I wish I could tell you that I spent time with The Man, but alas, not this trip.  What follows is the big press conference after the movie - which is scary, by the way.

On the panel were The Man (Samuel L. Jackson for those who don't know and should), John Cusack, Mary McCormack, director Mikael Hastrom and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Beforewarned, there were a few bad words uttered during the interview.

QUESTION: JOHN AND SAMUEL, SINCE WE READ SO MUCH ABOUT OVERSEAS GROSSES, 60% OF A MOVIE NOW IS MORE THAN THE UNITED STATES. DOES THAT INFLUENCE HOW YOU PICK A ROLE, WHAT KIND OF PROJECTS YOU CHOOSE? DO YOU THINK OF THINGS THAT ARE NOT JUST FOR AMERICA BUT THE WORLD OUTSIDE?

JC: I just thought it would be cool to be in a poster with Sam Jackson.

SLJ: I just go to work. I never think about where they're going to sell it. That's not my problem. No. Not a consideration at all. You always figure they're going to go over there anyway. Somebody else will make sure.

QUESTION: I LOVE THE PART WHERE YOU CALL IT 'AN EVIL FUCKING ROOM', BUT DIDN'T YOU WANT TO CALL IT 'AN EVIL MOTHER FUCKING ROOM?'

SLJ: Never occurred to me. No. Not at all.

JC: I was pissed off about that because it's PG-13 and I was tortured in this room for 15 weeks and you're being tortured and all you want to do is just swear. You want to go fuck, shit, right? But you can't because Sam’s got the great room. It's got to be 'evil fucking room.' We get one fuck and they give it to Sam and I get tortured.

SLJ: You get two, but they can't be sexual. Don't you get two?

JC: No. You get one.

SLJ: It used to be two. Okay.

JC: You just took it because you had the cool line and I got nothing during all the torture.

SLJ: You got the tee shirt.

JC: I know.

SLJ: 'Evil fucking room.' If the room goes, 'Fuck!’ that's not a tee shirt.

QUESTION: FOR EACH OF YOU, WHAT IS THE SCARIEST HOTEL ROOM EXPERIENCE YOU'VE HAD?

SLJ: I got to remember it.

QUESTION: OR JUST A BAD CHECK-IN EXPERIENCE? OR BAD HOTEL STAY OR ANYTHING?

SLJ: I don't know if it's bad but I guess the most interesting thing that's ever happened to me checking into what's called a hotel. Last year we went to a game reserve in South Africa. And when we checked in, the guy didn't ask for a credit card, he asked us to sign a release. Yeah. You're going that's very bad. Walking from here to my room, the things that could happen and they didn't even have cats. So it was kind of like, hmm.

JC: Besides normal jetlag where you wake up in Dusseldorf and you have no idea what country you're in or what room you're in, which has happened to me before. I was also in a game reserve in South Africa. It was a place called Eboma and they said we got to make sure you go back at night with a guard because some woman had dinner and she had taken her high heels off and wanted to go change her shoes and tried to walk back to her cottage and she got eaten. True story. Yeah.

SLJ: They had cats.

JC: They had cats. If you're in one of these places in Africa, one of these hotels, it's like that's where the animals live. So it's pretty real.

MCCORMACK: I've been to a game reserve in South Africa last year.

JC: Were you?

MCCORMACK: And nothing scary happened. Yeah, I didn't know about that. I walked to my room with no shoes on.

JC: That’s not good.

MCCORMACK: I wish I’d known. I could have been eaten.

SLJ: [to Mikael Hafstrom] You were a European teenager, come on. You traveled around and stayed in some of those two dollar a night places when you were like a teenager.

HAFSTROM: That was scary.

JC: I do have an anecdote, which I never do so I'm going to tell it. [Laughs] I've got an anecdote.

MCCORMACK: Finally.

JC: I know it. Three days in. I did a movie in upstate New York and there was this very, very scary old hotel and I found out that's what Stephen King based 'The Shining' on and it's this big hotel in Mohonk and it was supposed to be haunted and we were staying up there. And then when we'd go walking back at night after one too many cocktails, it was a little frightening in there. And I can't remember the name of it but it's in Mohonk and it was based on 'The Shining' and it was a scary place. Not a very *good* anecdote. [Laughs] But it ties in the Stephen King thing and ate up time.

