When you do a lot of interviews you know what to expect. For the most part roundtables are always better than a press conference because you get to ask more questions and it’s a bit more personal. And while I was dreading the huge press conference for “1408,” thankfully the people asked decent questions.

Of course I wanted to ask Lorenzo di Bonaventura about “G.I. Joe” and Sam Jackson about “The Spirit,” unfortunately the room was absolutely packed with people and trying to get a question in was almost like winning the lottery. But I’m interviewing Lorenzo again this weekend for “Transformers” so you can expect some answers soon.

So why were all these people doing a press conference?

It was for the newest Stephen King short story to be adapted into a feature film - “1408.” Here is the synopsis:

Renowned horror novelist Mike Enslin (Cusack) only believes what he can see with his own two eyes.  After a string of bestsellers discrediting paranormal events in the most infamous haunted houses and graveyards around the world, he scoffs at the concept of an afterlife.  Enslin’s phantom-free run of long and lonely nights is about to change forever when he checks into suite 1408 of the notorious Dolphin Hotel for his latest project, Ten Nights in Haunted Hotel Rooms. Defying the warnings of the hotel manager (Jackson), the author is the first person in years to stay in the reputedly haunted room.  Another bestseller may be imminent, but like all Stephen King heroes, Enslin must go from skeptic to true believer and ultimately survive the night.

Before getting to the press conference you can watch some recently posted clips from the movie on IESB.net here.

As always, you can listen to the press conference by downloading the MP3 here.

For the most part I think reading a transcript does an interview justice, but this is one I would rather listen to. The back and forth talking is very fast and both Sam and John are pretty funny. It’s much better to hear the audio on this one.

"1408" opens on June 22^nd.

John and Sam, we’ve read so much about overseas grosses being 60% of a movie now, does that influence what kind of projects you choose?

John Cusack: I just wanted to be on a poster with Sam Jackson so…

Sam Jackson: I just go to work. I never think about where I'm 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. There's somebody else to make them sell.

Sam, I like the part where you call it an evil fucking room. Ever want to call it an evil mother fucking room?

Sam Jackson: No, it never occurred to me. No, not at all.

John Cusack: I was actually pissed off by that because it's PG-13, and I was getting 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! But you can't . . because Sam got the one fuck that we could use.

For each of you, what was your scariest hotel room experience?

Sam Jackson: I can't remember

Or just a bad check in experience?

Sam Jackson: Oh, 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 preserve 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 . . . that's very bad… walking from here to my room there are things that can happen. And they didn't even have cats.

John Cusack: Besides normal like jet lag when you wake in Dusseldorf and you have no idea what country you're or what room you're in, which has happened to me before, I was also in a game reserve in South Africa and they said we got to make sure you go back at night with a guard. Because some woman had had dinner and she had taken her high heels off and went to change her shoes and tried to walk back to her cottage, and she got eaten.. . . that's where the animals live, so it's pretty real.

Mary McCormack: I've been to a game reserve in South Africa last year, and nothing scary happened. I didn't know about that. I walked to my room with no shoes on. I wish I'd known.

Mikael Håfström: I couldn't afford to stay in nice hotels until I became a Hollywood director. I like this place — Four Seasons. No, I don't have any — I think John and me were slightly going insane in our fictional hotel room, 1408. I think basically that's the scariest hotel room I've been to.

Sam Jackson: You were a European teenager. Come on, you've traveled around and stayed in some of those two-dollar-a night places when you were like . . .

Mikael Håfström: That was scary. Absolutely

John Cusack: I actually stayed in the old — actually, I do have an anecdote, which I never do, so I'm going to tell you. I did a movie in upstate New York, and there was this very very scary old hotel, and I found that was what Stephen King based The Shining on. It was this big hotel and it was supposed to be haunted. And we were staying out there and walking back at night after one too many cocktails, and it was a little frightening there. And I can't remember the name . . . but it was based on The Shining and it was a scary place. Not a very good anecdote.

John do you have any experience surfing?

John Cusack: Experience surfing? Yeah, I've actually done a little bit, but I'm not a big surfer. Water's kinda scary, especially those big waves. I actually have friends who do it, and I go out with them. I'm not a big surfer.

John, can you talk about the challenge of acting alone.

John Cusack: Well, I think Mikael and I, we sort of had a Stockholm syndrome where the room was keeping us captive, but as soon as we got out of the room and got to work with Mary and Sam and stuff — it was kind of strange, and you went to . . . the lobby and there were all these extras, and then you'd go out to Venice Beach and there were these surfers and things. We just thought: we gotta get back in the room, get back to the room where it's safe and horrible. And it's me staring at the walls and I get tortured. That made more sense than dealing with people after a while.

Sam Jackson: Than those of us who had to deal with you guys.

John Cusack: That's true.

Mary McCormack: Put him in the room.

Sam Jackson: No, get him out of the room

Mary McCormack: Oh, I see.

John Cusack: But it was pretty fun actually. I thought the piece was very ambitious that way because you didn't know if you could pull it off. You knew it would be interesting when these guys came back into the film were in and out of the film. But how do you pull off that kind of dance just in a room with the DP, the director, the actor and anything you can think of? It's kind of ambitious to try and pull it off. It was kind of catch and go in the morning because you couldn't rely on these guys.

