by Seth Rogen
Kanye: No! It’s fine! I loved it! Honestly, I think you were the only ones who actually got how stupid and bad our video was supposed to be.
I’m still not sure this is true, but, sure, I’ll take it.
Me: Phew! Yeah! I thought so! Again, you know it’s done out of love. I’m such a huge fan. I actually kept trying to see your show in Vancouver, but you canceled it twice!
Kanye: Oh shit, yeah. Uh…you wanna hear some new music I’ve been working on?
Lauren: Uh…yeah. We’d love to.
Kanye: Come out to my van.
Lauren: Your…van?
Kanye: I got a big van!
Vans have swept Hollywood recently. A lot of motherfuckers get these big-ass Mercedes vans that they deck out into mobile offices. It reminds me of John Hurt in Contact, floating around space, teleconferencing. I don’t have a van, but if I did have a van, people wouldn’t think it was strange, which shows how weird van culture really is. When I was a kid, people who owned vans were creepy grossos who might kidnap children, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.
We go out to his big van, which essentially looks like the first-class cabin of a commercial airplane, except with more LED lighting. He pulls out a laptop, plugs it into the AUX cable, and brings up an iTunes playlist of about twenty songs.
Kanye: Alright, so I only have the beats and some of them don’t have hooks, so I’ll just fill in everything else, okay?
Me: Uh…yeah. Sure.
He hits play, and the beat kicks in loud.
Kanye: Alright, and I start rapping here, and I’m like: Bip bita BOP and a boom bita BAP, and everyone goes, THANK YOU (you, you, you, you). And then I come back in again rapping like: Boom whapa BAM and PA whapa BAM, and then I say, THANK YOU (you, you, you, you). And then Frank Ocean will come in here and be like: Baaaa ba booooooooooo.
I’ve been in a few situations where rappers play you their music, and it’s always incredibly awkward. I never really know what to do. Do I look them in the eye? Is that too personal? If I just look at the floor, will it seem like I don’t like it? How much do I bob my head? What if I’m bobbing on the ones and threes instead of the twos and fours? It’s generally strange, but this was WAYYYYY stranger. Even though there was plenty of space in the van, we were, like, knee to knee. He was inches from our faces at times.
He finished the song, and me and my wife applauded.
Lauren: That was AWESOME! So great. So cool. When it’s done it’s gonna be amazing.
Kanye: Alright, thanks. Here’s the NEXT song!
And then he did the same thing to the next song, and the next song, and the seventeen songs after that. All in all, we were in the van for about two and a half hours as Kanye gave us a private performance. It was quite incredible.
Then, somehow, it got even weirder.
After the last song, he opened another file on his computer and turned the screen toward us.
Kanye: Check it out.
There was a drawing of a voluptuous tiger/lady/creature. Like if Kim Kardashian was cast in the movie Cats.
Kanye: This is my new shit. It’s a movie.
Lauren: What’s it about?
Kanye: Let me show you…
He then, for the next forty minutes or so, took us through the storyboards for an entire movie about these sexy cat creatures.
Kanye: They find this tree, and it’s, like, sexy, and there’s fruit on the tree, you get that? You get the analogy? Like the Bible, but with these sexy cats. And they’re all going to be, like, really sexy. And it’ll play on this…
He pulled up a rendering of what looked like a movie theater, but instead of just one screen in front of the audience, there was another one above them and four surrounding them.
Kanye: It’ll feel like you’re IN the movie, actually surrounded by these sexy cat bitches.
Me: Like 3D?
Kanye: No way, man! 3D is fucking LAME. Nobody wants to wear those stupid glasses! You wanna go to a movie and look like a fucking moron? Fuck no.
He had a point.
About a year later, his next album came out, and not one of the songs he played us was on it.
Randomly, around that time, I got a phone call from Kanye, who was about to get married to Kim.
Kanye: I’m having an engagement party in Versailles, France, and I thought it would be funny if I sang “Bound 2” at the party and you and Franco came out on a motorcycle when I sang it….You kinda writhe around and…then it’ll be awkward, and you’ll just be up there, and then I’m rapping at my own engagement party with two shirtless guys who aren’t friends with anyone there….Maybe not.
It was nice that his idea evaporated as it was entering the atmosphere, like a little meteor. Because if it hadn’t, I definitely would have done it, and it would have been a glorious disaster.
I don’t have any real deep insight into Kanye and his current state of being or mindset other than to say I really love his music and my interactions with him have been lovely. But I’m sure a lot of people have said the same about a lot of people who have made incredibly shitty comments. I recently read about a phenomenon where everyone assumes their actions are based on love and the actions of those they disagree with are based on hate. I don’t think Kanye is hateful. I think he is grasping and struggling to make his way through life, and as painless as his experience seems like it should be, there’s no pain more painful than your own pain, and that goes for everyone, even Kanye. That said, I really wish he would shut the fuck up about all this political bullshit. That doesn’t help anything.
