By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Errol Morris

I was, and I am, sympathetic. My son was really angry with me because I voted for Hillary in the Massachusetts primary. Why didn’t I vote for Bernie? My simple answer is I didn’t think Bernie was electable and I thought she was, which, I think, in retrospect, is a bad answer.

But you tell Bannon that you voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary because you were afraid of him, and Donald Trump.

was afraid of those people. Still I’m afraid of them. Really afraid. If you’re not afraid of them, you’re not really paying attention.

Bannon looks like he’s scored a point.

Maybe he even has, I don’t know. If you see some gigantic scorecard. It’s really not about point-scoring. Sorry.

In other interviews you’ve talked about not being interested in “confessions” from your subjects. The moment when you talked about voting for Clinton, it felt like you were confessing something.

It’s true. I mean, I was expressing my embarrassment. But it wasn’t made clear. It’s the embarrassment for not voting for Bernie. My producer, who was an ardent Hillary supporter, said, “You have to take that out. That’s wrong. You should not be embarrassed for voting for Hillary.”

But even if you are embarrassed—

Why confess it to him? Why not? I think one of the things that people really hate is that I’ve given him a kind of authority. Say that Bannon is laying down a bullshit narrative that, of course, puts Bannon at the center of his narrative. It’s the heroic Bannon. And instead of challenging this bullshit view—this would be the argument—I endorse it. I endorse it by cozying up to him in various ways. I endorse it by exhibiting my self-loathing, which, by the way, I have a harder and harder time of hiding, because it’s there in everything I do. Actually, it gives me a much clearer understanding of the hatred of my being embarrassed for voting for Hillary. I remember something raw about the whole experience of sitting there in front of him.

But here’s why you may hate me even more. It’s that I do buy into this bullshit. I buy into Bannon’s belief that he was the kingmaker. I don’t think people want to give him that.

~ Errol Morris

 

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon