The Interview

Prime Video offers the best in entertainment. The end of the world continues with Fallout 2. A global phenomenon, inbegred by Prime. I heard you about what to do in this situation. Look at the epic end of the unwritten story of The Witches of Oz. Buy or buy? Wicked for good now. I'm taking you to see The Wizard. There's no going back. So what you also look, Prime Video. Here you look at everything. Prime is advised, especially to buy or buy. Inhoud can be advertised 18+. All the rules are used to be used. Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a movie so stupid. Of course, it had to perfectly predict our current reality in so many ways. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my co-host Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how are you doing this morning? And what have you brought for us today? I am nervous that we are going to be hacked by North Korea. Just kidding. No, I'm not. We're not anywhere near important enough. And also, were they the ones who did the hack? We're going to find out in this episode about The Interview, which is a movie. Chris, what was your experience with this movie? Had you seen it before? And what did you think upon watching it for the podcast? So I had not seen The Interview before. I remember the brouhaha or the broad strokes of it when it came out. I'm excited for you to tell me more. I have so many thoughts. First of all, when you said you wanted to cover this movie, I thought, why? This movie's not important. It seems it's dumb, blah, blah, blah. And yet I'd have more thoughts coming out of this movie than any movie we've covered recently. Okay. First of all, it's basically Ishtar in so many ways. Like two bumbling idiots stumble upon international crisis. It's Ishtar Frost, Frost, Nixon, super bad, but not as good as, not as good as any of those movies. It is funny. Like this, I, there are a couple of laugh out loud moments. It made me laugh out loud a few times and I'll point some out. It's an unusual example of a comedy duo with Franco and Rogan in which the traditionally dramatic actor plays the idiot and the traditionally comedic actor plays the straight man. And it's so weird. I was trying to think of other examples of that. one of those performances is successful it's not james franco i don't know if either of them really are in my opinion we'll get into that in a minute um but it's just with again pineapple express this movie this is the end it is it's like franco was the dramatic actor and outside of these movies rogan the comedic one for every time it would make me laugh out loud there was like a weird unnecessary racist Asian joke thrown in there. And I really had to try to transport myself back to 2014. Were we just still, were we doing Asian voices in 2014? The answer to that I think is yes, but at the same time, the amount of completely unnecessary, unfunny, and just flat out racist jokes in this movie is stunning. It is. It's a lot. Well, and also none of them further the plot. That would justify it, but you would just imagine they would hit post and say, we should probably cut this. Nope, they didn't. Skylark Tonight was funny. Yes, the Eminem and Rob Lowe things are very funny. The Eminem interview made me laugh pretty hard. The Rob Lowe bald reveal was pretty funny and made me laugh pretty hard. Frosty Nixon made me laugh. There's like this great tradition of idiots visiting dictators. We'll talk about the most recent example of that. with Putin. We'll talk about one visiting Kim Jong-un, but yes, continue. Carmella, this is the dumbest movie I've ever seen. It was my wife's quote. It is. It's really stupid. There's, but it's also, it also has some really smart elements that are very funny. And it's like frustratingly stupid because I imagine there's a version of this movie that's closer to something like Veep or In the Loop, right? Where like an Armando Iannucci, where it uses more of a scalpel as opposed to a shovel to bludgeon its subject to death. There's a version of this movie that's like The Studio, which, of course, Seth Rogen would go on to make. And that's like, there's a version of this movie that is good. That's what's so frustrating about this. And there are ideas in it that are good. I like the concept that, of course, James Franco's beleaguered, nobody thinks I'm smart or takes me seriously, media mogul character gets along and finds solace with or like finds a kindred spirit in is very, very funny. And so on the one hand, this movie is so frustratingly juvenile. Sometimes that can be funny. A lot of the times it's just frustrating. For every good performance, Randall Park, I think, is actually really good. And this movie, please remind me the name of the actress who plays the revolutionary, the Diana, who ends up being, she's very funny in this movie. But James Franco's performance is inexplicable in that he is playing the world's stupidest person. And I just, and he's just like clearly riffing every scene. And it just makes no sense. Seth Rogan is just doing his Seth Rogan thing. Like that. You take it, take it or leave it. You like it or you don't. And yet, despite being so, like, utterly stupid and kind of unimaginative in a lot of ways, it predicts in so many ways our current moment, which is mind-boggling. So we have Tucker Carlson going to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin in what is basically Dave Skylark interviewing Kim Jong-un. We have the rise of alternative media. I almost didn't make it back from the Caribbean visiting my mom's family in Puerto Rico because the Caribbean was shut down because we just kidnapped President Maduro from Venezuela. I mean, the line, how many times do you Americans, you know, how many times can the U.S. make the same mistake than Franco's line that did make me laugh as many times as it takes. It's very funny. And then, of course, I believe, was it earlier this year, it was revealed that SEAL Team 6 had had a botched operation in 2019 attempting to put a listening device in North Korea that resulted in the death of a number of fishermen on, I think it's on the Sea of Japan. I'll pull up the details. But so many things about the moment we are in right now were thematically predicted by this very silly, kind of offensive, at times funny, very broad studio comedy. And so we're living in the dumbest timeline. And again, I feel like it just couldn't land its punches and it just leans into its jingoism. But like some of the lines could have been so much funnier if it had a slightly more meta take, like, you know, bye, have fun in the war, like the U.S. pulling out and just leaving areas to fall into civil war. Like, there are some very funny ideas in this movie. I agree. But ultimately, I was left feeling a little bit, and I do think Borat is funnier than this movie, but like Borat, we're like, we've taken a country that's an easy target as a source of jokes, forgotten the fact that there are 25 million people that live there in very hard circumstances. And also, it's a country with a really fascinating history. Which we're going to get into. And we have reduced it to like a one-note joke. And yeah, so I mean, you said this is the worst movie we've covered in Sex With Me. I don't think it's the worst movie we've covered. It's like top five, I think, maybe. It's not top five for me. I could name five right now that are worse. Dr. Dolittle, Fantastic Four, Evan Almighty. No. Evan Almighty is not. At least one of the Twilights. Shut your mouth. At least one. at least one between one and four of the twilights anyway all to say it was fine like it passed the time the problem is it like it's a movie that keeps stepping on rakes that it has put on the ground it's like it's like it could be good and then it steps on a racist joke where i'm like you could have just got that it could be good and then it just steps on like oh what would be funny is if we just kept sticking things up our butts because like no homo like that's the equivalent that's like the level of humor of this movie yes but i will say the sounds that seth rogan made when he's shoving the transponder device up his butt it those did make me laugh that was pretty good okay i agree with everything that you're saying i think i had a harder time with this one because i actually found it like quite boring in long stretches um the first like 40 minutes are like Like, when's this movie going to start? Exactly. It's pretty slow. It's just, it's very frustrating because I think that the, as you pointed out, the core idea is a really funny one. And it goes back to like Charlie Chaplin, like the great dictator. There's this long history of Hollywood satirizing and spoofing these great leaders because it is the one thing that they can't stand. As we've learned from our own president, is a mirror held up that shows them what they really are. And that's the thing is they had an opportunity to do that, to hold a mirror up to nature, as it were. And they just missed the mark over and over again in this. And it's, I think we're going to see why over the course of this episode that happened. And, you know, to your point about the real suffering of the North Korean people, that's something we're going to discuss a little bit as well. But like, I think in the name of comedy, they were very afraid of getting too real with this. But then they make the decision to make it actually North Korea and actually Kim Jong-un. And in doing that, they're like walking this weird line where they're not really picking a side of that battle in either direction. And it just doesn't work. And it's very frustrating. And it's very strange. I agree with you. I think Randall Park's performance in this is great, a lot of which is very much due to him and not the way that it's written, which we will talk about. But yeah, this movie is, this is a dumb, not super good movie written and directed by, I think, some extraordinarily talented people. And it led to one of the most fascinating corporate hacks in history. So let's get into this because there's a lot to talk about. Here's the basic info. The interview was directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg with a story by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg and screenplay by Dan Sterling. It was distributed by Sony, more specifically Columbia Pictures, as Sony very much want to remind you of, starring Seth Rogen, James Franco, Lizzie Kaplan, Randall Park, Diana Bang, Timothy Simons, and many more. Can I quickly mention Lizzie Kaplan, who then disappears for the middle hour of the movie and is given nothing to do and