Yesterday Big Bloggy Picture‘s Patrick Goldstein posted a discussion with Sony chairman Amy Pascal about “new rules” that sometimes come to mind when a particular type of movie has just tanked. Death of Soul Men = no more movies about soul singers. Death of The Invasion = WB chief Jeff Robinov reportedly telling producers that WB is “no longer doing movies with women in the lead,” etc. How phobic is Pascal along these lines?

“I did say [that] I hate movies that begin with a bet,” Pascal replies. “It’s a bad idea, because it usually means that it’s a fake story that revolves around a gimmick. But on the other hand, someone made My Fair Lady and it was great.

“Rules are oversimplifications, which are bad no matter how you look at it. It would be like my saying, ‘I’m so sick of Iraq movies, so I don’t ever want to see another script about Iraq.’ But that’s just my reaction in the moment. Someone will make a phenomenal movie about Iraq and everyone’s attitude will change.”

Wells to Pascal: Someone has made a phenomenal movie about Iraq, or at least a first-rate one set in Iraq — Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker.

“We all probably say things like [this], but it’s in the heat of the moment — everyone says things they don’t really mean. So if there’s a really young executive in a meeting and they hear you say something, even though you almost didn’t mean it the minute it came out of your mouth, they sometimes take it seriously, when they should probably do what you do, which is forget all about it five minutes later.”

In other words, we are all Walt Whitman in a sense. We mean what we say when we say it, and then the page turns and maybe we’re looking at things in a slightly different light. Declarations of conviction, faith and aversion are never final. “Do I contradict myself? Then I contradict myself,” Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself.” “I am vast. I contain multitudes.”