QUESTION: JOHN, DO YOU HAVE ANY EXPERIENCE SURFING?

JC: Yeah. I've actually done it a little bit but I'm not a big surfer. The water's kind of scary especially those big waves. I have some friends who do it and I've gone out with them a few times. Not a big surfer.

QUESTION: JOHN, THE CHALLENGE OF ACTING ALONE ALL THOSE WEEKS COMPARED TO BEING ON SET WITH OTHER ACTORS, WHAT'S THAT LIKE? WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE LEARNED FROM IT? ANYTHING THAT SURPRISED YOU?

JC: I think Mikael [Hafstrom] and I, we sort of had Stockholm Syndrome where the room was keeping us captive but then as soon as we got out of the room and we got to work with Mary and Sam and stuff. It was kind of strange and we did scenes in the lobby and there were all these extras and then you'd go out to Venice Beach and there'd be surfers and things. We just thought we got to get back in the room, get back in the room where it's safe and horrible. Just me staring at the walls and I get tortured and we started to think that made more sense than dealing with people after a while.

It was pretty fun. I thought the piece was very ambitious in that way because you didn't know if you could pull it off. And you knew that it would be interesting when these guys came back into the film or in and out of the film. But how do you pull off that kind of dance in a room with just the D.P., the director, the actor and anything you can think of. It was kind of ambitious to try to pull it off. That kind of got you going in the morning because we couldn't rely on these guys.

QUESTION: WHEN DID YOU FIRST ENCOUNTERED STEPHEN KING AND HAVE YOU BEEN A LONG TIME FAN? WHEN WERE YOU FIRST INTRODUCED TO HIM AND HOW? WHICH BOOK?

HAFSTROM: I think my first encounter with Stephen King filmwise was watching Brian De Palma’s ‘Carrie’ back in the day. I think ‘Carrie’ was one of the first films made of Stephen King. This was in the mid-70s. I think 1976 was when ‘Carrie’ came out. I got really obsessed about that film and I liked it a lot and I started to watch Brian De Palma films, but I also started to read a little bit of King’s work. I have read some. I haven’t read everything. King’s genius is in short stories which is a very tough literary genre to pull off, but I think he’s a great master in this contained way.

‘1408’ is 30 pages long, I think, but if you read it right, you get a lot of the information and obviously our film is longer. Our film has more material than is in the short story, but I feel very much that we are very true to the heart and soul of the short story and Mike Enslin, the guy that Stephen King writes about in the short story even if we created a more ambitious back story. So it started with ‘Carrie’ and I haven’t read everything that Stephen King wrote because it’s so much, but I read a lot of his short stories. I think they are great.

JC: My parents took us to Nantucket and it was 1978, somewhere around there to visit some cousins and that was about 1979 or 1978 and 'The Shining' had come out and it was already sort of was a classic. It was in all the revival houses and I snuck into a theater at around six o'clock because it was an R movie. And I had to walk back to this cottage where we were staying at and when I got out it was night and it was a pretty windy road with these lamps and stuff. That was the scariest walk home I've ever taken after a movie. I saw 'The Shining' when I was about 12 years old and that freaked me out.

MCCORMACK: Alone?

JC: Alone. I snuck in alone and then I had to walk home for like 20 minutes by myself. That was a bad, bad, bad, bad walk. I thought I heard Jack Nicholson around the corner of every bush. So that was my first entree into Stephen King. Then I saw 'Carrie' as I got older and read 'The Stand' in about one sitting over a whole night because you can't put it down. I think he's very underrated as a writer. Also his sense of character I think is very underrated. He writes terrific characters. And I think somebody told me he uses a lot of pop culture references and so he doesn't say 'the man poured the detergent into the laundry.' He says 'he poured the Tide into the laundry.' And everybody sort of dismisses him as not the kind of literary talent that he is because he's so pop cultured, but I think he's pretty damn good.

HAFSTROM: ‘Misery’ was a film I watched a number of times when we started to work on this. The connection with ‘Misery’ is obviously you have such a contained arena. It’s just his bedroom and I knew that we had to do this film in just this hotel room so watching ‘Misery’ was a good thing to do. Obviously you get stressed out but how do you make this alive and kicking in one room for the most part of the film. ‘Misery’ is the related film I could connect the most to of Stephen King’s work in this case.