makes the whole comment like, do you think just because I'm a woman, the only reason I'm here is to look attractive, to which the filmmakers say yes. Yeah, and then that's all they do with her. It's bizarre. But Timothy Simons does have a few laugh out loud moments. He's very funny. I mean, he's always funny in everything, but yes. He's always funny. I love him. The IMDb logline, as always, is Dave Skylark and his producer Aaron Rapoport run the celebrity tabloid show Skylark Tonight when they land an interview with a surprise fan, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, they are recruited by the CIA to assassinate him. Now, I want to start with a quote from Dan Sterling, who's the screenwriter, which said to the LAist, he said, quote, The movie in our minds was supposed to be an outrageous, of course, somewhat provocative, but totally hilarious comedy, which I think that it is. But the reaction by the North Korean government was surprising to me. I was quite naive going into this. This should be the least surprising reaction ever. I know. It's not surprising. This is like, I'm sorry, read the Wikipedia about North Korea's history. Also, sir, you're the one who did all the research on this. Anyway, I agree. I do not think that this should have been a surprising reaction. In fairness to him, I believe he is referring to the actual hack that happened as being the reaction. That they actually marshaled resources to attempt to retaliate in some way. Sure. That it rose to that level of importance. Okay, fair. Or did they? Okay, so I'm just going to drop all my little conspiracy theory crumbs along the way, and then we'll get to that part because it's my favorite part of the episode. Okay, since it's our first time talking about Seth Rogen, let's get a little bit of background on him. He was born in Vancouver in 1982 to a Jewish family. According to Rogen in the New York Times, his upbringing was, quote, mercifully unmarred by tragedy. He had a very nice childhood. His mom, Sandy, worked as a cashier and then a social worker, and his dad worked for non-profits. His father always told the kids, never do anything just for the money, and they were always very much encouraged to share. At 12 years old, he met his lifelong collaborator, Evan Goldberg, in bar mitzvah class. And at 13, Rogan started doing stand-up around Vancouver, and it's around this time that Rogan and Goldberg began writing what would become Superbad. At 16, he went to his first local audition for Freaks and Geeks, and of course, he booked it. He moved to LA with his parents, left high school when Freaks and Geeks took off. Meanwhile, his parents were laid off, and Rogan then became the family breadwinner. And then Evan Goldberg actually moved to Hollywood to join Rogan around this time as well. Unfortunately, in 2000, Freaks and Geeks was canceled after one season, a travesty, because that's, I think, one of the best seasons of television ever. But Judd Apatow, the series creator, was super impressed by Rogan and started trying to get him other gigs. Unfortunately, they kept telling Rogan and Apatow that Seth Rogen didn't look right. He's not a leading man. He's not going to be cast in any of these parts. So Apatow starts hiring him in smaller roles and then as a writer on shows like Undeclared. He was also impressed by Goldberg. And according to an interview with Time Magazine, he started training them like a 70s kung fu master, giving them writing challenges like developing a full movie script in 10 days or pitching 100 one-page movie concepts. They also showed Apatow the super bad script around this time, which of course he would help them hone and then eventually produce. Now Apatow also got them writing jobs on D'Ali G Show in 2003, and they continued honing their skills as a writing duo. And Apatow described Rogan and Goldberg's partnership to Rolling Stone as an incredibly harmonious one. He said, quote, I've never seen them fight. They have a connection that I don't know if I've ever seen anywhere else in my life. It was fun reading about the way that these guys work together. It just feels they are equals. They respect each other as equals, and they seem to just operate in complete harmony, which is very unusual for a duo like this. Now, the initial idea for the interview started gestating with Rogan and Goldberg sometime around the late 2000s. This does make sense. Of course, dictators like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were being toppled and killed, and Osama bin Laden was, of course, killed in 2011. They started to wonder what might happen if a journalist had scored an interview with someone like Osama bin Laden, which, by the way, did happen in 1998 with ABC's John Miller and with CNN's Peter Bergen in 1997. And then, of course, the idea being what would happen if that journalist was hired to take them out. Rogan told Collider, quote, journalists are in a weird position to get closer to these evil dictators than anyone else is. And it was also inspired by the idea that you hear that Saddam Hussein was a fan of Western movies. Again, I think this is a great idea. It's a good setup, and it points out the similarities between Western excesses within these spaces of Hollywood entertainment, mass media, and then how those are, I don't know, deeply appreciated by certain folks, authoritarians around the world and whatnot. You know, that opulence is mirrored. It sounds like they were kind of thinking of this as a comedy version of Frost-Nixon or Frosty Nixon, of course, as we get in the final result, which is a very funny idea. Now, it does seem that as far as Rogan and Goldberg were concerned, they always wanted to use a real political figure as the subject of the interview. Osama bin Laden, pretty much immediately taken off the table because they knew Sacha Baron Cohen had the dictator in pre-pro, and they figured, okay, that means he's cornered the market on Middle Eastern tyrants. We need to look somewhere else. So they turned their focus to the next most obvious target, North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il. But he died on December 17th of 2011, and they took a little pause when his son Kim Jong-un assumed power. Rogan and Goldberg put the project on hold, in case Kim Jong-un, quote, turned out to be cool. So let's take a moment to talk about the People's Democratic Republic of North Korea, and let's find out if its current Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un is, in fact, a cool guy. He's the youngest son of Kim Jong-il, former Supreme Leader of North Korea. He is the third generation to rule North Korea after his father, Kim Jong-il, and grandfather, Kim Il-sung, who founded the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea right after World War II, and then authorized an invasion of South Korea, which, of course, triggered the Korean War. A little bit of history here. He obviously did not successfully conquer South Korea. He established the central ideology of juche, which means self-reliance. But basically, it was just a way to massively isolate this country from any outside influence. The idea boils down to the way that the country will achieve the most success is by being completely independent in every arena. The way that it actually translates is that the government controls every arena and doesn't allow any outside influence. Well, what's interesting is like it was very much modeled after Stalinism, which then like Khrushchev moved away from Stalinism in the 50s. And that caused like a lot of tension between North Korea and the Soviet Union. And like, I don't know if you're going to talk about this, but when Japan annexed Korea between like 1910 and 45, all of the industrialization or a lot of it was in the north because it's so mountainous. Right. And then all of the arable land or most of it is in the south. And so if you try to become fully self-reliant without the agricultural base to support that, you know, it leads to a lot of problems. And that's a big reason why after the Korean War, North Korea did rely quite heavily on economic support from China and the Soviet Union. You mentioned Stalin. Right. So Kim Jong-il succeeded his father in 1994, and he kept upping the ante on their nuclear program in addition to some other things. And in 1991, the Soviet Union massively reduced the support that they were sending to North Korea. And this had to do with UN sanctions and also was very much a result of North Korea's ever-evolving nuclear program. China also not super stoked about how much they were advancing their nuclear program. And the Soviet Union dissolved in 91. Yes. So there's a bunch of things happening at that point. But the big thing to keep in mind for our story is that the Soviet Union, Russia, they remove not all but most of their economic support for North Korea. Now, this is a massive economic setback. And because the economy had already been a shitshow for years, this is when the major food shortages, famines, et cetera, start kicking in pretty regularly for the North Korean people because they've lost one of their most important backers. It was just a disaster. And they didn't have the infrastructure set up in place. And even though Juche, they're supposed to be self-reliant, they had not been. They had been relying quite heavily on both China and the Soviet Union. So reliable information about the actual state of the country and its people is extremely hard to come by because it's a communist dictatorship where every element of production and the economy is controlled by the government, which is, of course, controlled by the supreme leader. There is zero independent media. TVs and radios are pre-tuned to government stations and the government jams foreign broadcasts. And in terms of some of the more ridiculous claims the interview makes, like Kim Jong-un telling people he doesn't pee or poo, those actually may be more in line with his father regime A government website did indeed once state that Kim Jong did not need to defecate or urinate because his body was perfectly calibrated He also sort of claimed to have invented the hamburger and he called it double bread with meat. Didn't catch on. All to say, the movie is definitely mixing and matching where it sees fit, but it's not pulling this stuff out of thin air necessarily. Now, there are severe travel restrictions, especially for press. And the North Korean press is, of course, completely controlled by the government. And despite it being declared a classless society, there is absolutely a ruling class who lives a lavish life compared to the peasants. Now, that is a very short and uncomplicated rundown of a very, very complicated and long history. But it's all we have time for here. I highly recommend that you look into it far more than we're covering in this episode. But initially, when Kim Jong-un took power, many people wondered, like Rogan and co, if he would maybe be a little bit more chill than his dad had been. But those hopes were dashed quite quickly, because here is a timeline of what happened after Kim Jong-un took power and how it lines up with the interview development. So in 2010, Un was named as his father's successor. And that same year, his brother publicly stated that he opposed the hereditary transfer of power and seemed to maybe be advocating for a free election. On December 31st of 2011, after his father's passing, Kim Jong-un assumed power, despite his brother's objections. And he started very swiftly consolidating power and eliminating anyone who might be getting in his way. And by eliminating, yes, I do mean murdering people. By 2015, the South Korean foreign minister estimated that he had murdered around 70 officials since taking power. Also, remember that brother? According to South Korean intelligence, Kim Jong-un was behind his poisoning death in 2017. Kim Jong-un also would, and this is actually after the interview, begin accelerating North Korea's nuclear program much, much more, obviously, to everyone's chagrin, including China, who had continued to be more of an ally before his killing spree and the nuclear tests. All to say, not, in fact, a cool dude. Seth Rogen told Rolling Stone, quote, there was a real moment where we were like, hey, maybe this guy's not bad. And then we started reading about him killing his girlfriend and feeding his uncle to the dogs. To be clear, the thing about him murdering his girlfriend appears to maybe have not been true. And in terms of feeding his uncle to the dogs, also probably not true, but only the feeding to the dogs part. He definitely did have his uncle executed as part of this purge during the power grab. But I think that this is an interesting example of some of the problems with the way that North Korea is covered. There is a tendency to believe anything about this country because it's so hard to come by any reliable information. and so much of the actual true stories coming out of this country are extremely unbelievable. But it makes it difficult to parse out what's real and what's not. I only know a little bit on the economic side from undergrad, because it's an interesting example. But there was a period where... So like North Korea lost an incredible amount of its population during the Korean War. I think it was like 10 to 15% of its population. The ratio was as high or close to as high as the Soviet Union during World War II, which infamously just threw people into machine gun fire effectively as a strategy against the Germans. And I think for a while, as North Korea was re-industrializing after the Korean War, like GDP kept up with South Korea. And there was a period where things, I'm not saying they were good, but... Well, that also had to do with the support they were getting from outside, which I don't know if people knew that that's what was happening. Yes, but once the economy had to move from extensive growth into intensive growth, where it's like you have to actually make your economic inputs yield more outputs. You have to grow in efficiency as opposed to just scaling. That's when my understanding is things started to fall apart in Korea, and that's in the 60s. They start lagging, and then it was like the Soviet Union's also lagging in the 80s. Perestroika, Glasnost, they start pulling back on their aid to North Korea, and then by 91, everything falls apart. You know, the wall comes down, Soviet Union dissolves almost overnight, December 26th, and then floods, arduous March. And again, I'm going to misremember some of this, but my understanding is there was a moment where it seemed like maybe they were going to back off on some of their nuclear ambitions. And I believe when George Bush named them as part of the axis of evil, it pushed them back into a more obstinate position on the nuclear testing side. So there's interesting international dynamic. I know it's a closed country, but they're also reacting to these global politics in interesting ways, too. Totally. And they have a tendency to name America as, you know, one of their top enemies, which is interesting. Obviously, South Korea is their biggest, but they never forget about us. Well, yeah, and they see South Korea as a proxy of the United States, really, since the Korean War. Yes. So sometime around 2011, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg read a script off the blacklist called Flarsky, written by a guy named Dan Sterling. Sterling got his start writing on South Park. I think he was the first writer Trey Parker and Matt Stone hired. He had also EP'd The Daily Show and the Sarah Silverman program, and the script for Flarsky caught Rogan and Goldberg's eye. They both attached to produce it, and Rogan would star in it. Now, this became Longshot with Seth Rogan and Charlize Theron, which, when you think about Dan Sterling's background, makes a ton of sense. It's a political, romantic comedy. I thought it was pretty cute. I don't know if you got a chance to see it, but I ended up enjoying it. I liked it. It's good. Yeah. Rogan and Theron have surprisingly good chemistry in that. They do. They were great together. But before they got to work on Long Shot, Rogan and Goldberg pitched Sterling on the idea they had for the interview. Rogan said, we literally just hired a writer who's smarter than us. So Sterling got to work writing the screenplay, and naturally he chose a fake name, Kim Il-Hwan, for the titular interview subject, because it literally never occurred to him that they would ever use the real Supreme leader's name. The stars continued to align for the film when in February of 2013, former NBA star Dennis Rodman made his first visit to North Korea. He went with three members of the Harlem Globetrotters and a team of Vice journalists. They were there to film a basketball diplomacy series for Vice, which I've never heard a more Vice doc idea in my life than Dennis Rodman bringing basketball diplomacy. Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong-un watched games together, ate a super lavish 10-course meal, partied it up, and at the end of the trip, Rodman told Kim, you've got a friend for life. I mean, if Dave Skylark is just playing Dennis Rodman, this actually makes a lot more sense. Like James Franco's performance makes a lot more sense in this movie. That's true, because Dennis Rodman is also just dead behind the eyes. By the way, in 2015, just fast forwarding a little bit, Dennis Rodman released a documentary. Do you know about this? No. Oh my God. He released a documentary called Dennis Rodman's Big Bang in Pyongyang about his experience in North Korea. And his stated goal was to show the world, a glimpse of the country famous for its human rights violations and see that it's not that bad. Are they the current hub of modern slavery? Well, maybe, but you know, let's not worry about it. He puts on a really good 10 course meal. He does. All right. So Sterling Goldberg and Rogan could not believe their luck. As Rogan told Rolling Stone, quote, we were like, oh, my God, this lends even more credence to the fact that this could actually happen. It was fucking weirder than anything we had thought of. So in March of 2013, the interview was officially greenlit and announced with Sony's Columbia Pictures signed on as well as Rogan and Goldberg's company Point Grey Productions. And right away, Sony had high hopes for the interview based on what they'd already seen of This Is The End. So let's take a moment to talk about Rogan and Goldberg's box office run up to this point. In 2007, Apatow hired them as EPs on Knocked Up, which Rogan, of course, also starred in. This solidified him as both a leading man and a moneymaker because it made $219 million worldwide. That same year, Superbad was released, making over $170 million at the box office. One year later in 2008, Pineapple Express came out, again making over $100 million, solidifying the Rogan-Franco on-screen partnership. And in 2013, Rogan and Goldberg made their directorial debut with This Is The End, which again would end up making $126 million worldwide on around a $32 million budget. All to say, these guys are minting money, and they are officially in blank check territory, which probably explains what happened next. Sometime in 2013, again, after this had been greenlit, Rogan and Goldberg told Sterling to take a pass at the script, making the dictator a for-real-sies Kim Jong-un. And as soon as he did this, they all agreed, this is the way to go. However, Sony, not stoked. They were like, hey, please, don't do this. Or write it in such a way that we could edit it out, replace the name if we need to. Just like, don't do this. Sony, Japanese consumer electronics giant, The country that subjugated this entire peninsula for 35 years and arguably created Kim Il-sung, who was a resistance fighter and never has acknowledged the fact that they made sex slaves of Korean women. Like, this is probably not the relationship, you know, or even necessarily the studio that should be putting this movie out. It's very dicey, given the history between these countries. Yeah. Well, Seth Rogen said, nope. And he later told Rolling Stone, quote, Kim Jong-un is a lot closer in age to Franco and me, which is better comedically. And he also seems just a lot funnier. You'd see him in pictures. He's like laughing hysterically, but he's an evil fuck. You'd probably like him, but you shouldn't like him. Okay. The stakes of this redirection obviously are massive. As Rogan told Rolling Stone, quote, at best, it will cause a country to be free. And at worst, it will cause a nuclear war. Big margin with this movie. Now, Sterling did research on North Korea, including sources like books by experts such as Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy, which is about life in North Korea, and particularly after the Soviet Union's collapse, which we discussed, that is when it got particularly grim. Blaine Hardin's Escape from Camp 14 about Shin Dong-hyuk's experience in North Korea's most horrific concentration camp. There are Vice documentaries about North Korea. He also had the script reviewed by a high-level official from Hillary Clinton's State Department. But he kept running into a problem. Rogan and Goldberg had to