Former Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton has revealed in a new memoir that greenlighting the 2014 Seth Rogen-James Franco comedy The Interview about a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was “the biggest mistake of my career”.
Writing in From Mistakes To Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn’t Own You, which was co-written by Joshua L. Steiner and is published out next week, Lynton recalled events when he hastily agreed to make the film.
Under pressure to land the project ahead of rival studio Universal Pictures, which had a relationship with Rogen, and fired up by a late 2013 table-read when Sony’s then co-chairperson head Amy Pascal advocated for the film, Lynton said he forsook his usual protocols.
“Walking into the room, I immediately felt energized and simultaneously completely out of place,” Lynton wrote. “Although middle-aged, I had not lost the observational skills I’d learned in middle school: I could quickly identify the cool kids and the ones eager for their approval.”
He continued, “When the reading was over, Amy jumped up and said, ‘Let’s make this!’ I threw out all of our normal, careful approval processes and found myself agreeing. We rushed into the decision giddy about the project, thrilled to have outflanked our competition at Universal Studios and, alas, oblivious to the potential ramifications.”
North Korea threatened to take action against the United States when it heard about the project, which was directed by Rogen and Evan Goldberg and also starred Randall Park as Kim. Lynton decided to postpone the release from October 10 to December 25 2014 and had the film re-cut. Lynton has said he tried to rein in the film twice and on both occasions Rogen and Goldberg refused and the studio stuck behind them.
All this was not enough to assuage the North Koreans and in November 2014 Sony’s infrastructure was hacked by a group with alleged ties to the regime. In the ensuing data dump, stolen personal records, salary details and medical records of thousands of Sony staffers were published, along with damning internal emails in which former super producer Scott Rudin insulted Angelina Jolie, and Rudin and Pascal made racially insensitive remarks about the sitting US president Barack Obama.
The FBI launched an investigation, and when cinema chains refused to carry The Interview, Sony made it available to rent or buy on digital platforms on December 24 before a limited release the following day. The film went on to earn a little over $6m in North America and around $11.8m at the worldwide box office.
Pascal resigned from the studio in February 2015, and several months later Lynton spoke to Obama about the scandal. ”Unsurprisingly,” Lynton wrote, “he asked the right question: ‘What were you thinking when you made killing the leader of a hostile foreign nation a plot point? Of course that was a mistake.’ The mistake? My decision to greenlight a project on the fly.”
Lynton concluded, “Now I have come to believe that the whole affair neither began with that ill-fated table read nor ended with my buried feelings. It ultimately came down to a basic human truth: our desire to belong leads us all to weigh heavily the opinions of others.”
The executive left Sony in 2017 and currently serves as chairman of Snap.
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