're talking about right now?

Is it ego? Is it money? Is it power? Is it some combination of those things? I think it's always probably a different combination depending on the person. And it's hard, you know, you don't want to make blanket judgments about people as a stock character or architect. But I think there's certainly an element to Christy and some of the same. of the people you've met who were very successful with are incredibly driven, you know, they're visionary and that sort of obsession and that commitment, which is almost like a Stalinist commitment, can appear, you know, heroic and perhaps insane at times, depending on where you're standing in the river, you know.

But so I think, you know, it's, I've met a few of them, yeah, and talk to a few of them. I think they're it's interesting too the the billionaires of that level are they they want to be liked yes they want you to know that they're not bad guys or women and they want to be understood and they're very insecure about what you think of them which I found was just interesting psychologically because you think you know if you have that much power and wealth you might you know be able to be sure of yourself in some ways but they actually end up you know you're you know, being quite confessional about it. Because I think nobody actually really believes that they're worth or if made $80 billion. They don't believe it. No. They want you to know somewhere that they know they shouldn't have it all, but they're good people.

And look at the good things we're doing. Yeah. It would be quite an ego trip if you thought you deserved that much money. Right. And, of course, you don't deserve it. And you didn't make it. You made it. by looting Commonwealth and by partnerships.

There's always socialism for the 1% and rugged individualism for the working class. But corporate socialism has been a constant. So they know that too, and they sort of know that other people know that. So I find it interesting that they're very kind of very insecure and very aware of their image. Not all of them, some that have met.

I'm so interested, John, because you are so selective and have been over the course of your career about the characters you play and the roles you take. What was it about this one that said, yeah, this is worth several months or a year, whatever it's going to be of my time to go out and make a show? Because I'm sure stuff comes your way all the time

that you're like, eh, what was it about this? I would challenge that assumption. Really? Yeah, of course. You know, it's like this was quite the opposite. You know, if you can get a great role, you know, if you can work with the David Cronerberg or if someone asks you to play Brian Wilson at Love and Mercer,

Those are very easy things to say yes to. But if you can't get a great role, then you sort of do a job or try to get one of your things funded. And if you can't get the money, you know, you don't work as much and you work on other things. But this was one of those things where you get a call and saying, you're in Chicago and saying, Gillian Flynn is going to redo this great British show Utopia. She's going to not just remake the old thing. She's turning into something new. She wants you to be in it.

We want to send you the eight episodes. And you're saying, what a lovely phone call to get. morning. You're very flattered and it's nice to be wanted. And so I had very high expectations. And I got all the scripts and I got a couple of coffee. And I started at about 2 o'clock in the afternoon. And I finished it at about 10 o'clock in night.

And it was just an absolute page trimmer. It's a certain kind of architecture in the writing that's very rigorous and very hard to pull off. I think Gillian is kind of a master of, which is, you know, you can always see who in the first act, is around and think, oh, maybe they're going to be the people there. But Gillian sets trap doors that you can't see coming, and you're constantly being shocked and surprised. And then in retrospect, it seems inevitable,

but only after you've gone through it all. And she keeps up in the ante, and each episode, there's more and more trap doors, and you end up down different rabbit holes, looking at a different Cheshire cat. And by the final one, like whatever you've known about the first seven episodes, In the eighth episode, all of it gets thrown into a blender. And it's pretty wild stuff.

So I also just loved the sheer ambition of the writing, you know, of the project. So it was an easy, it was a no-brainer for me. It was nice to be asked, nice to be wanted, and nice to get a great role and work with great people. So I guess my question then was, what's the threshold for you to say yes? And it sounds like it's writing. It's page Turner, great script. writing, you know, who's going to be running, you know, Gillian's going to be running the show, and there's a great company doing it that was going to do it with a healthy budget and all that

stuff. So, yeah, this was just sort of an easy, no-brainer. And if I was being, if I appeared to be selected before, it's probably because I couldn't, my own things financed or didn't get good offers. Okay. I gave you a charitable assessment then, right? You would give me too much credit, but I appreciate it. Do you ever, John, take a time and look back at your career? You're starting, you know, as a young actor in Chicago and a family of actors. Do you think back or do you ever stumble on cable on Better Off Dead or say anything? Will you stop and watch those and say, man, look at that teenager who didn't know what was coming in his life?

Yeah. It's weird. It's like having your yearbook, your yearbook pictures on cable all the time. It's kind of a strange. Strange one. No, I don't really look back too much. But I find it's nice that people still are actually thinking or talking about some of those old movies and they want to screen them. And sometimes they'll ask me to go to a Q&A afterwards, a screening of an old movie.