* * *
Postscript: A few years ago, a guy came up to me on the street and was like, “Oh, man, a while back I was at the Grammys with my buddy who looks just like you! You were there, too! You introduced Eminem! Anyway, at the end of the night a security guard came up to my buddy and handed him a harmonica and said, ‘Bob’s a big fan of yours.’ ”
I’m only including this story on the off chance that the person who got the harmonica is reading this book. PLEASE GIVE ME THAT SHIT! You’ve had a good run with it! Let me have it. I’ll give you something else cool. I’ll make you four vases. Thanks.
It all started with a joke.
“These TV reporters, a lot of them interview the worst people in the world—bin Laden, Qaddafi. Wouldn’t it save everyone a lot of trouble if they just killed the person they were interviewing? Someone interviewed Hitler before the Holocaust….Just shoot him!”
That’s really where the seed of the idea for our film The Interview started, but the thing that made it bloom was an obsession with North Korea. Me and Evan were just so fascinated by it. It’s unique in the world: an isolated country whose leader has godlike status, its citizens shut off from any information that might lead them to think otherwise.
During the writing process, Kim Jong Il died and was succeeded by his son Kim Jong Un, who was even more compelling to us. He was around our age, and from what we were reading, he also had a lot of the same interests. He loved American movies, television shows, basketball. He was into fancy sports cars, which would make someone a total douche if they weren’t also super-short, which he is, so it’s fine. We heard he loved Ryan Seacrest….
He had this insane and hilarious mythology about him. They said he could golf a perfect game every time; that he had assassinated a unicorn by hand; that he never went to the bathroom, because he had no butthole—he had no need for one, as his body ran so efficiently there was no waste.
Knowing everything we do about celebrities—how vain they are, how easily manipulated and impressed they are, how much they like OTHER famous people—we realized: If an American celebrity came to North Korea and met Kim Jong Un in person, they’d probably be shocked to find themselves really liking the guy.
So, in the film Th
e Interview, a very stupid American talk-show host named Dave Skylark finds out that Kim Jong Un is a fan of his. In an attempt to get ratings, he secures an interview with Kim. Soon after, he’s approached by the CIA to actually kill Kim. Skylark sees this as an even greater opportunity for fame and agrees. But when he gets to North Korea, he finds that he and Kim Jong Un not only get along, they have a lot in common. Both famous, both misunderstood and isolated. They become friends. It’s then revealed that Kim Jong Un is manipulating the incredibly stupid American for his own benefit. But we’ll get back to that later….
Some movies are really hard to get made. Superbad took over a decade. Sausage Party, Pineapple Express, This Is the End, each took six to seven years, all because studios just couldn’t wrap their heads around how any of these movies could possibly make money.
The Interview was different. After the FIRST draft was handed in, Amy Pascal called: “If you can get James Franco in this movie, we’ll make it.” Alright. That was easy. We sent him the script, he said yes, and we were greenlit with only ONE note from the studio.
“In your movie, you made up a dictator. Would it be funnier if it was actually Kim Jong Un? Like you guys did in This Is the End?”
We were like, “Yeah. Sure.”
Aside from me almost getting killed by a tiger (page 203), the filming was largely uneventful—in a good way. After we were finished, the shit really hit the fan.
We edited a cut relatively quickly and did a test screening. The numbers were wildly encouraging. It was one of the highest-testing films we’ve ever had. Audiences seemed to really like it.
We cut a trailer, and in June 2014, it was released. About two weeks later, the UN representative from North Korea sent the following letter to the secretary general of the UN:
General, I have the honour to transmit herewith a copy of the statement released by the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with regard to a film made in the United States of America whose plot involves insulting and assassinating the supreme leadership of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (see annex).
To allow the production and distribution of such a film on the assassination of an incumbent Head of a sovereign State should be regarded as the most undisguised sponsoring of terrorism as well as an act of war.
The United States authorities should take immediate and appropriate actions to ban the production and distribution of the aforementioned film; otherwise, it will be fully responsible for encouraging and sponsoring terrorism.
I should be grateful if you would have the present letter and its annex circulated as a document of the General Assembly, under agenda item 110, and of the Security Council.
Ja Song Nam
Ambassador
Permanent Representative
A couple days after that, the Korean Central News Agency released a statement from the country’s foreign minister, who said that the North Korean government promised a “merciless” retaliation against the United States if The Interview was released, calling the film itself an “act of war.” They went on to say the film was a “wanton act of terror” that was the work of “gangster moviemakers,” which is hands down the coolest thing a foreign dictator can call you.
We weren’t that surprised. North Korea had a real history of releasing wildly inflammatory statements, so it was on brand.
We were summoned to meet with Michael Lynton, who was the head of Sony. We’d dealt with him a bit on The Green Hornet, and I was generally terrified of him. He was a dude in his mid-fifties, relatively fit, red skin, large horns, a tail, hooves, and a legion of screaming demons flanking him at all times.
We got to his office, where we were introduced to a representative from the RAND Corporation, a think tank that weighs in on risk assessment, among many other things. The dude from RAND had compiled a report.