constantly remind him, this is a comedy. Because he kept veering in a more political direction that included more facts and real pain and suffering about the North Korean people. But this is the thing. You can have both. I agree. When I was watching this, and this is going to sound outrageous, but stick with me. I kept thinking about Galaxy Quest. and the problem with this movie is that it actually has no stakes at the end of the day. It seemingly has all the stakes. Nukes are going to be launched at the end of this film. None of the emotional relationships mean anything to me in this movie. I do not feel the suffering of any of these people. The turn that Randall Park tries to make work at the end of the film where he starts crying on camera feels so out of left field and unearned. And I was thinking about Galaxy Quest and how the Thermians, who at first come off as the silliest, like, weird-walking, weird-talking people of all time become this utterly sympathetic group of people, and you're watching them suffocate on screen and are, like, deeply moved as, you know, Tim Allen, of all people, is giving this speech to Mathisar. And so they make people who feel so alien to us through their beliefs and their actions, etc., so deeply relatable that I get completely invested in the emotional stakes of that movie. This could have done the same thing, where instead of playing the cult of personality and the strangeness of the society to us just for jokes, they could play it a little bit for pathos. And by the end, we could actually be invested in these people's struggle in a really interesting way. And they just, it seems like they're completely disinterested in doing that. I think this is where it goes wrong. I actually think Dan Sterling could have written a very good version of this movie. I think that unfortunately, I love Seth Rogen. I love Evan Goldberg. I think they pushed him in the wrong direction. They pushed him in a direction that was faithful, I think they thought, to their audience at the time. But it doesn't work for what they're doing here. Oh, and we hit the third act, and we're just biting each other's fingers off and shoving joysticks up butts. It's like, I mean, it's shocking, and it can elicit a laugh in the moment, but again, it leaves me with nothing afterwards. No, and when you make the choice to make this about a real person and the real country, I do think you owe something to the facts and to those people. And they are just kind of blatantly ignoring that in a way that makes this really not work. But again, they come close at a couple points. When Jane Franco discovers the grocery store is fake. Yes. Like, oh, I actually thought that was a really good scene. And I wanted more of that. I wanted more of that moment. Because that's a real thing that has happened to journalists. Like, there's so many real things they could have pulled from. They didn't need to go as, like, joystick up the butt crazy as they do, because there's plenty in reality to work with, and they just don't do it. Apparently at the table read, Jonah Hill went up to Amy Pascal, the then head of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and said, I can't believe you're letting them make this fucking movie. And she said, I can't either. Let's talk briefly about casting. Casting Kim Jong-un was surprisingly easy. Randall Park, at this point best known for playing Governor Danny Chung on Veep, was the first person to audition and the last because they canceled every other audition after seeing him. The role had been written very combative and strict, but Park played him sheepish and shy and far more human, relatable and likable, which you really need in this. Before signing on, he talked to his South Korean-born parents who endorsed the idea. They said it was very funny. He also discussed the idea with members of the L.A. Korean community to gauge reactions and sentiment. And before filming, he put on 15 pounds. He shaved his head. They actually were going to do prosthetics, but then I think they realized they didn't quite look right. So they were like, just shove as many donuts into your face as you possibly can, like a week and a half before filming. And that's what he did. And actually, in a weird way, like, I think that saves the movie a little bit because they do style him, but they don't try to make him look exactly like Kim Jong-un. And so there's a little bit of a separation there, like you're saying, Lizzie, so it doesn't feel as much like a real person. Anyway, it's a bit of a silver lining for them. A little bit, yes. Now, to prepare for the role, he studied Forrest Whitaker's performance as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, which I think really comes through. Great performance. It is a great movie and great performance. Now, initially, Goldberg and Rogan had imagined a very serious actor for the role of Dave Skylark, like, and I think this would have been so much better, Matt Damon. That to me could have saved this. I mean, obviously it needed a rewrite. It needed a lot of the jokes taken out, but Matt Damon is a good enough actor. He's funny. So it would have, I think, it would have worked. It would have been just as funny, but he would have been able to pull off the pathos in a way that James Franco does not. Yeah. I was also, just because we just talked about it in Memento. I was thinking like Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading, for example. Exactly. Yeah. That's what you need in this. But the script had pushed the character in a far more sort of unhinged Ryan Seacrest direction. And they figured, hey, James Franco, you guys always work together. Let's just cast him. He's the right fit. I won't dwell on this. He's horrible in this movie, like inexplicably bad. I don't understand what he's doing. I rarely understand his motivations in any of the scenes. It's not he's not a character. It's just like it's just a manic. Every line is played in the most ridiculous way solely to try to land whatever joke is happening in that moment, as opposed to playing the stakes or playing a character, which, to be fair, made me laugh a number of times. But then by the end of the film, you're just kind of left with nothing. I rarely laughed at James Franco in this at Seth Rogen, at Diana Bang, at Randall Park, at Lizzie Kaplan, like pretty much everyone else in this. James Franco, I thought, was unwatchable. We're not going to get into this because it happens chronologically after, but in 2021, Rogan did decline to work with James Franco any further after he was accused of sexual misconduct by several students and his former acting school teacher. Their friendship ended and their professional relationship ended. Lizzie Kaplan was cast as Agent Lacey. She had starred with Rogan and Franco in Freaks and Geeks. And she joined the interview in October of 2013, coming right off of Masters of Sex, which was great. And she's great in. And True Blood. And True Blood. Yes, I love her on True Blood. Me too. And Party Down, Lizzie Kaplan, Stealing Hearts. She's great. She's the best. All right, Diana Bang, a Vancouver-based comedian. She was actually working as a receptionist at the time of booking the role of Suk-Yen Park. She actually continued that job sporadically following the interview's release. She is great. She dominates every scene she is in in this movie. I know. Like, she's very funny. And actually, she used a much stronger Korean accent closer to her mom's accent at the beginning of the shoot, and they had to ask her to tone it down a little bit for clarity. But I think she is wonderful in this. She really pulls it off. She's given a part with very little grace, and she handles it well. All right. On October 10th, 2013, filming kicked off in Vancouver with a budget of around $44 million. dollars. Rogan and Goldberg had planned the script around places they knew existed in Vancouver, using locations as stand-ins for Beijing, Pyongyang, and New York. Aerial shot of a North Korean forest is Vancouver. It's just, it's shot all around Vancouver. They did actually, though, work with Vice and license some of the Vice documentaries B-roll so they could use that to fill in the gaps, the B-roll from that Vice had actually captured in North Korea. Now, as production kicked off, Rogan and Goldberg tried to completely abandon the way that comedy traditionally looked on screen, and they were instead turning to films like Spy Game, The Insider, Argo, Rogan cited Ridley Scott, and Michael Mann as influences. And that's all the time we're going to spend on the actual production, because if you know anything about where this is headed, that is not where things go wrong. In fact, many journalists visited the set, and they were laughing so loud the crew had to ask them to move. People seemed to generally agree that what they were capturing looked like a slam dunk. And in December of 2013, the interview wrapped filming. But as the interview was wrapping, by all accounts, a very enjoyable shoot, Sony was starting to get pretty itchy about what they had bought. Nigel Clark, Sony's head of international marketing, emailed the script to Li Chao, Sony's GM in China, and just asked if they foresaw any issues. Would the Chinese government be pissed about this? Li Chao was cautiously optimistic, saying, quote, in recent years, China seems to have distanced itself from North Korea, and it is unlikely that Sony will be hurt by making the film. This does seem to be backed up. You know, China was much more willing to report some of the crazier stories that were coming out of North Korea. They, of course, were reducing and had been for years reducing aid that they were sending. Again, this has to do with many things, but had to do with North Korea's acceleration of its nuclear program. So Sony sat back and waited. And on May 10th of 2014, a rough cut was assembled for Sony's international distributors. And Chris, what do you think they thought of this movie? This is going to be a problem. They hated it. Yeah, that's what I thought. Hated it. Yeah. Maybe not for the reason you think, though. Sony's UK managing director called it, quote, desperately unfunny and repetitive with a level of realistic violence that would be shocking in a horror movie and made the very valid point that, quote, James Franco proves once again that irritation is his strong suit. But he's like, you know what? it's still probably going to make money because it's Seth Rogen. So they're all like, this movie's terrible, but we think it's going to make money. I will say that to the violence, which for some reason in