Joshua Seftel (left) with John Cusack Photo: First Look Studios

The Director in Spite of Himself

When John Cusack, big-time movie star, needed someone to direct War, Inc., a wacky political-satire romantic-comedy action movie he co-wrote, his first words probably weren’t: “Get me the guy who did that documentary on the Romanian orphans!” But Joshua Seftel, A90, whose résumé includes 18 years as a documentary filmmaker, did have something to offer. Having trailed politicians for the national news, followed pop stars and their posses, covered the war in Bosnia, and basically documented the tragicomedy of modern existence for two decades, Seftel knew all about the absurdities Cusack wanted to lampoon. “People say this movie is over the top,” Seftel told me recently. “A lot of it is stuff that happens in real life.”

Or what could happen, if taken a few baby steps farther. In the film, the United States has outsourced its war in “Turaqistan” to the Hallibur…—er, Tamerlane—corporation. Tanks advertise fast food as billboards go up for “Democracy Light” cigarettes. Reporters are implanted with microchips that let them experience the war from afar. Cusack plays a hit man who takes his orders from Tamerlane’s director, who happens to be a former vice president.

No, the ripped-from-the-Onion script wasn’t a stretch. But one difference between shooting real life and working from a page, Seftel said, was the persona he had to adopt. “When you direct a documentary, you have to pretend you know nothing,” he said. “When you direct a feature, you have to pretend you know everything.” He went from fading into the background to gain his subjects’ trust, to playing the alpha dog the actors and crew turned to for judgment on a thousand details, like whether an extra should wear the black shoes or the navy ones. “They want to feel directed,” Seftel said. “Of course there is no way to know everything, so you have to trust your instincts.”

So how does a master of laissez-faire tell a cast of seasoned and even Oscar-winning film actors—namely Cusack and his sister Joan, Marisa Tomei, Hilary Duff, Dan Ackroyd, and Ben Kingsley, who was knighted for his thespian achievements—how to act? Once more, with feeling, Sir Ben? “It’s like being the coach of the dream team,” Seftel said. “You’re probably going to win some games.”

He is proudest of his work with Duff, whom he helped transform from a Disney poster girl into an innuendo-mouthed pop star, “the Britney Spears of Central Asia.” He had Duff keep a diary in the character’s voice and learn pole dancing. That just left covering the sweet-faced actress with enough makeup and hair extensions to create a plausible tramp. It worked, but for a while the skankiness, Seftel said, “kept getting absorbed by her cuteness.”

Then there was Tomei, the twinkle-eyed beauty who plays a crusading journalist and John Cusack’s love interest. Seftel said: “The instinct when you see that face is ‘Zoom in, push the camera closer.’ ” And he did, until Tomei, in un-movie-star fashion, complained that she was getting too many close-ups. “She said, ‘I’m a comedian and the way I move is one of my best traits. You need to shoot more wide shots,’ ” Seftel recalled. “And she was right.”

Wherever he could, he used improvisation, which he considers a cousin to cinema verité. “Anytime you can turn the camera on and not know exactly what’s going to happen, to me it’s almost like documentary,” he said. The Cusack siblings ad-libbed liberally, as did a group of comedians Seftel recruited from the Bulgarian version of Saturday Night Live to play a gang of inept kidnappers. (They shot War, Inc. in Bulgaria, where they could stretch their modest $8 million budget and burn as many tires in the battle scenes as they liked.)

Although he plans to do more feature films, he has not lost his love for documentary. “I’m an observer,” he said. “I like to sit back and sort of make sense of things.” He’s less the kind of guy who barks orders on the set and more the kind who, while filming a documentary on Romanian orphans (as he did in 1990), spends a month living in a warehouse-like orphanage to be closer to his subjects. The resulting 27-minute film, Lost and Found, broke hearts, spurred scores of adoptions, and was nominated for an Emmy.

But many of his films incite laughter, including Taking on the Kennedys, which follows an underdog’s race for a House of Representatives seat against an heir to Camelot, and Breaking the Mold, a short comic fable about toxic fungus. His filmography includes episodes of This American Life and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Along the way, he came to the attention of Cusack, who thought the wry humor in Seftel’s work would translate to a feature film.

In the Times Square lounge where we chatted, a group of older men were yukking it up a few tables over. Judging by their jokes and their thick lacquer-framed glasses, they might have been retired borscht-belt comedians who met there once a week. Seftel kept listening in. “Those guys are such characters over there. A piece of old New York,” he said, and you could almost see him framing the shot.

JULIE FLAHERTY, an avowed movie buff, is a senior health sciences writer in Tufts’ Office of Publications and the editor of Tufts Nutrition, the alumni magazine of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. She has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times.