And so in that sense, I relive them. But yeah, I remember once I stopped because I had made a film called The Grifters with Angelic Houston and Stephen Frears and a net bending and it was a Jim Thompson novel. When I saw it, the first time, I thought, oh, everything's great, but I screwed it up. up. I didn't, I wasn't good. And then, you know, time came on and I, and I was going through the cable and I stopped. And all of a sudden I started watching it and I saw something different. And then I thought, oh, okay, maybe I, you know, I didn't have the right set of eyes back then. I thought it was better. It was better than I remembered. I thought the movie was very good. I just, I could see something that I hadn't, wasn't able to see before. So you will.

So you will. I'll only stop for like 30 seconds. I would say, you stop quickly and move on. Yeah. I think about is the mistakes or something you could have done better, you know. Of course. People don't know what you, what you were intending, but, you know. Does it ever get old hearing about the boom box, people coming up to you on the street? Yeah, but they come up about other things too.

And then I figure, you know, that's a kind of a, that's a kind of a champagne problem, if you really look at the, right? So I think if that's, if that's, you know, as tough as it's going to get for me, I'm pretty lucky guy. Yeah, I was re-watching last night, high fidelity, too, which, by the way, has been 20 years. I don't know if you can believe that, where you got the Golden Globe nomination and all of that. When you look back on that film, where does that fit in sort of your pantheon of movies in terms of experience you had and being able to watch it again and enjoy it and appreciate it? Well, that was one of the, I don't know how many, but I've produced and written, and a lot of them

that I've done, and that was one of them that I was able to do. And that was, at an interesting time in the business. So Joe Roth was the executive. And at Disney, he would have a slate of 30 films that he would do. 25 of them were designed to make money in very commercial. But he would have seven or eight slots of his slate each year. And he would just give them to filmmakers and was the best friend of filmmaker ever had. So he gave me money to do gross point blank and high,

He gave Wes Anderson the money to do Rushmore. Spike Lee got to make Summer of Sam. These were all kind of mid-range studio movies with big budget. So I felt very lucky to be working in Hollywood when that's 60s, 70s era of studio filmmaking was still a little bit there. So I remembered just having an incredible amount of support from them and from Kathy Nelson, the music supervisor because the requests for music and the request for music and that movie were Herculian. The fact that she was able to make all those deals

and get all the best music that we wanted was really amazing. And yeah, I remembered it being a very lovely time. I'm going to make another assessment that you can disagree with, which is that if you look over the course of your career, characters that have the vast potential to be unlikable on paper

are made likable and interesting by your performance. Is that a thread that you see through some of your characters? I think, I would think probably in that, you know, you just want to make the characters as human as you can. And then I think maybe connected to a different era of filmmaking where ambiguity is a virtue rather than something to be run from at all costs. So, you know, when you look at some of the films that you really love, you know, like even I was watching Carol Reads the third man,

and everybody in the movie comes into the narrative, exhausted, feeling like they failed at everything, almost existentially suicidal. And they know everything. They know all their faults. They know everything that they failed. And there's just that sort of, you know, the characters admit that they're deeply human and flawed, right?

And that's sort of the opposite of branded, you know, movie star performances and stuff. So I think I was always very interested in that ambiguity and the fact that somebody would say is this character kind of, is he likable? Is he not likable? It's more like, is that true? Like, you know, somebody tells a joke,

and it may be a truth that you really don't want to deal with, but you laugh because it's true or it hurts or it winces. So I think there's sort of an instinct just to run into that kind of trouble cinematically because, you know, drama has to do with problems. Yeah, absolutely. It's like, you know, it's a man versus himself and whatever it is, whatever the theme is. But, you know, you're always going to be doing a story about a man with a problem or a woman with a problem. It's interesting.

Even there, hearing you talk about Hollywood, for someone who's been as successful as you've been and who's got the name that you have, has been in all these great movies, that you have, I don't know if contempt is the right word. But in some ways, just for the Hollywood system of be a big star, do the big movie, do all the marketing, all the things that come. You strike me as somebody who just wants to do a good job in the performance and not deal with everything else that comes with it. Is that fair to say? Yeah, hopefully I'm not contemptuous because that, you know, I'm very fortunate, and that's the truth. I'm one of the luckiest people you'll meet.