JC: 'Carrie's' a really intense film, too.

SLJ: Well, 'Duel' was too for a television show. That was the first thing I...who's this guy Steven? 'Duel.'

JC: The Steven Spielberg?

SLJ: Yeah.

JC: I didn't even know that was Stephen [King].

SLJ: Yeah. Short story.

JC: Great.

QUESTION: DO YOU THINK THIS IS A COUSIN TO 'THE SHINING', THIS HOTEL ROOM MOVIE?

JC: It's definitely in that same ballpark.

DI BONAVENTURA: I think it’s a little bolder actually. What I found interesting about it is the examination of man’s mental state of mind. I mean Jack is phenomenal in ‘The Shining,’ but he’s so far out there so quickly that you don’t continue to have revelations in getting caught into his head. It’s a thing when I was first attracted to it and what I think everybody on the stage here is bold to be a part of is it’s a pretty tough experiment to try to carry that out.

SLJ: You actually start to talk about a place being evil and it's not like a whole place, it's just a particular section of this particular building that's possessed in this particular way that everybody believes and everybody knows and he comes to be a believer and if you're in that room with him through this film, you kind of go, ‘Damn! Maybe so.’ You know?

QUESTION: JOHN, WERE YOU INJURED AT ALL DURING THIS?

JC: I was emotionally injured.

QUESTION: WOULD ‘WE’VE ONLY JUST BEGUN’ BE YOUR NIGHTMARE SONG?

JC: That would be pretty good. I was thinking there's a couple Neil Diamond tunes that I would never want like for extended periods. 'Cracklin' Rosie' might be, that might really just push me over the edge. But if I heard that after being up for four days in Dusseldorf, I might jump. I wasn't hurt. No, I wasn't physically hurt. Although we tried. We tried. [Laughs] We did almost everything you could do to a person in a room. [Laughs] We lit ourselves on fire, we froze ourselves under water, earthquakes, cords.

COMMENT: DEAD DAUGHTERS.

JC: Dead daughters.

SLJ: Hung off a wall.

JC: Hung off a wall.

MCCORMACK: Good times.

JC: Sam was sarcastic to me.

SLJ: Always.

JC: I was wounded by the experience.

QUESTION: JOHN AND SAM, YOUR CHARACTERS BELIEVE ONLY IN THAT WHICH HE CAN SEE WITH HIS OWN TWO EYES. DOES THAT RING TRUE FOR EITHER OF YOU IN ANY WAY? AND IF NOT, HOW DOES IT NOT RING TRUE?

JC: That doesn't ring true for me. I thought one of the fun things about this piece was that King had written this very terrifically cynical character that is basically daring the gods or the devils to come and show themselves. Houdini used to go around and debunk all the people who were the mystics, but secretly it's because he had like this thing with his mother who died and he really wanted to have proof that there was another world. And I think Mike Enslin is a lot like, he's a paranormal debunker but he's really, he's just screaming ‘show me there's something out there in the universe’ because he suffered the loss of his daughter. So to go from a very worldly, cynical, bring it on kind of a guy and to totally break him down and have him be a true believer by the end is a pretty fun journey. Me, myself, I would never be that cynical with it. I think there's definitely stuff going on beyond our senses. I probably start where he ends up. So I don't relate to it that way. I definitely think there's much more than meets the eye here.

SLJ: I grew up in Tennessee around people who believe all kinds of things. I was told ghost stories at night by my grandfather and his brothers. And there were people in my neighborhood that, I guess the one lady in my neighborhood because I grew up in the segregated South so sometimes when we got hurt or sick or whatever, we couldn't afford to go to a doctor or even go to the hospital because we figured they weren't going to see us anyway. So they called what was known in our neighborhood as the 'root lady' who would actually come over and she'd put very sticky stuff on you and chant and do stuff. And you would get well. She would take herbs and things and we bought chickens, we didn't buy chickens from the store, we bought chickens off trucks, they were live chickens and we killed them. She got the heads and feet. She did stuff with them. And there were people who died in our neighborhood that we saw long after they were dead. If you were out at night and looking around the wrong place, doing something wrong and you'd look up and there would be that lady who used to call your house and tell your mother you were doing something wrong, even though she's dead and she's not supposed to be here but there she is.

