Minnie Driver Says Grosse Pointe Blank Was Nearly ‘Disastrous’ — Until John Cusack Saved the Day

Minnie Driver is opening up about the impact making Grosse Pointe Blank had on her — and how writer and costar John Cusack managed to save the film.

On the latest episode of James Corden’s SiriusXM show This Life of Mine, Driver fondly remembered making the 1997 comedy with Cusack, who cowrote the screenplay, as like being on a “moving creative train.”

“If you want to jump on board and make stuff, then do that and be willing,” she said. “And I was.”

The film follows Cusack’s Martin Blank, an L.A.-based assassin who returns to his hometown of Grosse Point, Mich., for his high school reunion. Driver, 54, played Debi Newberry, the high school girlfriend Martin dumped and with whom he reconnects in the film.

As excited as Driver was to board Cusack’s “creative train,” she told Corden that things got off to a rocky start.

“We’re making this film, and the script isn’t really that good, and everyone knows the script isn’t really that good,” she recalled. “It’s kind of this great idea: hitman goes back to his 10-year high school reunion, reconnects with the girl he dumped when he disappeared to become a hitman. And we needed to shoot the film.”

“So we shot a couple of days, and I remember it was — it wasn’t really that it was disastrous, but it just wasn’t funny,” Driver continued. “And it wasn’t working in the way that I think [Cusack] knew it could.”

According to Driver, Cusack went to then-Disney head Joe Roth and convinced him to let the film’s cast improvise. “Give us a week and watch the dailies and tell me if you don’t think that it’s great,” she recalled Cusack saying. “And George Armitage, who was the director, bless his heart, was kind of, I think, forced to kind of go along with this.”

Driver said she, Cusack and the film’s co-writers Steve Pink and D. V. DeVincentis holed up at Cusack’s New Crime Productions in Venice, Calif., and in a hotel in Pasadena to work on the Grosse Pointe Blank script.

“We sat there bouncing ideas, going, ‘Okay, this is what’s going to happen. This is the beginning of the scene. Martin Blank comes to Debi’s house. We need to show that there is this history between these two, and she’s got to not make it easy for him, and it’s got to be hot. So, what does that look like?’ ” Driver recalled. “And we improved the whole thing.”

“There was this immediacy and this piracy about the way in which we were doing it. And it felt like we were going to go up in flames every single day. But we didn’t,” she continued. “And it got funnier and funnier and more and more sort of rooted in the insanity of the story.”

Compared to her previous films like Circle of Friends, Big Night and Sleepers, Driver said, making Grosse Pointe Blank “was sort of a revolution of the way in which you make films.”

“And I knew that this was in a bubble, and I probably wasn’t going to make a film like this again because it was like a runaway train,” she added. “It was amazing.”