So I would hope I'm not contemptuous of it. But I do think the idea of ambiguity in doing something very human is at odds with the idea of a commodity or turning something into a product. You know, if you go to a fast food restaurant, the whole idea is you know exactly what a Big Mac tastes like and you're going to get it every time you go there. And that's cool, right? But that's also not art. So I think there's a little bit of a natural schism between those two things. the idea of making a commodity and a commercial commodity out of the film and also wanting to do something that's just kind of absolutely unique and human and merging those is not so not so easy sometimes and sometimes the selling of the films can be you know I remember when you'd be making these films and did say oh well you know we're gonna try to get you in a bad best actor nomination or best supporting actor nomination.

And, you know, then you court the Golden Globes and you do all these things. And then you have all these small films that are trying to buy for this kind of a seed in this luge of the award cycles, right? Free publicity. And it's not any of these films fault, but all of a sudden they have to be the most profound greatest thing that ever was, you know, the greatest thing since sliced bread and instant clash, like revolutionary. And, you know, you feel this marketing presence. and it starts to make you not like the film. So I started to, you know, not watch any of the films around that time. It's just so I could see them, just as the filmmakers, what they were trying to move on.

So I don't have to respond to being told, you know, open up. Here's a, you know, a 40-millimeter halitzer. We're going to blow this film down your throat. You're going to look. You know, sometimes it got a little, I don't know if that's contentious, but I was just a process of a little tiring. Right. Have you paid any price for that view of the Hollywood system in your career, do you think?

I mean, if there are things that you haven't been able to do because they said, well, he probably doesn't want to do it anyway. I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think anyone really has much of an attention span or memory about that kind of stuff, you know? Yeah. I also went and did all the, you know, I made, there's always a, you know, you're doing a dance a little bit, so you'll try to make something that makes money and then leverage that into, there's, you know, they call the foreign. sales market so they'll pre-sell a thing based on your name so you have to make money in order to go do a project you love for less money so there's a dance but then you know i'll go do it

and make the film and try to make it as best i can made big films where you fly around the world you know promoting it and it helps if you have nice fun people to be with because i can't a little bit you know after a while you those junket days got long don't they right at the end of the candidate race for them. So the selling is not as quite, is not as enjoyable. Right. People as doing it, I think, probably. I've got to ask you before I let you go about politics, you're very active on social media,

talking about what's going on in the country in politics and in corporations as we just had that conversation. What's your expectation for what happens this fall in November and for what comes after? Well, I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope that the Trump administration's let them eat cake. Like, they don't give a . . right? And they're fascists. But the Democrats are, I want to have my cake and eat it too, right? So they mobilize to kill the Sanders campaign.

And I understand that the Democratic establishment every four years has to pretend like they haven't seen the Ken Burns' documentaries on FDR. I understand that game. But the Ken Burns documentary on the Roosevelt's do exist. The New Deal did happen, and that's exactly what we need now. So I think the Democrats don't embrace some of those core principles in this climate now. I think they're going to lose to Trump. And that's why I'm most frightened up, that they feel like they can fight neo-fascism by return to the same neoliberalism pre-Trump.

But the problem is that the pre-Trump landscape is the landscape that gave us Trump. So there has to be a correction. And the billionaires have to pay. They have to pay taxes. They have to pay taxes. We can't have a permanent underclass of people who are in medical debt, student debt, who can't afford a foreign dollar emergency, who are being massacred because we can't take on the NRA in our schools. I mean, there has to be a correction and it has to come in an FDR-style way.

in my opinion with all humility. So I just hope that the Democrats don't think that they can squeak by without doing the structural change that's needed. So is your concern that progressives who supported Bernie Sanders, for example, like yourself, won't come out to support and vote for Joe Biden? No, I don't think so, but I think you're dealing with – I think everybody knows what the stakes of the election are, and they know it intellectually, and they sort of know it emotionally. But you have, you know, kind of a neo-fascist administration with, you know, a lawless AG

destroying the post. I mean, this is not, this is like lawless criminality, and these people will lie and do anything to stay in power. So you don't just need to understand that emotionally. You need to mobilize your base and give them something to vote for. And it's, you know, how on, on God's earth, can you not say during a pandemic, we are going to make sure you have health care. You get sick in a pandemic and you might get a $70,000 bill. You have to bust up these trusts and these corporations and they have to start paying. We cannot just go back to pre-Trump, you know, landscape and think that's going to be enough. There's been too much damage done.

So I just hope, I believe that, you know, I do believe that Bernie. Sanders has a relationship with Biden. I believe he believes that he's going to get a minimum wage hike. He's going to get some debt relief. They're going to expand Obama's Medicare program. I do believe Bernie believes that because I don't think Bernie lies. I think he tells you, he tells the truth, you know. But I just hope that Biden, the Democrats, tell the truth.

