The world is filled with terrible things that can influence children, and movies have depicted them since time immemorial. Should every terrible thing warrant an R-rating?
Hey, if I had my choice for social engineering, I'd declare an automatic R-rating for any movie that depicts television commercials. There's a truly dangerous influence on our children.
After I graduated from Brandeis, I took all the money I had in the world, which was $5,000, and I made a short film. I made every mistake you could possibly make. It was a total disaster as a piece of work, and yet, you know, it was ambitious in some way.
For reasons we don't have to get into, climate change has become an incredibly polarized issue in the United States. I think that is sad. My own personal view is that we're in a planetary emergency such has not been seen in 600,000 years.
If there is a public perception at all, they see the producer as a big old guy who smokes a cigar and has lots of money and lots of power. That's not what a producer is and, if it ever was what a producer was, it certainly hasn't been for a long time.
Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government.
