Amy Pascal, the embattled former Sony Pictures chair, has given a candid interview about the hack on the company that saw unreleased films posted online, terror threats made against cinemas planning to show The Interview, and Pascal’s embarrassing personal emails made public.
Speaking to Tina Brown on stage in San Francisco, Pascal described her feelings on discovering that her emails had been distributed online. “As a woman, what I did was control how everybody felt about themselves and about me… and there was this horrible moment when I realised there was absolutely nothing I could do about whether I’d hurt people, whether I’d betrayed people,” she continued. “I couldn’t protect anyone… It was horrible because that’s how I did my job.
“I ran this company and I had to worry about everybody who was really scared… People were really scared.”
One set of emails between Pascal and producer Scott Rudin featured attacks on Angelina Jolie, while another saw the pair joking about Barack Obama’s taste in movies, suggesting he would like movies with black leads and themes like The Butler, Think Like a Man and Django Unchained. Amid outrage, Pascal apologised, saying: “The content of my emails to Scott were insensitive and inappropriate but are not an accurate reflection of who I am.” She later met with civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton, and promised to work on a taskforce to ensure diversity in the film industry.
“They accused you of being a racist,” Brown said to Pascal, who replied: “It was horrible. That was horrible.” Pascal admitted though that having the information in the public eye was “strangely freeing”.
Of the emails where Rudin called Jolie a “minimally talented spoiled brat” with “insanity and rampaging ego”, Pascal said “Angie didn’t care”. Though there was some contempt for the very stars Pascal used to shepherd. “They’re bottomless pits of need. You’ve never seen anything like it,” she said, adding sarcastically: “They are so great. They’re this magical thing that no one else can be. They’re filled with the need to be loved … but that’s because they’re magical.”
In leaked payroll data, female actors were shown to be making less money than male ones. Responding to this, Pascal said: “Women shouldn’t work for less money. They should know what they’re worth. Women shouldn’t take less. ‘Stop, you don’t need the job that bad’.”
Following the hack in November 2014, Pascal left Sony in January, saying: “I have spent almost my entire professional life at Sony Pictures and I am energised to be starting this new chapter based at the company I call home.” She is instead starting “a new production venture” backed by the company, with a host of high-profile projects already lined up: the reboots of Ghostbusters and Spider-Man as well as a live-action Barbie film, a Little Women adaptation and Angelina Jolie’s Cleopatra movie, the subject of the aforementioned screed from Rudin.
