At 60, John Cusack is starting a new creative chapter, but it is not on a film set. It is in the world of graphic novels. The ‘High Fidelity‘ and ‘Say Anything‘ star made a rare public appearance at San Diego Comic-Con 2026, where he explained why he has slowed down his film career. He said he wants pure artistic freedom, which modern Hollywood no longer offers because of financial pressures and committees.
New Graphic Novel Gives John Cusack Complete Creative Control
Cusack was at the convention to promote Momo, his debut graphic novel, a project he describes as a “sci-fi buddy heist and road trip story” set in 1972. He has been in over 80 films across four decades, but this new medium gave him something that big-budget studio filmmaking could not. It gave him complete control.
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“Well, I always thought they were the closest things to film, really,” Cusack told Variety. He was explaining why he made the switch: “You know, you’re picking out shots and they’re so cinematic. I wanted to tell a story, but I didn’t want to negotiate telling a story.”
John Cusack Slams Studio Committees and Algorithm Filmmaking
The idea of avoiding negotiation was at the heart of Cusack’s explanation. He starkly outlined the reality of getting a major motion picture made compared to the simplicity of his latest venture. “When you ask somebody to put like $20 to $30 million into a bank account [for a film budget], they want to have an opinion, and they’re afraid and all that stuff,” Cusack said.
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In contrast, Momo was a collaboration between just two people, himself and the artist Ignacio Noé. “This was just like I wrote it. And I said, ‘I like this story,‘” he stated. “Nobody edited anything I wrote or that he drew. So it’s really a piece of work that was just done by two people… and that doesn’t happen today.” He also called the project “an anti-algorithm thing“, adding, “there’s no committee and there’s no computer up in Seattle that’s poll-testing it.”
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Cusack’s critique of the studio system is not a recent development. In a 2014 interview with The Guardian that has resurfaced, he talked about the loss of the “one for you, one for them” model. That model let directors like Spike Lee and Wes Anderson make unusual films in the late 1990s. “Now it’s six for them – with a committee cutting the film who weren’t part of making it – and maybe one for you,” he said.
His pivot is evident in his filmography. After decades as a leading man, his recent movies have been fewer. They include the 2025 thriller ‘Fog of War‘ and the Mandarin-language film ‘Detective Chinatown 1900‘. When asked about the current state of cinema, Cusack was honest. “Back when I was starting to make movies, you would find people who had aspirations to do something totally unique, not just installments in a franchise or something that fit their business strategy,” he told Forbes. He said of Momo, “I wanted to do something like movies from a different era, and no matter what happens, if someone reads it and likes it, I count that as a success.”
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