And you weren't the only person that saw her. It was kind of like we had phenomenon like that that went on throughout my life. We've gone through interesting things. People would tell you stories about places you could go, there was a school bus that turned over in this particular place and if you go there at a certain time of night, you can hear the kids crying and hear the screeches of the tires. And we'd go there and, sure enough, you’d hear it. So there are lots of things that we can't explain that somebody somewhere has seen these things and they write about them. Some people remember them vividly enough to write about them. Some people make them up. But there are lots and lots of things that we can't explain that are just part of our culture.

QUESTION: DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEARLESS?

SLJ: 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.

QUESTION: YOU'RE NOT THE HEROIC TYPE?

SLJ: Well 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.

JC: I shouldn't drop by your house late at night.

SLJ: Not unannounced. No.

JC: Sam?

SLJ: You could. [makes knocking sound] As long as you're doing that, you're okay. But don't just pop in the room ‘cause 'the door was open.' Was not! [Laughs]

QUESTION: JOHN, WHAT WOULD YOU DO IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT IF YOU HEARD SOMEBODY IN YOUR HOUSE?

SLJ: He takes fight lessons. He wants to test his skills.

JC: 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.

SLJ: You’re 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.’

MCCORMACK: There's still a lot of ‘don't go in the room’ in that room. Like don't go in that vent.

SLJ: Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah.

JC: Don't go in that vent.

MCCORMACK: Don't go in that vent. Don't open the shower curtain.

JC: Don't go in the bathroom.

MCCORMACK: Don't.

JC: Yeah. Don't turn that corner.

SLJ: Don't go out the window.

JC: Don't go out the window. Don’t be talking to Sweeney Todd in the bathroom. 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 I don't think it was...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.

QUESTION: WERE YOU IN A HEIGHTENED STATE WHEN YOU EXPERIENCED THIS?

JC: No. No.

SLJ: It's not necessarily evil either. I remember doing a movie in New Mexico 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 it's New Mexico and you're always seeing shit that's in the sky, that goes 'zzz, zzz,' stops, and then goes ‘zzz, zzz, zzz,’ and zoom, it’s gone. What was that? All I could say was please let nothing pull in front of my car and just hover. Just let me get back to Santa Fe, please!

QUESTION: JOHN, HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TREATED BY THE ROOT LADY?

JC: No. I actually have met a couple of women like that, actually.

QUESTION: LIKE WHAT?

JC: In New Orleans, people that do voodoo and rituals. They said it was for good, but they weren't dark.

QUESTION: DID THEY SACRIFICE CHICKEN?

JC: I haven't seen that but they pulled out all sorts of things and...

SLJ: Some bones and...

JC: They had a lot of elixirs and potions. I've been researching a movie about Edgar Cayce so I'm interested in all types of, I'm interested in the hustlers, the real deals, the con men. I'm just interested in all of it. So I have seen some people like that.

QUESTION: JOHN, THE REAL HORROR OF THIS FILM FOR ME WAS THE LOSS OF YOUR DAUGHTER. I THINK YOU ALSO HAVE A FILM COMING OUT WHERE YOU LOSE YOUR WIFE. IS THAT JUST NOT AN AWFUL LOT OF DARKNESS OVER A SHORT PERIOD OF TIME?

JC: Yeah. Yeah. It's something you do.

QUESTION: IS LIFE JUST TOO FUNNY?

JC: Well, one of them is about the Iraq War so I think that's a perfectly reasonable response to the world we're in here. And this one was, this is just a nice one because a lot of times when things have worked out for me in my career, it’s because there were really smart people who came by and said you should do this. And then there were people like Lorenzo [di Bonaventura] and Mikael [Hafstrom] around here who said, oh yeah, we're going to do this and you're going to do this and then we're going to get Sam SLJ and Mary and then all of sudden it's there for you. So this was just kind of blind luck to be able to get invited into this crew to do this film. But the one about Iraq is about this country and people going through shattering grief so it seemed appropriate to make a movie about the times you live in once and a while.

QUESTION: THAT WAS YOUR 'GROSSE POINTE BLANK' SCREENWRITER?

JC: No, that's another one I did, which is also about Iraq. So there's actually more grief. But that one’s funny. That one's actually funny. We're trying to live up to the Paddy Chayefsky, 'Strange Love' of it all.