We can all watch the Ken Burns documentaries. This wasn't, this didn't happen in the 50. This was like not that long ago. Yeah. We made these course corrections and we helped a lot of people. We can do it again, but corporations have to pay. Bernie's done a good job just for the part from the party's same point of circling the wagons, but he did come out a few days ago and say, I think he echoed. He said, let's not forget about us.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, as always the identity politics are, great, but they cannot be an end in themselves where we never address class. Because if you have, if you have billionaires making 40, 40, 50 billion dollars in the pandemic, and yet we can't get food, rent money, places to live, I mean, there's an enormous amount of suffering out there. So I mean, I can remember very clearly just when my father passed away and, you know, It was very hard, obviously.

Everybody goes through it. But I was aware that when the insurance company said, we're not going to pay for it, but I could pay for it because I was a successful actor, right? So I knew that that was the truth. And I thought to myself, I couldn't imagine what the families were going through when they were trying to get care for their loved one. And, you know, they were getting the brutal cold shoulder from the insurance company. You're like saying, if you're sick, go see a doctor.

We just take your money and don't pay, you know. So, and friends, family. So there's just, you know, there has to be a correction. It has to be a New Deal style correction. And they can choose whatever language they want. But, you know, let's just rewatch those middle of the road. Ken Burns documentaries. Let's not pretend like we don't know what we need to do.

We've done it before. We can do it again. I just hope that they start communicating that to the American people. And, you know, believe it. Well, you've inspired me. But I'm just not sure. You know, I don't think, I just don't know. You know, you got to make Wall Street mad at you.

They're going to have to be upset. They'll still be really rich. They're just going to have to pay some taxes. If nothing else, John, you've inspired me to watch the FDR series. Then I'm going to go back to Vietnam and baseball. That's a great one. But, you know, the Roosevelt's on Teddy and Franklin are really as relevant for today as anything you can watch. Hey, guys.

thanks for listening to the Sunday Sit Down Podcast. Stick around to hear more from John Kusack after the break. Welcome back to the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Now more of my conversation with John Kusack. Since you're sitting in Chicago, I just want to ask you about growing up in the family of actors, working with Joan. What was the first inspiration to be an actor as you were growing up?

Well, I think in my family, my father always he loved theater and art and film and you know cinema and stuff and my mom was more of in the social activist part so then that was sort of how we sort of grew up that was their interests I guess that they shared with us and you know in the summer I'd always go to the old art house movies and watch the week full of you know kiras or the film noirs or truffos all those things and you know You'd be playing baseball and then you go to the art house cinema and see all those old movies. So I sort of fell in love with that. And then when my sister and I were teenagers, they started making some films in Chicago about teenagers, which weren't really a genre at the time.

So she was in a film. She got a part in a film called My Bodyguard, which was Tony Bill produced or Tony Bill directed, I believe, who was a producer of the Sting. He made one in Chicago. And then the next year or so, John Hughes made one called 16 candles. And so we both got small parts in that. And that's how we kind of got into it. Is it a cool thing to work with your sister to be on a movie set and look at her and say, wow, that's the girl I grew up with in our house.

We're making movies together. Yeah, I know. With my sister, Anne and woman, yeah, and some friends. Yeah, it's always wonderful. I'm with her. It's the best because, you know, when I'm producing a movie, I know I can get her cheap. And so I say, I want you to do it. And she just pretends like she doesn't hear me.

I go, take a script, and I leave it by her door. And I just go, you just read that, okay? And you're going to come by and call me an asshole in this scene, okay? And she just pretends like she doesn't know what we're talking about. And then she just comes on the set and, you know, like Wiley Coyote just runs you over. And you're just like a flat pancake. And then everyone's really happy. It's usually the funniest scenes in the movie.

And then, you know, you can do it again. So, yeah, it's always a delight to work with my sisters. She's so good. She's so good. John, thanks so much, man. I appreciate it. Congrats on the show, too. It's really good.

Thank you. Thank you. My big thanks again to John for a great conversation. You can catch his new show, Utopia, Streaming now on Amazon Prime. And my thanks to all of you, of course, for clicking and listening along. To hear more of our brand new virtual conversations all fall, we've got some great ones dialed up. Make sure you click subscribe. so you never miss an episode.

And of course, don't forget to tune into Sunday today every weekend on NBC to see these interviews in Living Color. I'm Willie Geist. We will see you right back here next week on the Sunday Sit Down podcast.