Sean Penn Interview

Academy Award-winner Sean Penn talks about his portrayal of slain gay politician Harvey Milk.

Buzzine: Why did you choose to do Milk? Why did you get involved?

Sean Penn: Any actor would be glad to work with [director] Gus Van Sant, and then reading Lance Black’s sensational script, and then on top of that the particular values of the story and that [Harvey] Milk’s life had — those were the initial things that drew me in.

B: How did you prepare for the role, and how did you go about capturing Milk’s mannerisms?

SP: The documentary –The Times of Harvey Milk – and all of its archival footage was very helpful. The best way to use that is just to watch it a lot, the same way you’d play music all day in the background — not necessarily thinking about it, but just having it on all the time, and over a period of time, the synapses start to connect. The most exciting version of Harvey Milk to me was Harvey Milk. If you’ve seen the documentary, you know that the guy is the movie star of that documentary. He is an electric, warm guy. Still, you can just reach and reach and reach and never quite get it all in there. So between myself and the director and the screenwriter, and all of the other folks working on the movie, we can just try and get his spirit out there the best we can.

B: Since you gave such a seamless performance, did Harvey stay with you while you were playing him and seep into your daily life? Has he changed you as a person?

SP: The answer is that he did stay with me. How, I’m not entirely sure — I haven’t given it a lot of thought. When something comes in that you become aware that it’s there, you think, “Oh, don’t go away.”
In terms of humanity, one likes to think that with each day and each person that comes into your life directly or indirectly, there’s some growth of some kind, hopefully, in a positive direction.
Certainly with [Harvey], there would have been, but I can’t identify it. In a very immediate way, there’s a lot of…let’s say timeliness to this story that we’ve all been hearing about, in reference to the recent experience that we’ve had. But I can’t be more specific than that.

B: Did you recognize him as affecting you in your daily life as you are playing him?

SP: No. My daily life consists of getting up at 6:00 in the morning, making sure I’ve got my words together, that my kids got off to school or [that they] are going to wake up in time if I leave for work before them, and then I’m at work all day. Then I’m exhausted going home and learning a bunch of lines for the next day. So I don’t know if I had a daily life other than what’s on the screen.

B: With the Prop 8 decision that rescinded gay marriage in California in November 2008, the gay movement has become a new issue for civil rights advocates. Can this movie charge reaction and stimulate a response that it might get people to be more conscious of the issues that are well-defined in the film?

SP: It’s only an issue because of ignorance in the first place. We don’t have an excuse of being ignorant of the law. In fact, any support of Proposition 8 would be minimally manslaughter, because no human should [judge] teenage boys who are going to hang themselves [because] they reach out for an identity that they can’t have, in part because of things like “issues” like this — the whole history of any civil rights movement has had a problem [with words like "marriage"]. So as long as it’s an issue, it’s an obscenity. If this movie is part of an engine that can help reveal that, [then] that’s going to make all of us really happy and proud.

B: Since November 4th, there has been an escalation of tension and discord between the gay and “faith” communities. How did that impact the performance of the film at the box office, for even an ostensibly sympathetic figure like Harvey Milk, we were seeing such raw hatred against gay people every day on the streets and in the press.

SP: The tension is not between the gay and the faith communities. The tension is between the community which in fact really is gay, and a pseudo-faith community which has nothing to do with God, love, or anything of real “faith,” and it’s really just hypocrisy and hatred.

B: Could you comment on the parallels between Harvey Milk and president-elect Barack Obama, in terms of being galvanizing figures and the parallels between their two campaigns, the platform of hope, etc.?

SP: Well, I think that’s the first thing that hits any of us, I guess, is “hope” — to use the word. At that moment in time, relative to the gay community of San Francisco that he was running to represent, it was such a necessary part of what he was offering. Similarly, today, for the whole world in every issue, anything that represents hope might be our last shot at it. So there are those obvious parallels.

B: You made the sexuality shown in the movie really successful; it was so nonchalant and casual that it was really effective. It seemed natural and interwoven into the story so that the audience didn’t really think about it.

SP: Well, [gay activist] Cleve Jones said something really great. Early on, we had put together a dinner for a lot of the people that had been involved in Harvey’s campaign. He said one of the myths is that we’re all just the same, it’s just the sex that’s different. He said, “In reality, we’re very different. It’s just the sex that’s pretty much the same.” The difference, of course, is living with bigotry and oppression and all of that shit. And that was where the focus went. The rest of it is, for some people, a guy gives them a boner; for somebody else, it’s a woman. So it was an approach — the sex is the sex is the sex is the sex, but the other part was really the heart of the picture.

B: Do you have any thoughts on how the world might have been a different place if Harvey Milk hadn’t been assassinated?

SP: I think less people would have died of AIDS. I think Ronald Reagan would have been forced to address it. It was a tragic loss. He wouldn’t have stood quietly. He was a leader, and he happened to be focused on the gay movement. There was a popular notion initially that this was a “gay disease.” Certainly a huge number of homosexuals died related to it and all that. I think he would have advanced that argument a lot sooner. People are dead because he died too soon.

B: Will this, as the expression goes, “Play in Peoria?” This isn’t La Cage Aux Folles. Will straight audiences — straight men in particular — feel queasy seeing Milk?

SP: The one gay guy in Peoria can’t wait for this movie. [Laughs]