This Is The End works because it is celebrities coming to... Well, it's like a fantasy. But it's also that there's a little bit of schadenfreude in watching these celebrities get their hell on earth comeuppance in the most grotesquely funny ways. it's not so funny when it's Rambo style in Southeast Asia or the Korean Peninsula in this instance and there a long history of American atrocities there and whatnot that were Indeed which they literally joke about in the movie Yeah So Sony stays the course and then some They decide to sink an estimated million into marketing the interview. Which is, that's, you know, equal to the budget. So that's a big marketing spend. Yes. But remember, this is the end. Made a ton of money. So they're thinking, all right, you know, this is going to be fine. This is going to be fine. It's going to be fine. Or it's going to be the end. It's going to be one of the two. On June 11th, 2014, the teaser trailer was released, and just nine days later, the shit began to hit the fan. On June 20th, The Telegraph UK published comments from Kim Myung-chol, who was the executive director of the Center for North Korea-U.S. Peace, basically an unofficial spokesperson for Kim Jong-un's regime. They said, quote, There is a special irony in this storyline as it shows the desperation of the U.S. government and American society. A film about the assassination of a foreign leader mirrors what the U.S. has done in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine. And let us not forget who killed President John F. Kennedy. Americans. In fact, President Barack Obama should be careful in case the U.S. military wants to kill him as well. Took a left turn there at the end. Oh yeah, had me for a moment. Yeah, it takes a sharp laugh. So at this point, Sony went into full panic mode. Amy Pascal emailed Vice Chairman Jeff Blake, quote, we need Sony's name off this ASAP everywhere. She pushed to have it remarketed as a Columbia Pictures release exclusively and to distance it from Sony. Sony even pulled together a list of talking points for their execs, including the line, quote, this is a Columbia Pictures release and our parent company has little to no involvement in the creative direction taken. They also pulled together talking points for Rogan and Park on the press circuit and pointed out potential questions they might receive, like, quote, why make a comedy about this? And is this film racist? To which I say, I don't know. And yes. Yeah, like, yeah, one word answers for some of these questions. Yes. Just like there's this moment early in the film where Seth Rogen answers the phone and he's getting a phone call from a gentleman who's he's Asian, who's Korean, whose English is his second language and speaks with a slight accent. And Seth Rogen just decides to start doing a Michael Scott, you know, Asian accent in this scene. It's not funny. It's very weird. His character then like quickly maybe realizes it's inappropriate. It's so out of left field. And I thought, okay, well, that sucks. You should just cut that. You didn't need it. And then they just do it like five more times, you know, across the movie. I know. Meanwhile, Seth Rogen was openly tweeting that he hoped the film would make its way to North Korea and to lead a revolution that would remove Kim Jong-un from power. CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Michael Linton, shot Pascal a little note saying, quote, better if Seth does not do any tweeting for a while until we sort this out. But Seth Rogen did not take that note. Just five days later, on June 25th, North Korea released an official statement which promised merciless retaliation against the U.S. if the interview came out. Quote, The act of making and screening such a movie that portrays an attack on our top leadership is a most wanton act of terror and act of war and is absolutely intolerable. While Sony was shitting a brick, Rogan Sterling and co. were high-fiving. Seth Rogen tweeted, People don't usually want to kill me for one of my movies until after they've paid 12 bucks for it. Hi-oh! The hi-yo is in the tweet. That's not me editorializing. Also, hasn't Rogan said that he's high every day? He's like always a little bit high by his own admission. He does great work most of the time. Yeah. All right. So Evan Goldberg was also excited, but he found it a little bit more nerve wracking. And they were also surprised by this reaction from North Korea, which, you know, might sound dumb in retrospect. But I think it's important to remember that North Korea had a relatively mild reaction to Team America World Police's depiction of Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un's father. But there are a couple of major differences here. First of all, in 2004, when Team America came out, North Korea was far, far more sealed off. By 2014, there was a much greater chance that if the interview were released, it may actually make it into the hands of North Korean citizens. Also, it's much easier to share content by 2014 than it was in 2004. And he was a puppet, which I think is probably the most important element there. Well, and one last thing is the biggest target in Team America World Police is America at the end of the day. And now I don't know if they were looking at it through that nuanced lens, but arguably Sean Penn and Matt Damon come off way worse than Kim Jong-il in Team America World Police. Famously, the person most pissed off about Team America World Police was Sean Penn, who couldn't believe that they were not taking him seriously and immediately proceeded to go interview Chapo, which also could be the basis for the interview anyway. Totally. All right, so Rogan and Goldberg were viewing this all mostly as a positive because it's free press. One of the first calls they got after the news broke was their former boss, Sacha Baron Cohen, who said, hey man, I never got a nuclear war threatened. High five. Sorry, that is me editorializing. and again Kazakhstan if you look it up guys incredible architecture yeah like beautiful country not just like a bunch of like slummy farms that like he shows at the beginning of that movie anyway between June 26th and 29th North Korea fired three short-range ballistic missiles into the sea and this is when Sony started to realize oh my god we may not be able to release this movie at all. So they brought in a senior defense analyst at Rand named Bruce Bennett, who specialized in North Korea to discuss some next steps. And his assessment on the perceived threat read as follows. The North has never executed an artillery attack against the balloon launching area. So it's very hard to tell what is pure bluster from North Korea since they use the term act of war so commonly. So he's basically saying like, nah, you know, this is not necessarily out of the ordinary, very hard to tell what they mean about it. But then he heads in an interesting direction, specifically about the end of the film, which depicted an even more graphic death of Kim Jong-un than what we see on screen. Here's what Bruce had to say. I also thought a bunch more about the ending. I have to admit that the only resolution I see to the North Korean nuclear and other threats is for the North Korean regime to eventually go away. In fact, when I have briefed my book on preparing for the possibility of a North Korean collapse, I have been clear that the assassination of Kim Jong-un is the most likely path to a collapse of the North Korean government. Thus, while toning down the ending may reduce the North Korean response, I believe that a story that talks about the removal of the Kim family regime and the creation of a new government by the North Korean people will start some real thinking in South Korea and, I believe, in the North once the DVD leaks into the North, which it almost certainly will. So from a personal perspective, I would prefer to leave the ending alone. Yeah, which is interesting. The CIA is effectively coming in and honeypotting them just like in the movie. They're literally saying, we think you should leave this as is because we think it may topple Kim Jong-un's regime. Seth, we're going to give you a backpack full of DVDs and we're going to send you through the DMZ into North Korea to one of those North Korean markets. I can't remember what they're called, but they're these little black markets and you're going to just hawk some of these DVDs, sign a few of them, and then get out of there. Yeah, basically. So yeah, it's not out of the realm of possibility that the film could reach North Korea at all. Balloon launches, which he referred to in that email, had been administered by South Korean activists, and they had been able to send information balloons filled with everything from Bibles to money and medicine to shortwave radios and USBs and DVDs. Now, Michael Linton, CEO of Sony Pictures, who was the one who was corresponding with Bruce Bennett, replied, Bruce spoke to someone very senior in state confidentially. He agreed with everything you've been saying. Everything. I will fill you in when we speak. This is dumber and funnier than the actual movie. That's what you say. This would make such a good episode of the studio. Yes. Seth Rogen, you should do it. So in fact, according to the Daily Beast, by the end of June, at least two U.S. government officials had screened a rough cut of the interview and gave it two thumbs up. A plus. Good to go. Also, a special envoy for the North Korean human rights issues was consulting on the film. And he too said, look, this is probably just standard posturing. This is not a real threat. Carry on. So it seems like everyone kind of figured North Korea was just totally bluffing. And they were wrong. On July 10th, 2014, Reuters reported that North Korea had filed an official complaint with the United Nations. The letter, dated June 27th, from North Korea's UN ambassador read, To allow the production and distribution of such a film on the assassination of an incumbent head of 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. Kind of funny because they didn't know this at the time, but behind the scenes, obviously, they are talking to government officials who are like, hey, maybe this will... I know. I love it. Yeah, there's everyone saying like, you're kind of overreacting, North Korea, and the U.S. government is like, this could be the thing. This could do it. This is... Come on, guys. Kind of right. Okay. So none of these threats scared Seth Rogen. He said, quote, from our research, we know this sort of insane rhetoric is their bread and butter. It's all for show. But was it? By