Peter Sellars; Sony's hack culprits; the movie year-in-review

I was all over the place, but a lot in Berlin, a lot in New York, and a whole lot in Russia, and various corners of Canada. I’m just coming from New York where I’m rehearsing with 20 young African-American flex dancers from Brooklyn, making a big show about juvenile justice, solitary confinement of young people and incorrect policing. And that’s with these amazing, brilliant inspired young bodies.

Well it’s one of those interesting things. Flex is an art form, it’s the next thing after krumping, which I think people in L.A. know a bit about because part of its origins are here. Street kids who know they are carrying a lot of violence and anger with them started making a dance form to release the toxins because they know, not only does it poison other people, it poisons themselves.

Well, yes. Flexing has been going on for 10 years in Brooklyn. And it’s on YouTube now and it adds to krumping — this Michael Jackson-cool gliding, but also morphing. If you’re a young African-American man [trying] to survive, you’ve got to be able to flex, morph, change — be creative with your identity. And so that’s exactly what the art form is — their own [computer-generated imagery] in their bodies and it’s pretty breathtaking. And we made our first workshops in August, during [the Michael Brown incident in] Ferguson and just a few days after the Eric Garner chokehold [death]. So, it’s the DNA of the popular protests and uprisings — they are moving across the country — in this piece. When you see it, minus rhetoric, but just people’s bodies, it takes you way deep.

I was making — believe it or not — the story of the first contact of Europe and the new world [titled "The Indian Queen"]. It was the Spanish meeting the Mayans, but through the eyes of women. Music written in 1695 in London by Henry Purcell when he was 35 years old. The text is from a novel in the '80s, written by one of my favorite Nicaraguan novelists, Luisa Aguilar. She was trying to imagine, look for, the first accounts of the conquista by women and she looked everywhere, didn’t find any, so she wrote them herself. It’s one of those great acts of Latin American novel writing, [which] is to completely re-imagine history for the first time because, in fact, the history that happened was insufficiently imagined at the time it occurred.

Well, the bizarre thing was this conductor in Russia was obsessed as I am with this material. And of course we went to from the Mayan shamans — who we’re putting on stage — to the Siberian shamans, who were all located in the Euro mountains, and so we had amazing shaman activity. And the connections of the stories ... we’re obviously using big tanks and modern weaponry because it’s about the death squads moving into the plains of Chiapas and this ongoing struggle of indigenous people versus armies that continue to come in through those villages. So it was all told completely up-to-date in terms that would be recognizable.

That was produced in Perm, Russia and then we did it in Madrid, which was quite intense. We did it in the Teatro Real, the royal theater, opposite the royal palace, where Franco addressed his population. And yes, we had a lot of stormy evenings because telling that story in Madrid in the royal theater was quite intense.

That piece is going on in London in the next six weeks. Then we have to get here to Los Angeles. Because the sets are by [L.A. artist] Gronk. The sets were all painted here in Los Angeles and shipped to Russia, shipped to Madrid, and shipped to London. The only place that hasn’t seen it is, of course, Los Angeles.

I think it’s fair to say [he's] one of the key figures of the generation who invented the Chicano art movement ... a real absolute maverick visionary with a wicked sense of humor and a blazing sense of justice.

I’ve been teaching for 25 years as a professor of world arts and cultures. And the chancellor said, "Would you like really create some kind of institute that kind of gathers all this and deepens it?’" And, of course, the short answer was, "Yes, I would." That’s what we’re underway with. It’s called The Boethius Initiative. And basically it’s gathering artists and scholars and activists to work together in periods of three-to-five years around certain topics, like immigration. It’s incredible that in a country that is so based on immigration, we’re not allowed to use the word anymore and the entire conversation has been wildly highjacked.

We’re taking on juvenile justice, we’re taking on a lot of topics that, again, have been in the political sphere [but] quite deliberately misrepresented. And I think one of the issues with a public university like UCLA is that so much of the academic work of the last generation or so has deliberately been couched in impenetrable language, which means a lot of the breakthrough research of the last generation has yet to reach the voting public. And so, again, with a playbook that is 50 years out-of-date, how do you get the results of this research translated into a form that the public can grasp really readily and with their gut. How is this research translated into words, images, films, music that are suddenly graspable and become, in the Woody Guthrie tradition, suddenly part of people’s consciousness — not just people with advanced degrees, but day-to-day working people in this country. How can we put our own history back within reach? 

It remains one of the most complicated things Hollywood has to tackle. For every success like "12 Years a Slave," there is the issue that Lupita Nyong'o [who won the Best Supporting Oscar for that film] has not booked a sizable live-action role that we know of that we're going to see in the next year. And I think if it would have been a beautiful white actress who'd done that, she would have been offered every project under the sun. 



So you've got to admire a filmmaker like J.J. Abrams, who really stuck to his guns to cast the actor John Boyega, who's black, as the lead of his new "Star Wars" movie. We need more progress like that, we need more people who are willing to take risks and we need talented and smart people who are willing to put their necks out and say, Sorry, this is the way it's going to be. That's the only real way we can affect change.  

I think things are getting better on the blockbuster front, but you look at films like "The Hunger Games," "Divergent," "Twilight" —  all blockbuster successes with female leads, but movies that were based on books originally. Hollywood needed to be forced into making these movies that had female heroines to realize that maybe they should actually start adding major, significant, awesome female characters to most of their movies. 

One of the films I'm looking forward to is "Inside Out," that's Pixar's new movie. Pixar has lately been a sequel generating company, but this seems like a return to form. It's the story of a young girl whose emotions inside her head are voiced by people like Mindy Kaling, Amy Poehler, Bill Hader — all sort of jockeying for control as she goes through adolescence. It's the sort of creative concept that, I think, made us all fall in love with Pixar. 



I would be lying if I said — for all the sort of franchise-bashing that I've just been doing — that I wasn't looking forward to "Mad Max: Fury Road." This is a reboot of the "Mad Max" franchise with Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron. The trailer is bananas! It's amazing-looking action, very practical looking, too. So even though it is a franchise, it sort of stands apart from a lot of the other cash grabs that we've got going on right now. 

Usually whenever there's a large hack like this, a lot of cyber-security companies want to try to figure out what happened — partly because they're curious, but also they want to try to find out more about the way that hackers work, especially when it's a very major hack. I suspect that's what Norse did in this case. They started looking at this and there were some initial pointers to previous employees and it looks like they just went down that route. 

It's difficult to comment on the FBI's findings because I don't think we know all of the evidence they have. But we can quite easily say that based on what the FBI has made public, the evidence is quite circumstantial towards North Korean involvement. Now, of course, it might be that the government has a lot more information that they haven't made public. Right when this hack started, the first message that came from the hackers did talk about things like restructuring at Sony. There were many pointers towards this being someone that either worked at the company or used to work at the company. The subject of "The Interview" and of North Korea didn't really come up until about two or three weeks into this, at least from a hacker's side of things. So that's always been something that's been a little bit of a doubt towards North Korean involvement. 

There's a lot we don't know about the North Korean hacking program. The little pieces of information we are told, it appears to be there are several thousand of them. They have been implicated in different hacks on South Korea, but, so far, a lot the analysis of the hacks they have been implicated in points to them being relatively unsophisticated on a technical level. There were some things about this hack that were very different from previous actions that North Korea has been blamed for. For example: the messages to the media, the messages put online that taunt the FBI — North Korea has never done anything like that before. That is much more like some of these activist-hacker groups that we've heard of in the last year, groups like Anonymous that have been in the headlines. So, it could quite well be that there is a separate group involved in this as well, perhaps in collaboration with North Korea.