Sean Penn is Angry and Hates Hollywood

By Power-trip on 2001-08-28 18:04:36

EDINBURGH, Scotland (Reuters) - Former movie bad-boy turned respected director Sean Penn is still an angry man -- but now he vents his ire on an apathetic Hollywood and corporatized America rather than the paparazzi who have dogged him over the years.

Penn, in Scotland Thursday for the British premiere of his latest film "The Pledge," said time was ripe for a cultural revolution to shake his home country off its couch -- only most Americans have lost any stomach for a fight, he moaned.

"I don't think people value the idea of revolution anymore," Penn told reporters. "It would be an enormously patriotic movement that invested in the possibility of a revolution."

Instead, he welcomed recent anti-globalization protests at world leaders' summits in Seattle and Genoa as evidence that some young people were still thinking for themselves and were prepared to stand up for change.

"There's a lot of things happening around the world," Penn said. "You've got a lot of young people putting themselves on the line... They've got a kind of unified interest in humanity at large and that's one of the best things to have."

Now a 41-year-old father of two with wife Robin Wright Penn, Penn is hailed as one of the best actor/directors of his generation, and has come a long way from the reporter-bashing husband of pop megastar Madonna (news - web sites) from whom he split in 1989.

His latest film, "The Pledge," a spine-tingling thriller set in Nevada, is typical of his stance on the edges of the Hollywood system.

The film tells of lonely murder detective Jerry Black, played by Jack Nicholson, who reaches retirement on the day the mutilated body of a young girl is found in the icy mountains.

Its almost unbearable tension has won Penn critical acclaim, but little box office success -- a fact he shrugs off.

"In Hollywood ... there's a sense that if you put three thoughts in a movie, then you've broken the law and nobody will come," he said.

"The American audience is very interested in being comfortable, so I was very happy to go out there and take a few people by surprise," he said.

Rebelling against the power of the box office buck he has nothing but contempt for Hollywood directors who churn out formulaic pictures with no eye on artistic or intellectual value.

"There's a constant beating of anything that doesn't serve the bank," Penn said.

And will the modern-day movie Daniel ever break his lifelong promise never to enter the lion's den of an Oscar ceremony? Unlikely.

"I wouldn't treat as insult or compliment anything that happens in that building," said Penn, who received Oscar nominations for "Dead Man Walking" and "Sweet and Lowdown."

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