Sean Penn

Interview, Oct, 1995 by Graham Fuller

GF: Do you feel unrest?

SP: Sure, I feel unrest, but I feel more and more comfortable with it.

GF: I told one or two people that I was going to be interviewing you, and they said, "Oh, he's such a rebel." What do you think about that?

SP: Rebel is just as bad a word as maturity. It's a word I associate with James Dean and dying at twenty-four. I'll be thirty-five years old tomorrow, and I'm going to keep going. Rebels seem like a romantic notion to me, and I'd like to keep romance between me and a woman.

GF: Does a label like rebel offend you?

SP: Nope. I don't get offended by too much. It's O.K. The way it's intended sometimes, you can't help but get a little giggle out of it. It's just semantics, really. [pauses] I like the public perception of me that makes people a little bit too scared to come to the table when I'm out having dinner. I don't mind that. Bukowski said, "I know I'm good, so I like that people think I'm bad, because it gives me a dimension, effortlessly."

GF: But don't you then have to live up to the reputation?

SP: No. Reputations are maintained by the outside world, and they're created by it, too, by and large. And they serve as a hell of a device for privacy, because the more people look for something that's not there, the less chance they have of violating who you are. It's like going out there with a mask on, without having to exercise you're upper body to put it on.

GF: What are your feelings these days about the media?

SP: I think it's a pollutant. I live in a twenty-seven-and-a-half-foot Airstream trailer in fifty acres of mountain canyon. You don't hear a human sound. In a trailer like that, you can only have a TV set so big. It's not the kind of TV that makes you want to sit back and fall asleep watching some dumb thing. I use it to look at my dailies or maybe to catch the news when I see smoke ten miles away, to find out if my house is burning down. But that other TV stuff I don't have in my life that much anymore. I don't read newspapers too much either, just because they tend to make me feel I have a political obligation that I think is a distraction from what my political offerings are going to be if I just make my movies. Then, as far as airport reading goes - Entertainment [Weekly] magazine, Time magazine, whatever it is - the message they give is that the mass's opinion is always right. It's exploitive, it's unthoughtful, but it's not just the media that's responsible: It's in harmony with the culture and the so-called arts. Movies are unthoughtful, music's unthoughtful. But there are great exceptions. There's an exception sitting right there. [indicates a CD by Jewel on the hotel room table]

GF: Do you see yourself as a different guy from what you were ten years ago?

SP: I'm a little bit more sober. I've got two kids now, and that changes things. But no. I don't see myself as a different guy than I was thirty years ago. I don't have aspirations to be. It's really about where you're putting your energies. That's changing a lot. GF: In what ways?