mid-July, Sony was in full-blown freak-out mode. Kazuo Hirai, Sony's CEO in Japan, as you pointed out, their parent company, and the highest level you can reach, was very, very concerned. Kaz, as he's known, hated the final death scene and started putting heavy pressure on Amy Pascal and Seth Rogen to cut it. This was unprecedented. He had never interfered in the film division before. Here's Rogen on the Corridor crew describing the original death scene. It's interesting they did Corridor Crew because I will say the effects in this movie are very well done, especially at the end, the helicopter explosion. Brandon Truss, cinematographer. Great job. This shot became the thing that was like unacceptable. Like of all the things in the movie, like if there was going to be war with North Korea based on something in the movie, it was going to be because of this shot. What the shot was is it was like Raiders of the Lost Ark. We built a wax Kim Jong-un head that had all the layers and a skull and brains and all this. And it had like an explosive charge like in the middle. I remember we like melt. We had like these giant heat like lamps and shit like that. And we filmed it in really high speed and like melted all the layers. And the idea is it would happen in like a second. And then his head would pop with the explosive charge when he got to the bottom layer. That sounds awesome. It was very cool. Yeah, and then this became like the whole negotiation. Well, it's interesting, too, because hasn't Kim Jong-un killed people by like putting them in a field and blowing them up with a missile? And like that's effectively what's happening at the end of this movie? Probably. It's very hard to know what. Oh, nope. Looked it up. It is not with missiles. It is apparently with anti-aircraft guns. It was reported in 2016. A report says that North Korea executes officials with anti-aircraft gun in New Purge. That's part of the problem, though, is like, is he killing people? Yeah. Is he feeding them to his dogs? I don't know. Like, maybe not. That stuff is where it's like, it's very hard to parse out what is true. So Rogan stuck to his guns and refused to completely remove the scene. but he referenced a negotiation, and an insane negotiation, about how much of Kim Jong-un's face they could show melting is what ensued here. Michael Linton wrote in an email to Amy Pascal, yeah, we cannot be cute here. What we really want is no melting face and actually not seeing him die. A look of horror as the fire approaches is probably what we need. Sony Pictures executive Doug Belgrad told Pascal, I would still like to see them eliminate the tendril of flesh on the left side of his forehead that comes just before the fireball. And Pascal subsequently told him it was his job to get them to tone down the violence because, quote, I don't feel like falling on my sword for this one. No other studio would even touch this movie, and we all know it. Hours millions of businesses with tools to build beautiful stores, create content and market with ease. From inventory to shipping, everything runs smoothly. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your one euro trial today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. by august 1st there was still no approved final cut of the interview and everyone was freaking out because they were hurtling towards an october 10th release date or to put it in amy pascal's own words all caps just move the interview asap we need seth to make all the film changes and then pray kaz is comfortable on august 7th she got her wish sony finally pushed the release date all the way back to December 25th. On August 13th, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Sony was reworking the edit, and in particular, they were going back and digitally altering thousands of buttons on the actors because they had used the actual hardware worn by the North Korean military to honor Kim Jong-un, and now Sony was very concerned that this, too, may be read as blasphemous. Seth Rogen, not impressed. He told Amy Pascal, quote, this is now a story of Americans changing their movie to make North Koreans happy. And on August 14th, Amy Pascal sent my favorite email, quote, Seth Rogen is driving me nuts. You know, the problem is like, on the one hand, yes, this is like studio censorship, kind of, you know what I mean, top down, blah, blah, blah. But on the other hand, part of the problem is that Rogen and Goldberg didn't make a movie good enough that people felt confident standing with it. Exactly. And so it's, it kind of just sucks all around, because I understand their perspective. They're You're saying you are becoming the North Korean government and dictating what we do right now. But I understand the studio's perspective that says, like, if you had made a more interesting and nuanced movie, we wouldn't have to necessarily, like, we could stand shoulder to shoulder with you. Yeah, but you didn't. By the end of September, it finally seemed like Amy had worn Seth Rogen down. In an email to Pascal, he wrote, quote, 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 reduced the flaming hair by 50%. 50%. The head explosion can't be more obscured than it is because honestly, we feel like 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 this enough? Up to this point, they had been negotiating the sequence quite literally frame by frame. On September 29th, it did pay off when Kaz Hirai approved the latest version, but privately kept asking for more cuts. So Pascal continued pushing Rogan to the point where he emailed her, please tell us this is over now. On October 27th, Nigel Clark, who was Sony's head of international marketing, sent an even safer version of the ending to international distributors, giving them the option of choosing that version or the unedited one. And pretty much all of the distributors chose this softer version except for one nation. Who do you think said, give me the OG ending? South Korea? No, hell no. Germany? Which one? Australia, because they wanted to. Oh, yeah, mate. This is the best part. They wanted to, quote, sock it to him. Yeah. Well, they're within, probably within range of how far the ballistic missiles can go from North Korea. So, yeah. Sock it to him, mate. Fuck him, mate. I love that. They were like, give us the one where his face melts. And New Zealand's like, no, no, don't do it. I know. But no amount of arguing over the embers and burning flesh on his face mattered because before the movie ever came out, Sony was hacked. On November 24th of 2014, a group calling themselves the Guardians of Peace managed to breach Sony's servers and posted a message on every Sony employee's computer that read, We've obtained all your internal data, including your secrets and top secrets. If you don't obey us, we'll release data shown below to the world. Stop immediately showing the movie of terrorism, which can break the regional peace and cause the war. The breach completely shut down Sony's computer system and email system. Employees literally had to work with pens and paper, and the studio issued 190 BlackBerrys to a lucky few important employees. Now, I'm sure Sony thought this was perhaps another bluff, so they stalled a little bit, but on December 1st, the hackers made good on their promise. They began dumping piles upon piles of leaked documents every few days. This included confidential emails, salary info, including the fact that Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence had earned about half of what their male counterparts, Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale, had on American Hustle. Screeners of upcoming unreleased movies like Annie, Mr. Turner, Still Alice, and To Write Love on Her Arms. Employees' personal social security numbers, Michael Linton's credit card number, Seth Rogen's $8.4 million salary, James Franco's $6.5 million paycheck. budget details including $241 for a table of weed coke pills and panties to be clear those are props a table of weed and coke would cost a lot more than that $74,000 for tiger handlers two tigers and tiger accommodations seems worth it yeah the tiger look good I want to know what their tiger hotel was but on December 6th North Korea categorically denied responsibility for the hack they officially stated quote I do not know where in America the Sony Pictures is situated but said that the hacking into the Sony pictures might be a righteous deed of the supporters and sympathizers with the DPRK in response to its appeal. The righteous reaction will get stronger to smash the evil doings. So basically, totes not us, but also you deserved it. And also, it is funny that we will reveal to the world the Western bourgeois excesses of your decadent, opulent state. We will show the real inequality of what your actors and actresses are paid. And like the amount of money that you spent on these unnecessary things, like there's something so like Cold War to it that's also really interesting. It's just fascinating. This whole behind the scenes story is very Dr. Strangelove. Yeah, absolutely. On December 8th, the Guardians of Peace made a list of demands, including Sony pull the interview completely, saying, quote, stop immediately showing the movie of terrorism, which can break regional peace and cause the war. I have to imagine Sony was considering doing just that, but they didn't move fast enough because on December 9th, the hackers then released Amy Pascal's emails. More on those in a moment. On December 11th, the interview moved forward with a premiere with cast in attendance. It was heavily guarded, but it went off without an incident. And then on December 16th, the hackers released what they called their Christmas gift. It was the eighth tranche of hacked files consisting of thousands of emails from Michael Linton, CEO of Sony Entertainment. In addition to sensitive financial information, the hack revealed an awful lot of personal correspondence between Sony executives, including execs expressing frustration over Adam Sandler's declining box office performance. Sony exec Clint Culpepper calling Kevin Hart, quote, a whore for wanting additional compensation for tweeting support for his movie. Social security details for Judd Apatow, Sylvester Stallone, Rebel Wilson and more. Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin's flat-out racist jokes about the types of movies President Obama must like. Those are rough. And, you know, this brings us to something, obviously, that we kind of saw with the Don't Worry Darling episode with communications between Olivia Wilde and Shia LaBeouf, for example. And this is something that my parents, who are a labor employment attorney, has always drilled into me from a young age, but is really easy, I think, to forget because we have gotten so casual with written communications. And I think that's, we assume that, you know, the contents of our, everything from text messages to DMs to emails are as private as our own thoughts, but they're not. They're discoverable in a court of law and or through hacks, you know, in the court of public opinion. And to be clear, what it is, is they were saying like, oh, what movies do you think he's going to want to screen? And then exclusively listing Black movies. That the whole that their quote unquote joke That horror Kevin Hart was the follow Like yeah it just it anyway Yeah it bad Also George Clooney excitement over the now scrapped film Hack Attack which he compared to Citizen Kane Bill Murray's reluctance to star in Paul Feig's All Women Ghostbusters. That was interesting. There was a whole email exchange that outlined Sony's plan for, quote, aggressive litigation counsel. but they wanted to handle it on the down low because they didn't want to damage their reputation by going after Bill Murray. Jennifer Lawrence's email address, peanutbutt. Brad Pitt's tendency to sign off emails BP McWe, Amy Pascal's email to her senior staff expressing strong frustration about Cameron Crowe's aloha saying, quote, Cameron never really changed anything. People don't like people in movies who flirt with married people or married people who flirt. I'm never starting a movie again when the script is ridiculous and we all know it. Amy Pascal also talking about Aaron Sorkin. We are getting totally positioned in the Aaron stuff. He is broke. He wants to get paid. We paid him his insane fee on Flash Boys. When the poker movie came around, we didn't want to not be in Aaron business, so we wanted that too. I don't care if Aaron is sleeping with the girl or not. I don't care if it becomes a bestseller. They are treating us like shit. Judd Apatow's anger at Amy Pascal that Sony had scheduled Adam Sandler's Comedy Pixels at the same time as Trainwreck, tons of email exchanges of Sony execs complaining constantly about being harassed by Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg for donations to various Democratic candidates that they didn't feel like giving money to, and of course an email exchange between Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin in which he referred to Angelina Jolie as a minimally talented spoiled brat. The hackers also made a much scarier threat. Quote, we have already promised a Christmas gift to you. This is the beginning of the gift. Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September, 2001. We recommend you keep yourself distant from the places at that time. If your house is nearby, you'd better leave. Whatever comes in the coming days is called by the greed of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and the world will denounce Sony. So pretty scary threat on any theaters and physical locations that are showing the interview. In total, the hackers stole around 10 terabytes of data, which at the time was only a little less than the entire digital text collection of the Library of Congress. It was one of the largest corporate data breaches in history. Amy Pascal expressed deep regret over her most embarrassing emails, saying, I'm so disappointed in myself that I ever would have had such a lapse in my thinking. Of all the things I thought might be said about me, this was the last one and I feel awful. That's, you know, referring to her being racist. Ma'am, you wrote racist emails. Privately, she said it felt like she had been raped and then blamed for it. Now, Sony tried in vain to stop publications from publishing the emails. It obviously didn't work. They also tried to garner unified support from rival studios. That didn't work. Pretty much everyone declined to support them during this. So Sony pulled all TV advertising for the interview and canceled the film's New York premiere. And at this point, they had not yet canceled the Christmas theatrical release. But in the wake of that threat, Sony gave theater owners the option to back away from the interview, which was set to open on Christmas Day. Carmike became the first theater chain to announce it was scrapping plans to screen the interview, followed by Regal and Cinemark. Now, it's worth noting, this was only two years after the horrible shooting in Aurora, Colorado during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. And that was in a theater that was operated by Cinemark. Cinemark had actually been fighting quite a few lawsuits that had deemed them liable for that shooting. So their claim was that the incident wasn't foreseeable. So for them to release the interview after the 9-11 style threats, that would have completely undermined their legal defense. They literally could not release this movie. There's no way. And I do wonder if that was a bit of a domino where the other theater chains were able to be like, if they're not doing it, we're not doing it. The Multiplex operators made their decision under pressure from malls. AMC and Cineplex also followed suit. On December 17th of 2014, after the top five theater chains in the country dropped the interview, Sony canceled the film's theatrical release. On December 18th, they put the nail in the coffin and confirmed that they had not yet found a distributed forward on VOD. And it seemed like the movie was dead. The next day, President Obama commented publicly and said it had been a mistake to pull the interview. That it was allowing a foreign party to censor our media and entertainment. And this is exactly the type of movie that I like. Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin. Oh, God. Yeah. In an interview with Fareed Zakaria, Michael Linton countered that they hadn't killed the film. They were still actively seeking a VOD platform, but they just hadn't found any takers. And this was true. They did keep looking for a VOD platform. Eventually, they would find it. On December 24th, it was released to rent or buy on platforms like YouTube Movies, Google Play, and Microsoft Xbox Video. I do have to give those platforms credit for going ahead and releasing this. Many others did not. and they offered an extremely limited release at mostly independent theaters on Christmas Day. By the end of December, it had made $15 million in online rentals and sales and then, of course, was immediately pirated for free everywhere. But perhaps, Chris, the only screening that mattered occurred on December 31st when activists succeeded in a balloon drop of 10,000 copies of the interview over North Korean airspace. So this hack was 100% totally the fault of North Korea in retaliation for this terrible movie, right? You tell me. It depends on who you ask, Chris. On December 19th, 2014, the FBI released a statement saying, yep, this was probably North Korea. They linked data deletion malware to other malware used by previous North Korean hacks, found significant overlap between the IP addresses in this and, again, prior attacks, and similar tools used in a cyber attack against South Korean banks and media outlets, which was carried out by North Korea. And in 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice quadrupled down with a 179-page criminal complaint naming North Korea as the main player behind the attack. But here's where it gets interesting. A whole lot of people, including Seth Rogen and Amy Pascal, don't 100% buy it. Here's why. On January 23rd of 2015, a manager at Sony Pictures sent off a seemingly innocuous email to a team of 12 in the distribution department. It was sizing up an upcoming release from Disney. Nothing in the content of the email is unusual. But the fact that we know it exists is. because it was drafted almost nine weeks after the hack had supposedly been contained, and yet it was passed along to a U.S. cyber researcher by a Ukrainian hacker in February of 2015. Now, the hacker claimed the document had come to him from a Russian hacker and was proof that not only was his Russian buddy still in Sony's system long after the hack had taken place, but that he had always been there. Rogan pointed out to The Hollywood Reporter that, quote, the fact that we were never really specifically targeted always raised suspicions in my head. And he's got a really good point here. Neither he nor Evan Goldberg nor James Franco were personally attacked. In fact, Rogan hired a private cybersecurity firm to comb through all of his and Evan Goldberg's devices to look for any kind of breach, and they found none. No evidence that the two guys who were directly responsible for the interview were ever personally targeted. Instead, the people who were targeted were the top brass at Sony. Seems a bit odd, given the messaging being mostly about the interview. And speaking of the messaging, Seth Rogen pointed out that it felt almost deliberately amateur, full of spelling and translation errors that don't totally track if this was a State Department pulling off the hack. That cyber researcher I mentioned, whose name is Jeffrey Carr, who received that email, immediately turned over what he had to the FBI. He said, look, before you jump on the North Korea bandwagon, I'm getting these documents from a Russian hacker who seems to have unlimited ability to pull more documents, even after Sony's network was down. Something else odd. Three days before the hack occurred, a group called God's Apostles emailed Pascal Linton and three other Sony executives demanding not anything related to the interview, but instead a monetary payout. They were never heard from again, and in fact, the Guardians of Peace did not explicitly mention the interview until the December 8th messages. Now, it's completely possible this was just a different smaller hack or a hack of personal emails versus Sony's server, but an awful lot of people seem to think that the North Korea story doesn't quite add up, including our favorite Dennis Rodman. He's back. Quote, if the North wanted to hack anything in the world, anything in the world, really? They're going to hack a movie? Really? How many movies have there been attacking North Korea? And they never hacked those. North Korea is going to hack a comedy, a movie that is really nothing. I can't see that happening. Of all the companies. Really? over a movie? I don't know. I may lean toward Occam's razor on this one. Not to say that the Russians wouldn't be involved. There's very interesting relationships between Russia and North Korea, as we've learned