Wind the clock back just over a decade ago and an incredibly controversial movie was arriving in cinemas a few months later.
When movies are controversial it’s normally because they contain particularly explicit content, not because they result in a country declaring that releasing the film would be the ‘most blatant act of terrorism and war’.
The movie in question is The Interview, which stars Seth Rogen and James Franco as a producer and interviewer who arrange an interview with North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un (Randall Park).
In the interview, which drives the plot of The Interview, Kim Jong Un breaks down crying, s**ts himself and promises to launch North Korea’s nuclear weapons against the world.
However, he gets blown to bits by his own tank, commandeered by the movie’s protagonists – and you can imagine why the famously tetchy nation of North Korea was not happy with the film.
The nation promised there would be ‘stern’ and ‘merciless’ retribution if the movie mocking their leader was released, especially as the film depicts Kim being killed on camera by an exceedingly phallic tank shell.
Their ambassador to the United Nations said that distributing the film would be an ‘act of war’, and North Korea called on US president Barack Obama to stop The Interview.
For a while there in 2014, The Interview was the most notorious film in the world, and the release date in October was booted back to the end of December, while they made some changes.
In November, Sony ended up getting hacked by a group who demanded that they not broadcast ‘the movie of terrorism’, with further threats made against cinemas if they showed The Interview.
All in all, it was a pretty crazy time, and years later when he appeared on Hawk vs Wolf, Seth Rogen was asked what impact the film had on his career.
Tony Hawk (yes, that one) asked him whether the reaction to The Interview still affects his career these days.
“I don’t know, honestly, I don’t know. Not in a tangible way, we were able to keep making movies,” Rogen said as Hawk pointed out that the movie did eventually get released.
“They did release it, what’s crazy is now on television, it’ll be on FX at 2pm, like that’s what’s crazy. It was at one point the most controversial thing in the world and now I’ll be flipping channels on a Sunday afternoon and be like ‘oh, it’s The Interview‘.
“I was worried maybe it would cause some longer lasting fallout than it did. At the time it was really bad and really catastrophic, people were getting fired over it. People we know were getting fired over it. The head of the studio got fired essentially because of it.
“It really caused seismic shifts in Hollywood at the time and I think how things, how business was done in some ways, it actually kind of showed the success a movie can have in some ways if it has a full theatrical campaign and goes directly to streaming.
“It streamed on Google and I think it’s still the biggest movie that ever streamed on Google, which is crazy.
“So it did a lot of things that I think the fallout will still… students come up to me and they’re like ‘they’re teaching me about it in my university class’, it’s wild.
“It really recalibrated what I considered to be controversial, which is good. I think as a comedian a lot of people like to think they’re embroiled in some sort of controversy and after that I was like ‘now I know what it’s like’.
“Unless the president is giving news conferences about it, it’s not really a controversy. Some people getting mad about something on social media, that’s not controversy. Having the UN have to make a statement about it, that’s a controversy.”
These days, The Interview is readily available to stream on Netflix. Not bad for a film which at one point looked like it might end the world.
