Man of the Year Poster
Williams Talks Man of the Year Satire
“I just wanted to talk about the whole system,” said star Robin Williams. “How is it working? Is everyone happy with the way things are? As a comic, as you see with all these guys like Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Colbert, all they’re doing is basically just saying, ‘Here’s the absurdity.’ And people laugh and yet it still goes on. You can look at any given day and go, ‘That’s insane.’ And I think Barry [Levinson]’s pointed out that it’s very easy to be cynical right now because it’s hard to top what’s been going down.”
Filmmaker Levinson has tackled politics before, but even less than a decade has brought a very different climate within which to work. “Wag the Dog was in a more innocent time in a way,” he said. “It was in a less cynical time in that regard compared to where we are now. We’re in a much darker period, a much more cynical period, so therefore you have to find a movie that’s going to work in another place because if we’re going to just simply rehash what’s out there, and it’s so crazy and absurdist, you can’t go that way. You can’t top that. So therefore we had to find another place and that’s where this movie falls in a sense is in a different time and place than, say, where Wag the Dog was in the ‘90s.”
Costar Laura Linney knows what she wants in a political satire. “I think you want freedom, at least I want when I’m watching something,” she said. “If you’re watching satire you want your mind to be freed up, you want some sort of release of a situation that feels suffocating or feels predictable. You want release. You want freedom from the predictable. Not being afraid of going too far in any one direction and then having it all balance, and that’s where Barry is amazing. I think [satirists] do affect change, clearly. Someone’s making a movie about it. It’s important that people can go back and read Mark Twain and see what was happening then. It’s documentation in a way. The comics do document what is cultural history.”
Man of the Year represents the new millennium this Friday, October 13th.
For the trailer, TV spots, synopsis and more movie info, go to the Man of the Year Movie Page.
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