'The Interview' revenue; J.C. Chandor's 'A Most Violent Year'; David Lynch's artwork

Yeah, considering the unusual circumstances, it’s pretty good — bordering on great. There was a point where you had none of the major theater chains showing it, so Sony had to make a deal with 331 independently-owned theaters, many of which have smaller theaters than the big guys. So, getting close to $20 million is a good start.



We’re talking about grosses here. For theatrical releases, studios typically split the box office 50/50 with theater owners. Is that also true for the online platforms?

I believe that Sony gets more than that 50 percent split, but it’s unclear especially because this is such a strange circumstance. I don’t know what the specifics are of the deal between Sony and Google. You know, Google [YouTube] and Microsoft [X-Box] are the two online stores who released the movie at first. They kind of stuck their neck out, [so] they may have asked for a more favorable split.

Sony’s cost is $70 to $80 million. It was a $44 million production budget and then the marketing could be anywhere from $25 to $40 million. There’s little chance that Sony makes its money back on this. People assume that they will lose money on it, but perhaps not as much as we all thought a week ago.

Yeah, in many respects for the top executives at Sony, they don’t get criticized as much because they actually managed to get the movie out there and they will not have to lose as much [revenue]. They will still lose a lot of money in having to reset their computer systems and pay for a lot of their employees’ security and settle potential lawsuits. So the cost of the hack will be really high, but the cost of the particular movie has gone down a bit.

It may encourage people to experiment. It shows that if you have built a lot of interest in a movie that you can make some money selling it online, especially since it’s only available on only three outlets. I don’t think this will influence the release of "The Avengers" or "Star Wars" – no studio is going to do that because you make a lot more money if people pay to see it in theaters than they pay online.

Yeah, once you put something online, especially because they didn’t work out a strategy for the movie overseas, there was no way of controlling it. In an ideal scenario, if you were going to do this, you’d make it available for rent or purchase in a bunch of other countries outside of the U.S. as well. They didn’t have time to work that in this case. A lot of this piracy does happen in other countries.

I've decided to put this couple that's at the heart of the film — a husband and wife who run a business together — but [what] the title refers to is that it's their most violent year. It's their experience in this time. I'm a big fan of Quentin Tarantino movies and the like, but this is a movie that plays on your own bloodlust. This is by no means a spaghetti western. 

Most people who reach real success don't kill people — not to be too cute about it — but what I'm trying to do in the film is really play off the fear, which is really the most wide-reaching byproduct of violence. There's the horrible act at the core and then these waves kind of go out. But as those waves go out, they start to affect this massive population, especially in a place like New York.



What these two are doing is sort of altering their path of what they would normally do under normal circumstances. And a lot of that is not always rational, but it doesn't mean that you don't start steering a civilization or city in an entirely different direction. I'm playing off your expectations, obviously, and hopefully still giving you the emotional kind of fun — that's the wrong word — but the thrill that you would [get] from a classic gangster film. 

The simplest way to put it is, in 1981 — in that world — all of these gangster films of that period literally affected the way people did business and dressed. Just like my father always said after the movie "Wall Street" came out, everyone on his trading floor starting dressing differently because of the movie. Actually, I think Oliver Stone is still upset that people wanted to emulate his villain.



But look, it's a fact that movies affect the way people act and dress and, in a way, I think Oscar certainly has made this character his own. And once you see the movie, you realize what we're playing off against, but it's also just absolutely what that man at that time in that period, from that cultural background, would have dressed like. It's someone who's very formal and wants to present this suit of armor to the world — those '80s power suits with the huge shoulders and everything were designed to come into the room and that's certainly what we're trying to do with the film. 

My characters — all of them throughout the three films I've made — I think are normal people [who] just kind of want to keep going with what they're doing. And because of these outside forces, whatever they may be, [the characters] are tested. You know, I'm a pragmatist, too, and to get people off of their couch and go to a movie theater in this day-and-age takes something that has to be somewhat heightened — really give them an event so that those two hours or three hours that it takes to get there and get home are a worthwhile journey.