RAND Dude: Well, North Korea does not seem happy.
Me: Will they be even more unhappy when they actually see the movie?
RAND Dude: From what we can tell, they likely already hacked into Sony’s servers and watched the film, which is why they issued such a strong response.
Lynton: What’s the most egregious part, you think?
RAND Dude: Well, the characterization is a big issue, because it is quite accurate. From his hobbies to his interpersonal relationships with his father and brother, it’ll really hit home for him.
We did do a lot of research, so this was nice to hear.
Lynton (talking over screaming-demon army): Okay, what else might be a problem?
RAND Dude: I notice you used a lot of actual imagery of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung, Un’s father and grandfather.
Me: Yes. We cleared all the actual imagery that we legally could.
RAND Dude: Well, they’re not gonna like that at all.
Lynton: Okay…maybe we can do something about that. What else?
RAND Dude: Well, obviously, the ending is an issue. You VERY graphically explode Kim Jong Un’s head, and since he’s viewed as God, it’s exploding God’s head, and, well, you see how that could be…problematic. All I can say is, protect yourselves. They already likely hacked into your systems once; they’ll probably try to do it again as you get closer to release.
Over the next couple months, as we finished the film, the studio asked us to make a series of annoying but mostly benign changes.
The first was taking the word “Sony” off the movie, so as not to remind people that the movie was ultimately made by a Japanese company, due to Japan’s terrible history with Korea. I’m not sure if they thought people were just gonna forget that Columbia Pictures is owned by Sony, but nowhere in the film or its marketing materials does it say, “A Sony Picture,” which is probably a rare distinction for Sony Pictures.
Also, there are little pins worn by every North Korean character in the movie, with Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung on them, as well as countless other images of them on propaganda posters in the background of shots. The studio insisted on going in and EVER SO SLIGHTLY digitally altering them so it was not technically them we were showing. Me and Evan got really mad about it—then we saw the first shots come back from visual effects and we literally couldn’t tell the difference, so we didn’t make a big deal out of it.
The last thing was the death.
Lynton called us. “Can you not kill him?”
Me: It’s kind of baked in there. Unless you want to spend a lot of money reshooting a new ending.
The studio NEVER wants to spend a lot of money on anything, so it’s always a good thing to bring up budget when you’re not into an idea.
Lynton: Can you cut around it?
Me: Not really.
Basically we agreed to tone the shot down a bit, which wasn’t that hard to do, because it was quite toned UP when we filmed it.
Whenever there’s something that we fear might be watered down by the studio, we go WAYYYYY overboard on set so we have a lot of room to negotiate. We knew that graphically killing Kim Jong Un would very likely become a debated point while we were editing, so we shot it in the most explicit way imaginable, giving us something to pull back on.
We had the practical-effects team build a realistic replica of Randall Park’s head, in character as Kim. The head had layers of wax and fake bone that perfectly replicated what was inside an actual head. We used a super-high-speed camera and blasted the wax head with flamethrowers, causing the layers to melt, one after the other. Once it was just a flaming skeleton, a small explosive was detonated, blowing up what was left of his head.
“We want it to be the face melting in Raiders, followed up by the head explosion from Scanners” were likely the exact words we used when explaining it to our crew.
After a LOT of back and forth, we agreed to slightly alter the shot so you don’t see
quite as much face melting before the head exploding. It got VERY granular. We literally created hundreds of versions of the shot as we tried to arrive at a consensus.
In October, Kazuo Hirai, the chairman of Sony, weighed in with his feedback to Amy over (now hacked) email: “I’ve given this a lot of thought and would like to go ahead with a variation of version 337….It would be much appreciated if you could push them a bit further as you mentioned in your email. Also, please ensure that this does not make it into the international version of the release.”
The studio had started making their own shots at this point, and we didn’t think their version worked. I wrote back: “We will make it less gory. There are currently four burn marks on his face. We will take out three of them, leaving only one. We will reduce the flaming hair by 50 percent….The head explosion can’t be more obscured than it is because we honestly feel that if it’s any more obscured you won’t be able to tell it’s exploding, and the joke won’t work. Do you think this will help? Is it enough?”
After a few back and forths, I wrote: “This is it!!! We removed the fire from the hair and the entire secondary wave of head chunks. Please tell us this is over now. Thanks so much!!”
It was. We had settled on a version and we were heading into the months leading up to release on relatively the same page. Except for one.
Me and Evan took the RAND Corporation’s warning seriously. We avoided the Sony servers at all costs, as we’d been told they’d likely already been hacked, and hired our own people to help secure our networks. Sony, it would seem, did not.
Although it didn’t become public until November 24, the Sony hack actually happened on November 21. I’m sure a lot of people wondered, What was Michael Lynton doing the moment he found out about the hack? And by a crazy stroke of coincidence, I actually know what he was doing. He was in the Rita Hayworth building on the Sony lot, sitting down in front of Sony’s international-TV-and-movie-distribution partners, conducting a Q and A with me.