John Cusack Says He Doesn’t Want to ‘Negotiate’ His Stories With Hollywood Anymore

Actor John Cusack says he prefers writing fiction over films these days.

The 60-year-old star of hits including Serendipity and High Fidelity recently explained his career change at San Diego Comic-Con.

“I always thought they were the closest things to film, really,” Cusack said while speaking Variety on July 24 about turning his latest ideas into a graphic novel. “You’re picking out shots, they’re so cinematic.”

Written by Cusack and illustrated by Ignacio Noé, Momo is set for publication by Mad Cave Studios on September 29.

Set in 1972, Momo follows two fugitives who form an unlikely alliance as they embark on a wild road trip and heist with a sci-fi twist, all while hunting an ancient artifact for TV legend Jackie Gleason.

For Cusack, the freedom of being able to come up with and publish such a crazy story was the point.

“I wanna tell a story, but I didn’t wanna negotiate telling a story,” he explained. “And when you ask somebody to put $20 or $30 million into a bank account [for a film], they wanna have an opinion and they’re afraid and all that stuff.”

The Say Anything star continued, “This was just like, I wrote it, and I said, ‘I like the story,’ and then I got this beautiful, wonderful artist, Ignacio Noé, to do the illustrations and so nobody edited anything I wrote or that he drew. And so it’s really a piece of work that was just done by two people [who] did a great job putting it out.”

The graphic novel marks a new creative territory for Cusack, who previously cowrote the 2016 essay collection Things That Can and Cannot Be Said.

But don’t count Cusack out of Hollywood just yet.

According to People, if Momo becomes popular enough to attract a movie studio, the actor admitted he would love to play a role in any film adaptation.