QUESTION: IS IT ALSO TRUE YOU PUT HILARY DUFF IN ONE?

JC: Hilary Duff is in the script we did called 'Brand Hauser' which is about Iraq and she's great.

QUESTION: WHY DID YOU WANT HER IN IT?

JC: Well, because there's a role with a very slutty Eurasian pop star and so the idea of Hilary who's so classy and kind of wholesome doing that was pretty funny. There's a real kind of a lascivious young pop star who wants to be like one of these girls that I don’t need to mention.

QUESTION: SAM, YOU WERE JUST MENTIONING THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT AND FLYING IN THE NIGHT, AREN'T YOU DOING A SCI-FI CALLED 'JUMPER?' YOU'VE GOT A SLEW OF MOVIES COMING OUT.

SLJ: [Laughs] Really?

QUESTION: DO YOU MAKE MOVIES TO EXPLORE THOSE KIND OF THINGS, TO EXPLORE THINGS LIKE SCIENCE FICTION OR BOXING AND WHATEVER ELSE OR IS IT JUST A SCRIPT THAT COMES ALONG?

SLJ: 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.

QUESTION: DO YOU GET TO BOX FOR THE ROD LURIE MOVIE AT ALL?

SLJ: 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.

QUESTION: I KNOW AT ONE POINT AFTER 'CABIN FEVER' ELI ROTH WAS ATTACHED TO THIS AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER, WHAT HAPPENED WITH HIS INVOLVEMENT? AND ALSO WHAT IS YOUR DIALOGUE LIKE WITH STEPHEN KING THROUGHOUT THIS PRODUCTION?

DI BONAVENTURA: Well Eli was attracted to it right away. Eli’s take was we could not set up anywhere and so he fell out and it was a little while later that Dimension bought the rights to this short story and Matt Greenberg came in and then Scott [Alexander] and Larry [Karaszewski] followed him with Mikael.

QUESTION: DO YOU MIND IF I ASK WHAT HIS TAKE WAS?

DI BONAVENTURA: Eli’s? It’s too bloody to say out loud but it was madness, you know. It was an entirely different movie actually. He has such a love of the most bloody parts of the genre that I think it scared everybody at the time. And I think when you go through some kind of transition like that, what’s very fortunate about it is that some of the most interesting aspects of the story which is the mental disintegration as opposed to any sort of physical degradation that’s going on, that’s something that Mikael and John and the writers can bring to the table on that.

QUESTION: AND STEPHEN KING?

DI BONAVENTURA: Stephen pretty much lets the filmmakers make their decisions so he’s not a guy who’s looking over your shoulder constantly. And he’s very, very clear about there’s a difference between the written medium and the moving medium and as such, a lot of novelists don’t understand that. That’s when you can get into trouble when you’re trying to adapt things and what’s great is he completely got that and we were able to show him the movie three or four weeks ago and fortunately it lived up to the short story for him.

JC: There is something about his stories that are so rich that I think he gets really undervalued as a writer, like I said because we were going through the script and we'd get in a room and there'd be a certain kind of logic that you have to try to play out and you have to kind of keep going. And so we kept going back to this 30-page short story just to see what did he write? And there was always stuff we could pull from it, just little details or lines or turns of phrases or descriptions. It was amazing. It was like this 30-page piece that was like a bottomless well of stuff.

DI BONAVENTURA: Also, he doesn’t force a conclusion. I think that’s one of the interesting things about what he does. Particularly with Olin who I find is a fascinating character. Some people will read and see the movie and say Olin’s evil. Some people will say he’s a doorkeeper. Some people will say that he’s really trying to stop him.

QUESTION: WHAT IS OLIN?

SLJ: [joking] A film agent.

JC: 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.'

SLJ: Hopefully I can be the crypt keeper for the next three incarnations of this film. '1408 Returns.'

MCCORMACK: '1409.' '1410.'

SLJ: Yeah. That's right. '1408 Junior.' Junior suite.

QUESTION: MARY, YOU'RE A MOM WITH A COUPLE OF DAUGHTERS.

MCCORMACK: I am.

QUESTION: DID THAT MAKE IT HARDER TO IMAGINE A DYING CHILD?

