I’m a pretty good artist. I didn’t get to be an artist for the last 18 years. I started out drawing, drawing. It was fun, but didn’t feel quite right. So I dropped out. I started writing in magazines, and that was like fun. But then I got into filmmaking, and the whole dream was coming true. So here we are now, doing “The Interview,” and I don’t know what life would be like if I wasn’t doing that.
You’ve been a journalist for three decades. What is a journalist, specifically, really like?
It’s hard to define a journalist because the term itself is a bit vague, so my definition is “a person who can report on politics, economics, or pop culture from a source outside a specific institution.” Sometimes it’s journalists working outside organizations like The New York Times and NPR. Sometimes it’s reporters working in newsrooms because they’re in the business of writing. Sometimes it’s freelancers who do not have to make a salary — they just want coverage. It’s really tricky because you don’t know which one you’re talking about when you say “journalist.”
But in general, it’s an unpaid job, basically; basically there’s a story to tell. It involves journalism, but at the same time it involves reporting and writing, and a lot of it is just being a journalist is not a job that I enjoyed as much as I enjoyed being a writer. That’s why I ended up doing something else that I really enjoyed: working in TV, music, sports, and news. That was my life as an activist, because it was something I could do.
I was always a writer, never a journalist. But I always loved writing, so the idea of “getting a job” kind of appealed to me, even more than, say, doing another book deal.
I got this idea in 2012 that the reason that The New York Times didn’t hire reporters in the 1990s after it had hired so many people was because it wanted to have the best of both worlds: It had the highest quality of reporting, but some editorial control so it wouldn’t have to be beholden to the whims of its board. This was pretty intuitive.
But I also realized that we hadn’t had a free press in the United States since the founding of the United States. We had really strong executive-branch branches that were independent. The reason I started my own business and writing as
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