John Cusack on the huge responsibility of parenting:

"I have ultimate respect for the weight of that. I would never take it lightly. That's total selflessness. It's pretty incredible. I watch a lot of my friends and family doing it, so hopefully when I do it I'll be ready."

Cusack on working with Bobby Coleman:

"I like to work with kids because they're animals. Think about that, Im being stupid. Pretty amazing. Bobby is an amazing kid, he's really professional and accomplished. He came in and had his own point of view and he had it all mapped out in some strange way, and never was in a bad mood. He was amazing. A couple of times I saw - and he was a kid and he was tired and he was sleeping on his father's shoulder, the kid's eight or nine years old. Hes very accomplished and it helped with his other worldliness."

On single father adoption:

"I dont know. I'm sort of the philosophy of the idea of any human being taking care of another person and loving them to the best of their ability has got to be better than no love at all. Obviously, it would be ideal to have a mother and father but thats not how life is. I was lucky I had both. Thats just luck."

On how his own parents nurtured him as a child:

"They were pretty good about... they said it's not important to make everybody like you, so I dont know how we became actors. They went and followed the Joseph Campbell thing in following your bliss. It worked out to some degree but they didn't push us in one direction. They started to expose us to a lot of stuff and support us, so they were great parents."

On people who criticize actors for their political opinions:

"Let's see the people who are making those assumptions. They talk in front of cameras, they wear make up. Sometimes they say other people's lines. Sometimes they write their own. Do you think all those people work for the Brookings Institute or the Cato Foundation? No. Even those people who work for those places - I've met them - they dont have any monopoly on patriotism or intelligence or insight. I like to read, write, talk to interesting people, think about ideas, think about the world we live in. Just because I make art, you want to put me in a box. People who are critics of that, that's ridiculous."

On whether he likes TV pundits:

"I'm just saying, what's the difference? These people who work on these shows that are pundits, are you kidding me? Where does their intellectual moral clock come from? They are in front of a camera, wearing make-up reading a teleprompter and bitching to other people. I know enough to be intimidated by serious men and women, but I wont be cowed by people like that. What gives them the right?"

On whether audiences are ready to see movies based the war in Iraq:

"I think the country... my own personal thing is we've been in denial about the whole thing. It's natural. Were not asked to sacrifice anything. The people who are making the sacrifices are the military, their families and the people who are out there dying. We're told to go shopping, go to a movie. I was rooting for the Cubs this year, it's been abstract. If there was a draft, there would be people on the streets. People can vent on the internet, but there's no substantive change, whatever reforms or movements or political kind of juice out there is stopping right outside the door of the Democrats, who are cowing to the Republicans and the terror. Theres no other way to explain. I can understand to see how people don't want to see these movies right now, but on another level I think they're ready to. I dont know. I haven't seen a lot of those movies."

On whether Grace is Gone crosses partisan boundaries:

"Yeah, I think so. I do. I think if it stirs your imagination and you like it, and it says something you feel you can contribute to, you do it. Then you just do it and hope for the best. I havent seen those other films but I think this movie is cutting through that partisan box where people are yelling at each other. Its a story about grief, and this family, that its transcending that and becoming more of a universal thing. Its not about the polemics and comments on policy on ideology."

Cusack on why he wanted to do War Inc.

"I'm interested in mercenaries and the concept of that, and the difference between peoples perceptions of who they are and what they do in life. Metaphorically, thats interesting."

John Cusack and his outlook on Americas future:

"Pretty dark at the moment. God, I dont know. I dont know if I want to make that story, but its troubling that the people who are running government have such disdain for it that they want to howl it out to the point where it doesn't function, and outsource it to private business so the state it's being run for private profit corporations. That's a fundamentalist ideology. We have to worship the markets where there are no checks and balances. Blackwater, the fact that you can subcontract military duties to a private company = if you're in the military, why wouldn't you want to work for Blackwater if you're offered more money? It's never the people, its the policy, ideology behind it. That's what Im finding the most disturbing [is] that there is no balance between these fundamentalist ideologues on the left and on the right. We seem to be totally lost."

On the lack of checks and balances surrounding Blackwater:

"How is it even fundamentally legal? Nothing in the Constitution would recommend that it would be vaguely legal? So is the government an ATM for private companies with no accountability? That scares the hell out of me. That has nothing to do with what Grace is Gone is about. It's about the servicemen and women and the people who are making the ultimate sacrifice. Who gives a hell what I think about it? In War Inc. were exploring that other stuff but I think it scares me. I'm really scared."

Cusack on the similarities of his characters in Grace is Gone and Martian Child:

"I think being vulnerable is the whole deal in movies, and it's hard to do. I've also looked at... a friend of mine, John McGinley, has a kid with special needs. I've watched that over the last eight years change his life and watched how selfless he's become. You realize we often go out and do our things, and were ambitious and we want to be heroic, then you see parents being heroic everyday. It's amazing. You think about all the things your parents gave to you, that's pretty amazing."