BY DAVID SERVER

JOHN CUSACK INTERVIEW

Q: Why did you want to do another romantic comedy?

A: I was going to go off and do a film in Europe, and the way things happen in the film business so many times, it fell apart at the last minute. I thought, 'I'm going to be sitting home right now, not working...' I hadn't had any of my own projects ready, and then I had a call saying, 'You've got to meet this guy Gary Goldberg. He really wants to talk to you.' So I went and met him for lunch, and he seemed like a great guy, and I read the script. So it just sort of came out of the blue and they asked me to do it. But I thought the combination of Gary and Diane and Chris Plummer - that's a pretty great pedigree, so I was kind of happy to be asked to join such a great group.

Q: Are you worried that you're being typecast these days as a 'romantic comedy' actor?

A: I don't think of it that way, as type-casting. I think if I get offered to do a movie about relationships, I'm going to download as much of what I think about them into a part, or what seems funny to me about it, or what's on my mind about it. It seems to me that one thing people do over and over again is try to figure out how to get married, stay married, fall in love, how to rekindle all this stuff. It seems to me to be a pretty eternal theme, so I don't know if you can get typecast from making movies about men relating to women. It seems to be what is going on on the planet a lot.

Q: What makes this movie a great romantic comedy?

A: What I think was so great about what Gary was, and I really didn't know Gary, I just knew that he was this kind of impresario of television - he's like James L. Brooks or one of those guys who made those great comedies and character-based comedies that will work forever in television. He really loves character and I think from working in television, the process keeps evolving with Gary. He's always writing it, and re-writing it, and re-tweaking it, and throwing something out. He just loves characters. I think he found the book and loved the idea of doing this story with Diane, but then he just kind of falls in love with the characters and then just jeeps trying to make their world more interesting, and more interesting, and he's not precious at all. I heard great things about him, but he's really exceeded all my expectations that way. He just stands there and he goes, 'I love this guy. I love this girl', and 'how do we make this better?' and 'what do we do here?' I think of you just approach it from being interested in the characters and not just interested in the devices or the plot twists...obviously, in a romantic comedy you know that these people are going to meet, and then they're gonna get separated, and then they're going to come back together. So it's really just fleshing out the lives in-between. Any genre can be done well or bad I guess.

Q: How much of this character was in the script when you signed on, and how much was based on your input?

A: When I talked to Gary, when I met him, I said...because it was a little bit of a small part, he goes, 'well, if we're going to have you do it, we've got to make something of it'. And then that's his thing. His process is to just get an actor and then write and re-write and work on the set. He's always bringing new pages on the set so I came with some ideas and then he wanted to go with them. That was kind of how he wanted to do it, and I like to work that way too. And I have ideas.

Q: What was it like working with Diane Lane?

A: I'd always sort of wanted to work with her, so, as I said, I was very lucky to get asked to do this because I'd been following her. I probably had a crush on her since 'A Little Romance' when she was 13 and I was about the same age probably.

Q: Was there a lot of improv in this film?

A: I think Gary would have it on paper, and he'd be rewriting it a lot, and you come up with an idea. I would do it that way, and then I'd say, 'well, let's just do one where I sat anything that comes out of my mouth,' and we'd do that. Sometimes Gary would laugh, and sometimes he would sort of look at me like I was insane, and I don't know how much of that he used. We improvised a bit, but there was a lot on the page, and the actors kind of just went with it, and went with their impulses. It's kind of nice to do that in comedy, because it's really all about the character. It's not like it's a heist movie where they have to be at this moment and do this and crack the safe and get the number. Character drives plot so it's all about these characters and what's gong on with them, and what they're feeling. So there is room for improvisation in a film like that. Gary likes to work that way. I think he's worked with actors before who like to riff.

MUST LOVE DOGS

Oh man, there are so many ways I could go with this. Must NOT love Dogs. Must Hate Dogs. Must Hate Good Filmmaking? If you haven't already gotten the message, I didn't love this flick. Matter of fact, I didn't like it at all. I would go so far as to say that this film was even a little painful to sit through. But let's at least get you caught up on the plot before I begin the shredding.

Sarah Nolan (Diane Lane), a 40 year old pre-school teacher, is single, and getting desperate. As the years pass, Sarah's family grows concerned that her time to meet her special someone is running out, so they place her in an online dating service without her knowledge. After at first being offended by the idea, Sarah eventually relents, and tries the service out. After a series of romantic debacles with various online would-be beaus (a mix-up that leaves her on a date with her own father provides one of the few worthwhile chuckles to be found), Sarah finally meets Jake (John Cusack), an eccentric but sweet hopeless romantic and boat builder who falls for her right away. However, Sarah meets Jake right while her recent flirtations with a student's parent, Bob (Dermot Mulroney), are finally starting to heat up. Sarah must choose which of these two men is meant for her, before she accidentally makes a big enough mess of the whole situation and risks ending up with neither, all the while dealing with the rotating door of her overly flirtatious fathers' (John Plummer) girlfriends, and her sisters' meddlesome involvement in her own personal life.

This movie is so standard, boring, and predictable at every turn, that you could just as easily watch the trailer online from the comfort of your own home, guess the way the film plays out (you have a 95% chance of predicting everything about it correctly), and save yourself the ten bucks it'd cost you to see this clunker in a theater. More often than not, it's not even that there's something specifically wrong with the film, except that it's completely devoid of anything right (thought a good deal of the humor falls flat). The characters are all easy and two-dimensional types. The performances are flat across the board. The dialogue is neither witty nor clever. Basically, the film wastes a lot of talented people's time.

Diane Lane is a charming actress, but she falls prey to one of the least likable and most stereotypical female leads in recent romantic comedy history. She's clingy and unappealing throughout. John Cusack, who I'll admit to being a sizable fan of in most occasions, is utterly wasted in a character that could have been (and should have been) played by a B-list actor with much less ability (although his charm does manage to penetrate the script from time to time). Even Christopher Plummer, who is trying so hard to give a decent performance in this film that you can practically hear him straining, comes off as occasionally charming at best. I don't blame the actors, for the most part - they're just buried under an uninspired script.

Now, in the midst of all this, you may have noticed that none of this really has much of anything to do with dogs at all. And yeah, that's true. While Sarah's online ad includes the line 'Must Love Dogs', forcing both Sarah and Jake to bring dogs that don't belong to them to their first meeting, this only takes up about five minutes of screentime, and it really doesn't make for a logical title for the movie. But I guess that in one way, the title is representative of the whole film - it just doesn't work.