MCCORMACK: At the time I had one, so it was easy. [Laughs] No. Two ups it. My second one is this big but she was not around then. My first was. And yeah it's hard but it helps I think. I mean I think every actor uses their life and their relationships to sort of access their emotional life and so yeah. I sacrificed her.

QUESTION: DID YOU GO HOME AND HUG YOUR DAUGHTER?

MCCORMACK: A lot. But at work she died a lot of horrible deaths.

QUESTION: ELI ROTH’S ‘HOSTEL II’ OPENS TODAY AND I WAS WONDERING ABOUT YOUR TAKE ON HOW AN ALMOST COMPARATIVELY ELEGANT, QUAINT -- I DON'T KNOW WHAT WORDS TO USE -- TRADITIONAL KIND OF SCARY HORROR MOVIE THESE DAYS FITS INTO THIS WORLD OF TORTURE PORN AND ALL THAT GRAPHIC STUFF?

SLJ: Torture porn?

QUESTION: YEAH.

SLJ: Really? I want to see it now.

JC: That movie's going to be green lit by the afternoon.

SLJ: Really? Who makes that? Is that like Asian cinema? What is that? Asian extreme? Gonzo? What is it? Who's making that?

DI BONAVENTURA: I hesitate to put any genre into sort of a box. I think what this movie does and what Eli has done – those movies are two totally different experiences. I hope that the genre is big enough to do all of that. You always want the fans to show up on an opening weekend, but this movie is trying to go beyond what I’ll call the extreme to elicit a reaction. It’s going towards the subtle and hopefully the nuanced and the emotional and needing the audience to come and support us in doing that and that’s really the only way we’re going to decide how wide and how broad the genre is if the audience keeps showing up. That’s going to be our challenge. It’s funny. Some people have talked to us and said, ‘Well this isn’t as scary as that’ or ‘That isn’t as smart as this.’ They are really in a way two entirely different movies so I look at them as though they exist in two different worlds as opposed to within the horror genre.

SLJ: Is ‘The Eye’ torture porn? No? What's torture porn? ‘Hostel’ and what? ‘Captured?’ BK type stuff. Oh yeah. E.T. the killer? 'Audition?' 'Audition's' torture porn? Come on. I love 'Audition.' 'Audition' was an awesome movie. It's a date movie. It's a movie about a man who hasn't had a date in years and makes a bad choice. [Laughs]

JC: What's the Danish director who did the film about the two guys who come by the...

QUESTION: 'Funny Games?'

JC: 'Funny Games.' Right. This is more…. Haneke is gory but it wasn't gory right until the very end. So what made that movie sort of terrifying was the tension that it kept up and created the whole film. So I think if you do a movie like this and you did it like 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 and guts and gore? I don't know how you sustain tension that way.

SLJ: 'Audition's' like that. Nothing happens really until the end. It was just kind of like damn. [Laughs]

JC: And this has got its share of...if you've seen this with an audience, they go and they jump for this one, too. It's just two different deals.

SLJ: Every generation jumps for a different reason. Some of the people used to jump for Vincent Price. Now they're jumping for different shit. I remember that. You know when the hands went under your seat and they tried to make you think there was something there. Or even, what was that ‘Ghosts on High’ [can’t catch name of film] when they ran it across on wires in the theater and it was like ‘Ah, come on!’ But then it was innovative and awesome and come on. And kids are so movie savvy now. You know the thought that 15 years ago people were making snuff films is like ooh, ahh. Now we're watching them. You got to the movie and watch them and they're not...kids are special effects savvy. They're making their own slasher movies in, what, sixth grade? And doing them all in Photo Finish or whatever.

QUESTION: YOU AND JEREMY PIVEN HAVE BEEN CHILDHOOD FRIENDS SINCE YOU WERE KIDS. [Laughter]

SLJ: What does that mean?

JC: I don't know.

QUESTION: I KEEP EXPECTING TO SEE YOU MAKING A CAMEO AS ONE OF ARI GOLD'S CLIENTS OR SOMETHING ON 'ENTOURAGE.' ARE YOU GOING TO SHOW UP THERE?

JC: I haven't gotten around to that one.

SLJ: He was in 'Smoking Aces.'

JC: No, I wasn't. Was I?

SLJ: Yes, you were.