in the Ukraine war, with North Korea sending, effectively, cannon fodder troops to fight in that engagement. But there's like a history of North Korea in the movies. Totally. I mean, there's that famous story of the South Korean actress and her director husband who were kidnapped by North Korea. Yes. And forced to make films there. All right. Well, Chris, if North Korea didn't perpetrate the hack, which the FBI says that they did, so we're just entertaining possibilities here. But who was it? Option one, it was an inside job. A honeypot, if you will. Allegedly, even Amy Pascal entertained this theory in private, and there is some merit to it. The hackers knew exactly where to look for the most embarrassing and incriminating documents, and that took some acumen. It may be hard to believe that hackers from a completely isolated country like North Korea would have had the Hollywood know-how to know where the bodies were buried, but a disgruntled Sony employee would. The hack also occurred exactly as Pascal was renegotiating her deal. I find this one a little bit far-fetched. It just feels like massive lengths to go to, to, you know, take out the people you're pissed at. And also, again, there's one thing to hack and release embarrassing emails to then invoke September 11th. Yeah, I agree. I'm not buying it. Well, option two, and this is the one that I think is more interesting. Someone wanted to short the stock. Chris, could you explain what shorting a stock means? Sure. You're effectively making a bet that the stock is going to fall in price, and then you're going to pocket a profit based on that drop in stock price over a defined period of time. Right. So if that were the case and someone was trying to tank Sony's stock, they would have been successful in this event. Now, it's impossible to know whether the SEC investigated this because their investigations are private, but this type of thing has actually happened before. It is not impossible, and if someone had managed to pull this off, they would have made a shit ton of money because Sony stock did, in fact, take a massive hit during this. All of which is to say, we don't know, we're never going to know, but there are some people who are very close to this who certainly have a lot of questions about whether or not it really was North Korea that perpetrated this. Something Seth Rogan, I'm paraphrasing, but basically he was like, look, it's totally possible that somebody saw North Korea's reaction to the interview and then decided to pile on with this hack. Like, we know the reaction, the public reaction was real. I guess my point would simply be, people are, Dennis Rodman, I can't believe I'm trying to counter his argument here, but he's saying, why would they do it over a movie? Well, this is the first movie yes a movie had gone after kim jong-il for example perhaps even something had made fun of kim il-sung before that but you're in the third generation of a hereditarily transferred you know power in this country that is a cult of personality well and it's live action well it's live action and this is the first external threat from hollywood that kim jong-un has faced himself. We have not seen his reaction to something like this before. They are invoking him directly with another actor, and then they blow him up at the end of the movie. It does not seem far-fetched to me that he would have a very extreme reaction to that at all. All while privately and publicly tweeting that they hope it's going to topple his government. I agree with you. I think the simplest answer here is probably the correct one, and it probably was North Korea. I'm just saying, we don't know that for sure. And there are some people who know a lot more than we do that have a lot of questions about it. I mean, the true twist would be a year later, Kim Jong-un gets a present and it's from Dennis Rodman. And he says, I had your back the whole time. And Dennis Rodman was behind the hack because he had become a friend for life with Kim Jong-un. You got a friend for life. All right. Let's talk about the fallout and long-term impact for Sony. Their computer systems were massively damaged. Initial remediation and investigation costs reached over $15 million just in that third quarter. By February of 2015, that had climbed to $35 million. In February, Amy Pascal stepped down. As the co-chair of Sony Pictures, she was effectively pushed out. She founded her own production company, Pascal Pictures, which entered a first-look deal with Universal Pictures in 2019. She's fine. In October of 2015, Sony agreed to pay up to $8 million to settle a class action lawsuit that was filed by former employees because, again, many of their personal accounts and data were hacked as well. And estimates vary widely, but a Columbia University analysis put total damages at around $100 to $150 million for the Sony hack. That's not even including what they lost on the interview. That wraps up the coverage of the interview. Chris, what went right? We'll see if this episode ever airs or if we are hacked and our true selves are revealed. Please don't hack me. What went right? I'll say Randall Park, Diana Bang. I think Seth Rogen's fine in this movie. He's just, again, it's just a kind of standard performance. I like him more in some other stuff. So Randall Park, Diana Bang, like you said, they're not given much, but they do interesting things with the material that they're given. I like, like, Randall Park coming in as such a shy fanboy is very funny. I do think he does a good job of revealing his true short-tempered dictatorial self later in the film. And, yeah, I liked those. He does the best he can, for sure. Yeah, and, like, I think the production design is very impressive. I think the cinematography, I like the cinematography. There are a lot of elements I like in this movie. I just think, as we were talking about this more and more, It kind of made me realize, I feel like the problem is it's effectively Tropic Thunder, but Tropic Thunder hides behind a fake Southeast Asian rebel group, right? They don't want to. It's kind of the Khmer Rouge, I feel like, a little bit. But they're also skewering themselves. That's the thing that this movie is missing. The biggest target in Tropic Thunder is Hollywood at the end of the day. And we're going to cover that. I just feel like this movie, I don't know, maybe it's the time it came out. It just needed to be smarter. It needed to be, it needed to actually, if Seth Rogen believes what he's saying and that like the best this movie can accomplish is toppling into kiddorship and the worst is ending the world. I'm sorry, but you have to- It needed to be so much better. It needed to be better. Yeah. And also they could have done it. They've proven that they can do it. That's the thing. It's like, you're capable of that. All of the people involved in this. Everyone. Everyone is a really good writer. Everyone is smart. Everybody is capable of doing so much better. With the exception of James Franco, everyone is capable of doing so much better than the end result of this movie. James Franco, I think, we got his best. But my what went right, I guess I will give it to the cinematography and the VFX. I think the VFX in this movie look great and are very funny. The tiger looks great. The explosions look great. It has a lot of scope for a comedy. It does. It does. It has a lot of scope. I think that they very successfully used Vancouver and, you know, the blending into the B-roll and everything. They did a great job. So for all the below-the-line folks that worked on this, excellent work. I think, you know, the problem here comes down to the way that it's written, unfortunately. And it's not good enough to merit all of the trouble that it caused. But I would love to see a behind-the-scenes version of this story. Seth Rogen, you're in the perfect position to do this for an episode of the studio. Please, please, please examine your own work. All right. Thank you so much, Lizzie, for taking us into the deep mountain bunkers of the interview. The arguably dumbest piece of entertainment to ever spark an international crisis or come close to it. guys if you are enjoying this podcast there are just a few easy ways to support us you can tell a family member or friend hey this thing's pretty good you can leave a rating and review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to us on apple spotify etc make sure you are following us on that podcatcher hit subscribe or follow if you would like more episodes we now offer bonus episodes both through apple podcasts you can hit subscribe to get bonus reviews every month or through Patreon. Go to www.patreon.com slash whatwentwrongpodcast, and you will there get at least one bonus episode a month. We typically are reviewing more recently released films. We have an episode that we just did on 28 years later, The Bone Temple, and we have a bunch of really fun Oscars coverage coming up over the next few weeks. Again, if you do it through Patreon, you get an ad-free RSS feed. And if you're interested, for $50, you can get a full-stop Shout out just like one of these. Ryan Donahue, Half Greyhound, Lana LJ, Lydia Howes, Nate the Knife, Brooke, Blaze Ambrose, JJ Rapido, Kate Elrington, David Friscalanti, Rural Juh, Chris Zucca, MZodia, Film It Yourself, James McAvoy, Jose Amelano Salto del Giorgio, Ben Schindelman, Scott Oshida, Suzanne Johnson, Galen and Miguel, the Broken Glass Kids, the Provost Family, the O's sound like O's, Cameron Smith, Karina Canaba, Lazy Freddy, Jory Hillpiper, Amy Elgeschlager-McCoy, Evan Downey, Nathan Centeno, Felicia G, Angeline Renee Cook, Frankenstein, Mariposa's humans, there is no spoon. Jared pronounced again, full Greyhound. Mark Bertha, thank you. We love you guys. Thank you, Lizzie. Remind the folks at home, what do we have coming up next? We have something that is directly connected, I believe, to the Sony hack, and that is Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse. So Chris will explain to us how these two movies connect and where we go from here. We're very excited. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. Again, stick around later this month. We have a lot more bonus content coming your way. And until then, don't write down the terrible thoughts you have. Just keep them in your head. Don't put them in emails. We all have bad thoughts. We all have terrible, terrible thoughts. Just don't say them out loud. I can't read those yet. Go to patreon.com slash whatwentwrongpodcast to support whatwentwrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods. Thank you.