When did all of you first encounter Stephen King and have you been long time fans?

Mikael Håfström: I think my first encounter with Stephen King film-wise was watching Brian De Palma's Carrie back in the day. I think Carrie was one of the first films that were made of Stephen King. This was in the mid Seventies, 1976 I think Carrie came out, and I got really obsessed by 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. I think 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 — it's what? Forty pages long or something, but it really tells — if you read it right, you get a lot of the information there, and obviously our film is longer. Our film had 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 I feel like  Enslin's character is the guy that Stephen King writes about in the short story, even if we trade a more ambitious back story and so on. So it started with Carrie and I haven't read everything, I think that nobody has read everything Stephen King wrote, because it's so much, but I read a lot of his short stories. I think they are great.

John Cusack: My parents took us to Boston — Nantucket, right? — it was 1978 . . . to visit some cousins, That was about 1979 or 80, 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 in to the theatre around six o'clock because it was an R movie, and I had to walk back to this cottage where we were staying. And when I got out it was night, and it was a pretty winding road with 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.

Mary McCormack: Alone?

John Cusack: Alone. I snuck in alone and I had to walk home about 20 minutes by myself.

Sam Jackson: Hey

John Cusack: And I saw Jack Nicholson around the corner in every bush . . . That was my first entry into Stephen King. Then I saw Carrie as I got older, read The Stand in about one sitting for a whole night, I couldn't put it down, so — I think he's very underrated as writer. Also his sense of character — he writes terrific characters. Somebody told me he uses a lot of pop culture references. He doesn't say, "The man poured the detergent into the laundry." He says, "He poured the Tide into the laundry." Everyone sort of dismisses him as not the literary talent he is because he's so pop culture, but I think he's pretty damn good.

Mikael Håfström: Misery was a film that I watched a few times when we started to work with this, because the connection with Misery is that it has such a contained arena. It's just his bedroom and I knew we had to do this film in this hotel room, so watching Misery was a good thing to do. Obviously you get stressed out — how do you make this alive and kicking in one room for the most part of the film, and Misery is probably the film I connected most to of all the Stephen King films that I've seen in this case.

John Cusack: Carrie's a really tense film too.

Sam Jackson: Well, Duel was too for a television thing. That was my first thing —

John Cusack: Duel by Steven Spielberg?

Sam Jackson: Yeah. It was a short story.

Do you believe in the supernatural?

Sam Jackson: 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 the 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 stinky stuff on you and chant, good 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 a truck, 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. You'd be like, ‘she's dead. She's not supposed to be here and 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.

Does that make you fearless?

Sam Jackson: 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.

You’re not the heroic type?

Sam Jackson: 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.

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

Sam Jackson: Not unannounced. No.

John Cusack: Sam? [he knocks on the table]

Sam Jackson: You could. As long as you're doing that, you're okay. But don't just pop in the room 'the door was open.' It was not.

What would you do in the middle of the night if you heard somebody in your house?

Sam Jackson: He takes fight lessons. He wants to test his skills.

John Cusack: 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.

Sam Jackson: I'm 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’.

Mary McCormack: There's still a lot of don't go in the room in that room. Like don't go in that vent.

Sam Jackson: Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah.

John Cusack: Don't go in that vent.

Mary McCormack: Don't go in that vent. Don't lift the shower curtain.

John Cusack: Don't go in the bathroom.

Mary McCormack: Don't.

John Cusack: Yeah. Don't turn that corner.

Sam Jackson: Don't go out the window.

John Cusack: Don't go out the window. 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.

Were you in a heightened state when you experienced this?

John Cusack: No. No. Not even alcohol.

Sam Jackson: It's not necessarily evil either. I remember doing a movie 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 the hope that, it's New Mexico and you're always seeing shit that's in the sky, like zzz, zzz, zzz, stop! And 'zzz, zzz' and boom you're gone. What was that? All I could say was please let nothing pull in front of my car and just hover. Let me get back to Santa Fe, please!

Have you ever been treated by the root lady?

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

Like what?

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

Did they kill a chicken?

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

Sam Jackson: Some bones and...

John Cusack: 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 conmen. I'm just interested in all of it. So I have seen people like that.

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?

John Cusack: Yeah. Yeah. It's something you do.

Is life just too sunny?

John Cusack: Well, one of them is about the Iraq War so I think that's a perfectly reasonable response to the war 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 and Mikael 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 Jackson 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.

That was your gross point blank screenwriter?

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

Is it true that you put Hilary Duff in one?

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

Why did you want her in it?

John Cusack: Well, because there's a role with a very slutty pop,  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.

You were just mentioning things that go in the night and flying in the night. Aren’t you doing a sci-fi Jumper? You’re got a slew of movies coming out.

Sam Jackson: Really?

Do you like to make movies to explore those kinds of things or is it just a script that comes along?

Sam Jackson: 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.

Do you get to box for the Rod Lurie movie?

Sam Jackson: 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.

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