JC: All right. Sure. [Laughter] I was out of the country all last year working on this and other things so I haven't been around, but sure, why not.

QUESTION: JOHN, CAN YOU TALK A LITTLE ABOUT THE EMOTIONALLY CHALLENGING ASPECTS OF YOUR ROLE?

JC: I think probably once we...it was a relief to kind of do scenes with these two [referring to McCormack and SLJ]. But then after a while when you're in sort of the third act and you're trying to keep topping or keep the tension or keep the stakes raising, it required a lot of wattage I guess that you had to keep putting out. So Lorenzo and Mikael and I would really try to, just sort of try to figure out the logic of the inside of the room and then once you figured it out, to actually do it with no one to cut away to was kind of, that was a challenge. And then during the end really kind of letting it, daring, going along with the dare, which is the room sort of said you're going to go find what you bring in 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 in it and you’re going to have to confront your demons in it. So by the end of the movie you sort of knew that it was going to bring Katie back and bring the daughter back. I thought 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. It was kind of a pretty dark place to go. When you saw that little girl walking over that broken glass, that wasn't a fun day on the set. It’s all pretend and all, we're just making movies, but it's still challenging.

QUESTION: SAM AND JOHN, WHEN THEY'RE DESCRIBING BOTH OF YOU AS ACTORS, THE PHRASE ‘MEN LIKE HIM AND WOMEN LIKE HIM’ IS OFTEN USED BASIC ON RESEARCH. HOW DO YOU FEEL WHEN THAT’S USED TO DESCRIBE YOU AND WHY THEY CHOSE YOU FOR A ROLE?

SLJ: It means we’re all part of the human race. I don't know. Really? People do studies about stuff like that? Really? That's bizarre. I just assume people like you because they come see your movies or they don't or they won't come see it. I don't know how you classify that. I just think that when you approach the work honestly and people appreciate what you do and the sincerity and the I guess 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 to act and be as normal as I possibly can. But when audiences have an opportunity to see you, see the things you're doing, they find things that make sense to them or they see things that make sense in terms of who the human beings are or people that they know that act that way and they appreciate it in another kind of way. And they appreciate you as an actor for being honest with them.

QUESTION: BUT YOU DON'T SEE IT THAT WAY? YOU JUST SEE IT THE WAY YOU SEE IT IN TERMS OF HOW YOU APPROACH YOUR WORK RATHER THAN...

SLJ: 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 look at a script and say, do I want to see this? Number one, would I pay money to go and see it? Then whether I would pay my money to go and see it with me in it? And if the answer is yes, then I do it. So I approach things as an audience member. My wife says that about me all the time. I have this bad habit of watching myself do things. She used to claim that I was a bloodless actor because I would stand there and do stuff on stage and then I would kind of look at the audience to see how they reacted to it because I wanted to see what, how well I was doing. But I still tend to think of myself as an audience member, so when I'm doing something, if I do go to the monitor and look at it, I look at it like I paid my money to go and see it and do I believe that? And does that fit in with what I'm trying to do in terms of the context of the film? And then I'm happy with it. But most times I don't even go to the monitor. You can offer it to me but I'll usually wait and watch the movie.

QUESTION: WHAT WOULDN’T WE WANT TO SEE YOU IN?

SLJ: A dress. [Laughter]

JC: We've got Rudy Giuliani.

SLJ: Yeah. We got him.

JC: That's a Giuliani.

QUESTION: JOHN, ARE YOU STILL ATTACHED TO 'COSMIC BANDITOS?' AND SAVAGE STEVE HOLLAND JUST ANNOUNCED THAT HE'S MAKING A FOLLOW UP TO 'BETTER OFF DEAD' AND 'ONE CRAZY SUMMER', ARE YOU AT ALL ATTACHED TO THAT?

JC: Yes. No. 'Cosmic Banditos' is something we're developing although 'John From Cincinnati' seems to have stolen our thunder. It looks that way. The scripts are floating around then all of a sudden they end up on HBO. Someone else just shot it when you develop something. And then I heard about that ['Better Off Dead' and 'One Crazy Summer'] but I don't know anything about it.

QUESTION: JOHN, CAN YOU ALSO RESPOND TO THE ‘MEN LIKE HIM AND WOMEN LIKE HIM’ QUESTION?

