Thursday, July 31, 2003

James Woods at Salon

James Woods gave an interview for his upcoming film, entitled Northfork. Apparently the film is really good and you should go see it. The interview is at Salon--so you have to watch an ad to get it.

But then the interviewer, Amy Reiter, gets a little more than she bargained for, when she starts to ask him about politics.

"If a rational person heard this conversation they'd think, Oh, he's making a good point or she's making a good point, they'd hear it that way. But the way you could potentially report it, I could sound horrible: "James Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger," or whatever the fuck. I don't even want to be in that category.

So I, to try to help my friends who made a beautiful film, try to get their film promoted, am making a deal with the devil. You're going to talk about the film for five minutes and never mention it in the article, I'm sure, or mention it in one line just to get it out of the way. And I actually tried to help you get through it quickly because I knew it was just a pretext to talk about the other stuff.

No, that's not true.

I don't know if these are facts. I'm just saying they're impressions. So I'm just sitting here getting my ass again to the gangplank, getting my ass chopped off by the pirates, and talking to Salon.com so I can be humiliated and degraded, and it's fine because I'm doing it for the movie, but honestly, it just saddens me because it would be wonderful to have a conversation with somebody who says, "Well, yeah, that's a good point," and then wrote a kind of balanced article about it. That would be great. Then I'd be actually interested in talking about politics.
"

On the one hand it's easy enough to sympathize with his point; personality journalism is about destroying its subjects. On the other hand, it's hard not to see him as a bit over the top and paranoid for a guy who really doesn't have to worry about where his next meal is coming from. If he doesn't like doing press, I suppose he could just stop.

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