Sean Penn has an intense new interview with The Telegraph. It’s always interesting to see how the “good” British press outlets treat American stars, and how those Americans treat British journalists. What I’ve noticed is that British outlets are more quick to point out when an American star is being coddled by publicists, managers and the like, and the journalists will often say outright “his publicist told me not to ask this or that.” That happens a few times in this Penn interview, although Penn ends up talking about what he wants to talk about, and I have to think he went off-message several times. He’s still promoting The Gunman, which did not receive great reviews. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

His cigarettes: “I quit while I was doing the movie. You can’t do that stuff and smoke a lot of cigarettes.” Why did he start again? “It’s a beast. A stupid beast. You quit and have a hole in your life. Missing it. That’s the trap.”

His gun collection: “I never had a gun collection. I did, though, amass, for a period of time, what amounted to a gun collection. But ‘collection’ insinuates you are a collector, whereas in my case I had either purchased them for particular movie projects or inherited then from my younger brother, who has passed. [Chris Penn] had a number of weapons. I ended up with a lot of those but, about a year ago, I gave them all away.”

Whether The Gunman promotes violence: “I don’t think you can put something on a 40ft-wide screen with Dolby stereo and not be stimulated by it, whatever it is, a car going fast, a weapon firing. The only obligation of the film-maker is to show that there is a price to pay for violence. If it excites people in a negative way then I think that’s in the audience, not in the presentation.’

He’s watched all of the ISIL beheading videos: “Uh-huh. I’ve watched them. And anyone who sees them and claims that they were anaesthetized by violent movies, that they weren’t horrified by what they saw, on the most primal level, is intellectually dishonest or existentially unpresent.”

His thoughts on Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper: “Here’s the thing. I don’t see the same problems with it [as others do], not because of my relationship with Clint. I don’t see the glorification. I probably go into a zone when it comes to military films, where I am assessing the technical aspects of the film-making more than the political message. Clint and I have had some political discussions and he is a committed libertarian. I don’t think he is by any means a conventional Republican.”

[From The Telegraph]

I like how he nitpicks about his “gun collection” – he never collected, y’all. He amassed. He was a gun amasser. As for Penn’s admission that he watches all of the ISIL beheading videos… I know what he’s getting at and it actually makes sense in the context of the conversation he’s having with this interviewer about violence and whether we become anaesthetized to it, but I still don’t know how anyone could really seek out those videos and watch them all the way through. Just the clips they show on the news are horrifying enough. But I guess that’s the point Penn is trying to make – those videos still have the power to horrify. So we are not desensitized to violence.

Photos courtesy of WENN.