Brazilian author Paulo Coelho offers to pay Sony US$100,000 for rights to The Interview
PUBLISHED : Friday, 19 December, 2014, 10:50pm
UPDATED : Friday, 19 December, 2014, 10:50pm
Agence France-Presse in Brasilia
Brazilian author Paulo Coelho offers to pay Sony US$100,000 for rights to The Interview
Brazilian author Paulo Coelho has offered to pay Sony US$100,000 for rights to The Interview, protesting the company's decision to scrap the North Korean parody film amid threats from hackers.
Sony Pictures cancelled the December 25 release of the film with Seth Rogen and James Franco after major theatre chains in the United States and Canada said they would not screen the comedy in which two television journalists are recruited to assassinate the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who is played in the movie by Randall Park.
Skittishness about attending the movie followed threats by a hacking group calling itself GOP (Guardians of Peace), which invoked the September 11 attacks in a warning to people planning to see the film. Sony's decision sparked protest from free speech advocates and foreign policy hawks.
"I offer SonyPictures 100k for the rights of The Interview I will post it free on my blog. Pls get in touch with me via SonyPicturesBr," Coelho wrote on his Twitter account.
He later added: "Offer to SonyPictures stands till Fri 12:00 AM. You recover 0.01% of the budget, & I can say NO to terrorist threats."
The author of The Alchemist told Brazil newspaper O Globo the cancelled release "set a terrible precedent".
"It's a threat that works. It's like the terrorists win," he said, likening the move to when British-Indian author Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was burned and banned in Muslim countries. But Coelho said "this is even more serious".
In addition to the threat against cinema-goers, Sony was hacked and a trove of embarrassing emails, scripts and other internal communications including information about employee salaries and health records was leaked.
North Korea has denied involvement in the brazen November 24 cyberattack against Sony, which experts say could have been carried out by disgruntled Sony workers or by supporters of a foreign power.
Agence France-Presse