JC: Sure. I think people respond to, it kind of echoes what Sam said, which is they respond to something personal about you so I mean I don't know another actor that reminds me of Sam or an actress that reminds me of Mary. 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, you're not trying to be some cookie cutter version of someone else and people kind of respond to it so that's probably it. Or maybe it's women and men like you if you're...

SLJ: You're not too cute and you're not too ugly.

JC: Not too cute.

SLJ: Not threatening.

JC: If you're really threatening, if you're really good looking, then guys aren't going to like you because the girls are going to...

SLJ: Kind of like wow, he's like an ordinary kind of guy.

JC: These guys are saying you're average.

SLJ: Yeah.

JC: You have to be kind of a perfectly average man.

SLJ: Yeah. Interestingly enough, yeah.

QUESTION: THE PARIS HILTON STORY IS SO FLUID RIGHT NOW. I HEARD OVER LUNCH THAT SHE'S BACK IN JAIL. DO YOU HAVE ANY COMMENT ON CELEBRITY JUSTICE?

JC: Yeah. I'll talk about it. I think all heiresses should be put in prison on general principle.

SLJ: No. Not my daughter. No.

JC: All heiresses.

SLJ: My daughter's an accidental heiress only because of what I've done.

JC: I'm talking about old money.

SLJ: Oh, old money. All right, all right, all right.

JC: I'm Irish American so I'm anti-royalist. You know, right? I intrinsically don't trust the monarchy so any heiress I think should have to do prison time. Mandatory prison time.

QUESTION: HAVE YOU HAD A GOOD TIME IN LONDON THEN?

SLJ: This story's [Paris Hilton] way bigger than it needs to be. You know? Come on. For real. I mean that's just the truth. It's just way bigger than it needs to be.

JC: It's always sad in the context that it's taking up, to me, if you ask me, I'll tell you, it's sad to me because it's taking up air time when habeas corpus is suspended and no one's doing anything about it. Habeas corpus, right? That's the foundation of our capitalist structure, right? That you can face your accuser and all your rights stem from that, right? The Bush administration has taken away habeas corpus and people want to talk about Paris Hilton. That's America.

QUESTION: DO YOU THINK SCOOTER LIBBY AND PARIS SHOULD BE CHAINED TOGETHER?

MCCORMACK: That's a cute couple. That is a reality show. How rich is that?

QUESTION: THAT WOULD BE TOUGH ON HIM, WOULDN'T IT?

MCCORMACK: Wouldn’t it?!

JC: That is a fascinating, grotesque story.

MCCORMACK: Well, just because it happened the same day. They were both arraigned the same day.

JC: Another one was arraigned?

MCCORMACK: No, no, I just meant Scooter Libby and Paris.

SLJ: Scooter and Paris.

QUESTION: '1408' DEALS WITH EVERYBODY'S INNER DEMONS, SO WHAT IS AN INNER DEMON THAT EACH OF YOU HAVE THAT YOU WOULD BE WILLING TO SHARE WITH US THAT YOU WOULD BE TERRIFIED TO HAVE COME OUT IN THAT HOTEL ROOM?

MCCORMACK: I'm classic girl on that front. I can't do bugs. No bugs for me. You know real demons are much bigger, sadder things like family and safety and all that. But in terms of just like shallow demons, it's bugs for me. No bugs. No bugs. No rats.

JC: Shallow demons would be like rats. Big demons, but it hasn't happened to me, but if like I was responsible for someone else's death or something, you know. Who knows? But if something like that had happened, then I'd be haunted by that person. That would be my worst fear if I did something to someone and then that would be the worst thing, being responsible for that. And on a shallow level, just rats. Rats. I hate them.

SLJ: Not working. [Laughter]

JC: You don't have that problem.

SLJ: Phone stops ringing. Damn! And I guess on a really deeper level, I guess getting older is one of those kind of things that there are things that I used to know that I don't know anymore and I'm disturbed by that because Alzheimer's kind of runs in my family so when I walk in a room and I don't know why I walked in there, it is really starting to fuck with me. So I'm having that issue but I'm doing more crossword puzzles. [Laughter]

QUESTION: BUT YOU GOT A GUN.

SLJ: Exactly. I got a gun. Yeah

1408 Hits theatres June 22^nd!