Diablo Cody‘s 8.29 Red Band Trailer interview is with Megan Fox. It gets pretty good when they talk about how shallow and predatory many journalists have become. (A brief transcript follows the video.) I love Cody’s observation that Fox has a skewed sensibility and that press people don’t know how to handle beauty mixed with perversity. Fox’s handicap, I feel, is her thin and reedy voice. It doesn’t suggest rivers of soul or passion. Beep-beep-beepity-beep-beep-beepity-beep.
Cody: “Do you feel like you’ve been mistreated, misquoted? Do you feel like you’ve had a crappy experience in the limelight, or do you feel positive about it overall?”
Fox: “I would never call it crappy experience. I think…those are such different things. Not so much ‘misquoted’ as the things I’ve said being taken completely out of context or sensationalized into something scandalous when they weren’t. They’re waiting for anything they can take as a sound byte, to sell. And it doesn’t matter what your intention behind your words are never communicated by ‘journalists,’ any more. So it’s hard to be sarcastic. Do you find this happens to, you?
Cody: “I have this theory that it must have been incredibly fun to be a celebrity in, like, the ’70s. Because there wasn’t the sound byte culture. There wasn’t the tabloid culture. You would see these interviews that were like these 17-page interviews in Rolling Stone in which you really got to know a person, and now it comes down to, like, oh, we have to keep 8 million websites rolling so what does one person say today that we can get a clip [from]? It makes it impossible to speak like an individual.
Fox: “I don’t even want to express myself during interviews especialy during print interviews, because I know that everyone is constantly searching for an angle and they’re reaching for those four words that they can piece together for some sort of explosive sound byte.”